ReviewWiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science2018
The evolution of stories: from mimesis to language, from fact to fiction.
Review in Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed.
- Storytelling increases oxytocin and positive emotions and decreases cortisol and pain in hospitalized children.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Trial
- Narrative inquiry for beginners: A practical guide for health professions education researchers.Anatomical sciences education · 2026Review
- Multiple child caregivers and multiple cognitive caregiving practices: Associations with early childhood development in 51 low- and middle-income countries.International journal of behavioral development · 2025Article
- Neural dynamics of semantic control underlying generative storytelling.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Turns around periodic spatial boundaries facilitate increasing event segmentation over time.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Narrative as active inference: an integrative account of cognitive and social functions in adaptation.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Communication for collaborative computation: two major transitions in human evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Dreams Shared on Social Networks during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Tower of Babel or Noah's Ark?-A Group-Analytic Perspective.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2023Article
- Archaeological evidence for thinking about possibilities in hominin evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Stories in Action.Psychological science in the public interest : a journal of the American Psychological Society · 2022Article
- The Rough Road: A Single Case Study of Dreamtelling in a Group during the COVID-19 Pandemic and Military Conflict.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- Does the character-based dimension of stories impact narrative processing? An event-related potentials (ERPs) study.Cognitive processing · 2022Article
- Why and How Did Narrative Fictions Evolve? Fictions as Entertainment Technologies.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Dialogic Book-Sharing as a Privileged Intersubjective Space.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Eliciting empathetic drives to prosocial behavior during stressful events.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Narrative event segmentation in the cortical reservoir.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Situated language learning via interactive narratives.Patterns (New York, N.Y.) · 2021Review
- The Ape That Lived to Tell the Tale. The Evolution of the Art of Storytelling and Its Relationship to Mental Time Travel and Theory of Mind.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Review
- Article
- The "Who" System of the Human Brain: A System for Social Cognition About the Self and Others.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Why a species as successful as Homo sapiens should spend so much time in fiction, in telling one another stories that neither side believes, at first seems an evolutionary riddle. Because of the advantages of tracking and recombining true information, capacities for event comprehension, memory, imagination, and communication evolved in a range of animal species-yet even chimpanzees cannot communicate beyond the here and now. By Homo erectus, our forebears had reached an increasing dependence on one another, not least in sharing information in mimetic, prelinguistic ways. As Daniel Dor shows, the pressure to pool ever more information, even beyond currently shared experience, led to the invention of language. Language in turn swiftly unlocked efficient forms of narrative, allowing early humans to learn much more about their kind than they could experience at first hand, so that they could cooperate and compete better through understanding one another more fully. This changed the payoff of sociality for individuals and groups. But true narrative was still limited to what had already happened. Once the strong existing predisposition to play combined with existing capacities for event comprehension, memory, imagination, language, and narrative, we could begin to invent fiction, and to explore the full range of human possibilities in concentrated, engaging, memorable forms. First language, then narrative, then fiction, created niches that altered selection pressures, and made us ever more deeply dependent on knowing more about our kind and our risks and opportunities than we could discover through direct experience. WIREs Cogn Sci 2018, 9:e1444. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1444 This article is categorized under: Cognitive Biology > Evolutionary Roots of Cognition Linguistics > Evolution of Language Neuroscience > Cognition.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.