Applied narratology. Theory, Methods, and Analysis of Social and Political Narratives: How Stories Shape Power, Identity, and Reality

CHAPTER 5. COGNITIVE NARRATOLOGY

How the Brain Creates Meaning and Why We Think In Stories

The brain is constantly forming hypotheses about the world and testing them against experience.

Consciousness does not reflect the world – it constructs it on the basis of bodily experience.

If classical narratology studied the story as a construction, cognitive narratology focused on who perceives this construction. It shifted attention from the text to the person. To what happens in their consciousness when they listen to, read, or tell a story.

The world of cognitive narratology was born from a simple but revolutionary idea: humans are wired such that they cannot perceive reality as a set of unconnected facts. They need a plot. The brain strives to turn chaos into sequence, to find patterns, to construct causality – even where none exists. And it does this automatically.

This chapter is devoted to how this process works, why narrative is a natural form of thinking, and what happens inside a person when they explain events to themselves.

Story as a Way of Thinking

Cognitive narratology is the science of how the brain turns the world into a story. If classical narratology looks at the text, cognitive narratology looks at the person who creates, reads, remembers, and interprets that text. It answers questions: ‘Why do humans think in plots at all? Why, without a story, do they lose orientation? Why, by changing a story, do we change feelings, decisions, and life?’

Classical narratology provided a precise language for describing the structure of a story, but its interest was the ‘text as object.’ Cognitivists became interested in ‘reading’ and ‘thinking.’ Why does a reader feel for a character? Why do two people understand the same plot differently? Why do they see causality where there is none? Why do some stories become beliefs?

These questions could not be resolved through structural analysis alone. A science was needed of how consciousness, memory, and imagination work. Cognitive narratology was born when researchers realised that a story is not a property of the text, but a property of the brain. And this changes everything.

To grasp the power of cognitive narratology, one must see how it emerged, what problems it solves, how memory works, why we are so dependent on causality, and how the brain turns disparate events into a coherent line.

Formation of the Discipline

Cognitive narratology did not appear instantly. Its birth was a long journey from the structural analysis of texts to an attempt to understand how a living person creates meaning. It grew out of three directions: structuralism, the psychology of perception, and linguistics.

After the rise of structuralism in the 1950s—1970s, researchers first noticed: formal structures are not only properties of the text, but also properties of thinking. Barthes said that narrative logic permeates culture. Lévi-Strauss showed that myths work as cognitive matrices. Genette demonstrated how consciousness processes the time of a narrative. But the structuralists did not study consciousness directly. They studied the text. The question of how the brain ‘reads’ and ‘creates’ a story remained open.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a shift began in the humanities: ‘We need to study not only the story, but also the human capacity to construct a story.’ Thus, the ground was prepared for cognitive narratology.

With the arrival of cognitivists in narratology, the approach changed. They did not reject Genette’s achievements, but ‘transferred’ his analytical apparatus inside the reader’s psyche, asking: how exactly are formal manipulations of time and point of view processed by consciousness, memory, and attention?

The 1980s and 1990s saw the birth of the cognitive turn in narratology. During this time, literary scholars began asking: what happens in the reader’s head, how does consciousness grasp the author’s point of view, what schemas are activated when we interpret a text, why does a story evoke an emotional response?

Concurrently, revolutions were occurring in other scientific fields. Research emerged on human attention, memory function, cognitive biases, and the formation of cause-and-effect relationships. These ideas mapped perfectly onto questions about how a person understands a story.

Works appeared on how language shapes thinking. If language is a code, then narrative is a refined, higher form of this code. And when brain research showed that meaning is a product of neural models, literary scholars saw an opportunity: to unite the structure of the text with the mechanism of perception.

In the late 1990s, the discipline was finally formed. The approach became an independent field thanks to several research movements. Studies in cognitive narratology in the 1990s and 2000s often began with the phrase: ‘We continue, but also reassemble, the structuralist tradition.’

Cognitive Poetics

In their work, Richard Gerrig, Peter Stockwell, and Raymond Gibbs attempt to understand how a literary text triggers mental processes: imagination, associations, experience simulation, empathy, and prediction. Researchers prove that reading is a form of ‘cognitive modelling’.

The theory of mental models and ‘immersion’ emerges. Researchers begin to study how a reader constructs a mental image of a scene, how they maintain sequence, how they create causality, how they model the world of the text. A key idea appears: reading is the creation of an ‘internal world’ that operates according to the laws of cognitive models. This line leads directly to cognitive narratology.

Working with Narrative as a ‘Way of Processing Experience’

Psychologists Bruner, Schank, and Abelson study how a person creates stories to explain events, make decisions, and maintain identity. Bruner formulates a crucial phrase: ‘We live in the narrative nature of reality.’ This idea became one of the cornerstones of cognitive narratology.

In the 2000s, cognitive narratology finally gets its name – the very term ‘cognitive narratology’ appears. It is associated primarily with the work of David Herman.

David Herman is one of the main theorists of cognitive narratology, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, and one of the creators of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Herman unites psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, and narrative theory. He formulates: ‘Narrative is the way people organise experience into an understandable structure.’ It was Herman who built the bridge between the classical structure of Barthes and Genette and the cognitive models of perception.

Next came expansion and institutionalisation. Cognitive narratology ceased to be a niche field. Schools and research platforms formed around it. The most important figures of this period:

Monika Fludernik – author of the concept of ‘natural narratology,’ which views narrative through the lens of everyday experience and perceptual schemas. Her idea is that narrative thinking is formed prior to literature, and the text merely uses natural cognitive structures.

Marie-Laure Ryan works with possible worlds, modal structures, and digital narratives, narrative space, actively integrating cognitive models into the analysis of narratives and digital stories. Her contribution: showing how the brain switches between ‘possible versions of reality’.

Manfred Jahn – one of the first to consistently connect formal analysis with cognitive models of reading. And Lennard Davis, Keesen Faulkner, and Ruben Zunder explore narrative and attention, narrative and emotion, narrative and embodied cognition. Kate Hamburger and participants in Project Narrative (OSU) develop the branch of cognitive narratology at an institutional level, including narrative rhetoric, neural models of plot perception, and media narratives.

But the turning point came in the digital age. After 2010, cognitive narratology expanded dramatically due to the rise of new media. Games, VR, interactive films, social networks, storytelling in apps, and multi-layered digital plots appeared.

Researchers began to study how the brain processes non-linear plots, how a person navigates a story without a single line, how they perceive ruptures, branching, and multiple perspectives, and why Stories trigger ancient narrative mechanisms of memory. Cognitive narratology became a necessity for analysing 21st-century culture.

Today, cognitive narratology is not one school, but three branches.

The ‘soft’ cognitive narratology, which works with attention, interpretations, schemas, and narrative logic, is close to literary studies.

The ‘hard’ cognitive narratology is based on psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience. It studies how the brain reacts to plot, which areas are activated during the perception of a character’s emotions, how memory encodes a story, and why a person so readily accepts causality.

And the direction that views narrative as a model of consciousness. This is a more philosophical line, associated with Merleau-Ponty, Ricœur, and Dennett. The idea is that the ‘I’ is a narrative construction and we are the stories we tell about ourselves. This branch is closest to applied narratology.

The power of cognitive narratology lies in its explanation of the mechanisms: why a person creates stories, how they maintain them, how memory rewrites the past, how language fixes a plot, why emotions shape a story more strongly than facts, why a person sees causality even in chaos, why we live for years in destructive plots, and why changing a story means changing a life. Cognitive narratologists study precisely how the brain turns ‘after this’ into ‘because of this.’

It was the understanding of these mechanisms that prepared the transition to the main focus – to applied narratology, which uses this knowledge not only to understand a person’s story, but also to teach them to rewrite it.

CHAPTER 6. THE BRAIN AS A MEANING FACTORY

Why Humans Inevitably Live by Stories

Interpretation is the work by which meaning becomes possible.

Perception is a controlled hallucination constrained by sensory data.

The brain prefers a bad explanation to no explanation at all.

A person often thinks they live in a world of facts, but in reality they live in a world of explanations, and it is these that govern their feelings, decisions, and life trajectories.

Understanding narrative begins with one fundamental property of the human brain: it cannot leave events unexplained. The brain creates meaning automatically, as naturally as the heart pumps blood. A story emerges not because a person loves to tell tales. It emerges because the psyche needs order, sequence, and the ability to predict the future.

This chapter explains how the natural mechanism of meaning-making works, why it always takes the form of a narrative, and why this makes the story the central structure of human life.

A person lives in a world that changes faster than they can process it. There is too much information, the context is too complex, uncertainty is excessive. To avoid drowning in this flow, the brain reduces complexity. It connects disparate facts into a chain.

Thus a story appears. Not in a literary sense, but in a functional sense, as a mechanism for transforming experience into meaning. For the brain, a story is an economical way of understanding. It allows one to gather heterogeneous information, identify the main points, connect events into a causal line, predict the future, and choose a behaviour.

Why the Brain Needs Causality

No one sees reality in its entirety. The brain is limited in perception: too many stimuli, too high a speed of change, too complex a context. To avoid overload, the psyche reduces the world to a manageable form. It does this through processes of:

– selection (what to consider important),

– linking (how to connect disparate elements),

– generalisation (how to turn a single episode into a pattern),

– causality (which event explains another),

– inference (what this means for me).

All these processes are not ‘stories’ in the literary sense. They are mind programs that turn chaos into order. But the result is precisely a story: a structured narrative where events have a beginning, development, meaning, and consequences.

Without this mechanism, a person could not navigate. Even a simple task – how to respond in a conversation – requires instantaneous meaning analysis: what is happening, who is in front of me, what strategy should I choose. And the brain constructs a story that corresponds to past experience and expectations.

Interpretation Appears Before Analysis

One of the key findings of cognitive science is that emotions and interpretations arise faster than a person can consciously register them. The amygdala works first, forming an emotional response: danger, interest, disgust, anxiety, excitement. Only then does the prefrontal cortex engage, trying to explain what is happening.

This creates the illusion that we ‘decided to feel’ one way or another. In reality, we explained what we had already felt. And we explained it in accordance with the story we already have.

Hence the phenomenon of persistent narratives. If a person is accustomed to perceiving the world as a dangerous place, their nervous system will react faster than logic. And logic will merely confirm the reaction.

A person cannot bear meaninglessness. Uncertainty causes anxiety. When something happens, the brain seeks to understand ‘Why?’ and ‘What now?’ These questions are not mere curiosity, they are survival tools. Therefore, even in random events, a person seeks logic. Even in chaos – order. Even in complexity – an explanation.

And if logic is absent, they create it. Thus interpretations are born. And interpretations become part of a narrative.

A person cannot live in a pure stream of facts. They need order, cause and effect, coherence, direction. Without these, anxiety arises, and our psyche strives for ordering because chaos is unbearable. Therefore, if events occur haphazardly, the brain ‘fills them in’; if a person does not understand another’s motive, they ‘invent’ reasons; if faced with uncertainty, they ‘create’ a story to reduce tension. An important focus of what cognitive narratology studies is precisely this ability of the brain to create meaning where there are only fragments.

For example, a child once told ‘Don’t bother us, we’re busy’ might construct a story: ‘I am not worthy of attention.’ An adult who has made a mistake might create a story: ‘I am not capable of taking risks.’ A person who grew up in an unstable environment forms a story: ‘Safety does not exist.’

Facts are merely an entry point. Narrative is born at the moment of interpretation.

How Memory Turns Life into Plot

We are accustomed to thinking that memory is a storehouse. However, memory works not like an archivist, but like an editor. It does not store everything indiscriminately, but only what matches the central story a person has created about themselves. Each time an event is recalled, it is rewritten, simplified, emotions are amplified, extraneous details are removed, emphases are shifted. Everything else disappears, softens, or is restructured. And ten years later, a person lives not with the events that actually occurred, but with the stories they have formed.

Memory is selective and does three things: it reinforces episodes that support the core narrative; it weakens or completely erases episodes that do not align with it; it reassembles meaning if necessary to maintain the integrity of one’s internal picture.

A person convinced that ‘I am always being found lacking’ will ignore praise a hundred times but retain two critical remarks. In this way, the brain maintains the stability of the story. The narrative becomes a framework that determines what a person allows themselves to see.

Within this mechanism is born what applied narratology calls tunnel vision – a narrow corridor of interpretations along which we move, unaware of alternatives.

Emotional Encoding

Stories live through emotions. If an event evoked no emotion, it disappears. If it did, it is remembered as part of a personal plot. This is why traumatic stories persist, why successes rarely become anchors, why one negative comment can spoil a mood for an entire week. Emotion fixes the plot.

Emotions give a story its power. An event that caused a strong experience becomes embedded in memory, becomes a supporting element of the plot.

For example, shame forms a narrative of inadequacy; fear forms a narrative of danger; success forms a narrative of capability; support forms a narrative of worth.

Emotions turn a story from mere telling into an internal instruction. We begin to act in accordance with it – avoiding risk, seeking confirmation, repeating familiar scenarios.

Emotion is the ‘binding emulsion’ of narrative. It connects event and interpretation so tightly that they begin to seem like a single whole. And it becomes difficult to separate them without deliberate work.

Narrative as a Tool for Prediction

Cognitive narratology has shown that a story is not only an explanation of the past but also a model of the future. The brain uses past stories as a matrix for prediction.

If a person once decided that ‘In this world, you have to be careful,’ their brain will seek confirmation of this, highlight dangers, analyse risks. If a person has adopted the story ‘I always manage,’ they will see more opportunities.

Narrative is a filter of probabilities. It determines which actions a person considers realistic and which they consider impossible.

The Brain Fills in What Is Missing

One of the key ideas of cognitive narratology is that a person always fills in gaps. If something is missing in a story, the brain adds it automatically. For example, if a client says, ‘No one supports me,’ they are not listing all the people who have ever been there for them. They are constructing a generalisation because it aligns with their internal plot.

This characteristic makes the narrative very stable. But also vulnerable to change. If the central construct is altered, the brain will begin to assemble reality differently.

Linking Events into a Chain – An Automatic Process

If two events occur one after another, the brain links them. ‘He was late and didn’t warn me, so he doesn’t care.’ ‘She didn’t reply to the message – she’s probably angry.’ ‘I wasn’t promoted because I’m not good enough.’ Between ‘after’ and ‘because of,’ the brain places an equals sign. Yes, this is a cognitive error, but it is also the foundation of narrative thinking.

Searching for Causes Where There Are Only Coincidences

The brain, like nature itself, abhors a vacuum. If a cause is absent, it creates one. On a rainy day, your mood drops, and you decide that ‘the weather ruined the day.’ But this is a construct – emotional and cognitive. The same happens in relationships, work, and self-esteem.

Simplifying Complex Systems

The world is complex, and the brain cannot hold thousands of variables in its head. It creates stories to manage complexity. ‘I’m an introvert’ is a story that simplifies billions of interactions of emotions, social conditions, and habits. ‘I’m unlucky’ is another story, not a fact, but a schema. Simplification is not an error; it is a survival strategy.

And undoubtedly, the role of language in creating narrative can hardly be overstated. Cognitive narratologists believe that language is a tool for assembling meaning. This is also confirmed by French philosophy. Lacan said, ‘The unconscious is structured like a language.’ That is, even our emotions are formed in the form of a narrative.

If a person says: ‘It’s always like this with me,’ ‘I don’t know how to love,’ ‘I’ll never be successful’, they are not stating a fact, but a ‘story.’ Language is the framework of narrative. Change the language, and you can change the story.

The brain will always create stories – this is not a defect or a weakness, but a condition of human life. Danger begins when a person mistakes their interpretations for facts, and their narratives for reality. An unconscious story becomes fate. A conscious one becomes a tool.

Understanding how the brain constructs meaning leads us to the main question: Can we learn to change a story before it once again begins to govern our lives?

The answer to this question is the territory of applied narratology.

PART TWO