In this episode of The Power of Narratives, host Virginie Glaenzer and guest Aditi Khorana explore how emotions intertwine with the stories we tell and why those emotions fuel our attraction to narratives. They discuss brain research showing that listening to or telling a story activates the insula, frontal cortex, and mirror‑neuron systems, causing listeners’ neural activity to mirror that of the storyteller. This neural synchrony is presented as a biological mechanism that helps humans operate cohesively, making storytelling a powerful social technology for building empathy and collective identity. At the same time, they acknowledge that stories are neutral tools that can also be used to manipulate emotions and lead people astray, depending on the cultural and social context. The conversation frames storytelling as an evolving technology that can bind or mislead, emphasizing the responsibility of creators to harness it for positive social outcomes.
Why don't we begin this discussion by trying to answer these two fascinating questions: How are emotions tied to our narratives? And are those emotions guilty of our addiction to to our stories? And I'll let you begin.
I wouldn't say that emotions are guilty, exactly. But I think stories are— before we were writing stories, we were telling stories. People would sit around a campfire, and they would tell stories. And if you look at brain research in terms of what happens to our brains when we're telling a story, and what happens to our brains when we're listening to a story, the insula, the frontal cortex all light up. And the mirror neurons in your brain, if you're sitting with a friend and they're telling you a story, the mirror neurons in your brain begin to mimic the mirror neurons in your brain. So your brains essentially start to mirror one another. And this is just kind of like a function of the brain. You have to ask yourself, why does this happen? And it really happens because we're trying to cultivate— humans know that we operate well as a collective, when we're able to work well cohesively. So the brain understands this. The brain understands that the technology, that storytelling is a really powerful technology to bind people together and to cultivate empathy as an emotion. That being said, stories can also lead us astray. Stories can also manipulate us. We've been manipulated by stories. We've been taken down the wrong path by stories. I don't think stories themselves are sort of guilty for manipulating our emotions, but I think it's like a neutral technology that can be used in many different ways. And I think of it as a technology that is constantly shifting and changing with whatever era we're living in, whatever the social constructs are that we're operating within.
Interesting. Okay, so emotions are not bad if they are used or put in use for good stories?
I think emotion— first of all, I don't want to look at it in a binary way of like good or bad, but I tend to think of emotions as— I think emotions tell us the state of our body, the state of are we safe, are we not safe. Emotions are sort of a tool that we— I think at least living within the constructs that we're living in right now under capitalism, in these patriarchal structures, we're often told, you know, I'm a woman, I'm brown, I'm an immigrant, to deny our emotions and to go with sort of rational logic. But I think emotions are really powerful in conveying to us what reality we're actually living in, what reality our bodies are perceiving. So I think emotions are, in my opinion at least, a good thing. They're informative data points. I think Jonathan can speak about this because He does talk a lot about data and emotions too.
