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Symposium
The Storytelling Brain: How Neuroscience Stories Help
Bridge the Gap between Research and Society
XSusana Martinez-Conde,
1
XRobert G. Alexander,
1
Deborah Blum,
2
Noah Britton,
3
Barbara K. Lipska,
4
XGregory J. Quirk,
5
Jamy Ian Swiss,
6
XRoel M. Willems,
7,8
and XStephen L. Macknik
1
1
State University of New York Downstate Health Sciences University, Brooklyn, New York 11203,
2
Knight Science Journalism Program, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139,
3
Bunker Hill Community College, Boston, Massachusetts 02129,
4
National Institute of Mental
Health, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892,
5
University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine, 00936 San Juan, Puerto Rico,
6
San Diego,
California 92116,
7
Centre for Language Studies and Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, 6500 Nijmegen, The
Netherlands, and
8
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 6525 XD Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Active communication between researchers and society is necessary for the scientific community’s involvement in developing science-
based policies. This need is recognized by governmental and funding agencies that compel scientists to increase their public engagement
and disseminate research findings in an accessible fashion. Storytelling techniques can help convey science by engaging people’s imag-
ination and emotions. Yet, many researchers are uncertain about how to approach scientific storytelling, or feel they lack the tools to
undertake it. Here we explore some of the techniques intrinsic to crafting scientific narratives, as well as the reasons why scientific
storytelling may be an optimal way of communicating research to nonspecialists. We also point out current communication gaps between
science and society, particularly in the context of neurodiverse audiences and those that include neurological and psychiatric patients.
Present shortcomings may turn into areas of synergy with the potential to link neuroscience education, research, and advocacy.
Key words: science communication; storytelling; science outreach; broader impact; science reporting; scientific journalism
Introduction
Researchers worldwide have started to realize that communica-
tion with society is necessary for our involvement in developing
science-based policies. This newfound awareness culminated in
the 2017 March for Science, with an estimated global attendance
of more than one million people. Increasingly, institutional and
funding agency policies around the world, including the Royal
Society in the United Kingdom, the Centre National de la Recher-
che Scientifique in France, the Max Planck Society in Germany,
and the National Science Foundation in the United States, com-
pel scientists to engage more with the public, and to disseminate
research findings in an accessible fashion. Along similar lines,
there have been calls for scientists and journalists to join forces in
their common endeavor of unveiling objective facts and dispel-
ling misinformation. Yet, too often, researchers remain unsure of
how to approach science communication, feel they lack the tools
to undertake it, or receive mixed signals about the pros and cons
of public outreach (Martinez-Conde, 2016;Martinez-Conde et
al., 2016).
Part of the problem is insufficient or inadequate training in
the necessary skillset. As a result, many scientists assume a stan-
dard lecturer approach when attempting to engage broad audi-
ences, believing that, if the public is simply given more accessible
information, societal support for scientific and technological is-
sues will increase accordingly. However, the evidence indicates
that many barriers stand in the way of effective communication,
and that simply providing more information does not necessarily
change popular but incorrect views, as difficulties extend beyond
the complexity of the material (National Academies of Sciences,
Engineering and Medicine, 2017;Attanasio, 2018). Narrative sci-
ence storytelling may improve these efforts, helping to engage
listeners and lead policy change (Oliver and Cairney, 2019).
For purposes of discussion, it may be useful to define what
“narrative science storytelling” means in this context. According
to Webster’s dictionary, a narrative is a “discourse designed to
connect a series of happenings” (Webster, 1969). In narrative
storytelling, the narrator (or author) deliberately uses tech-
niques, including voice, character, suspense, and description, to
both connect the disparate elements involved and to create a
compelling and readable story (Chaitin, 2003). For professional
science writers, these narrative choices are aimed at making sci-
ence information inclusive, seeking to help build a larger and
more science literate audience (Blum, 2014). But those same
techniques may also be useful to scientists seeking to engage a
variety of audiences with their work.
The magician Michael Weber has affirmed that “whoever tells
the best story wins” (personal communication to J.I.S; sometimes
attributed to John Quincy Adams). Though Webber referred to
the performance of magic, asserting that magic that best incor-
Received June 24, 2019; revised Aug. 12, 2019; accepted Aug. 16, 2019.
This work was supported by the National Science Foundatoin Award 1439189 to S.M.-C. and Award 1734887 to
S.M.-C. and S.L.M., and The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research Vidi Grant 276-89-007 to R.W.
The authors declare no competing financial interests.
Correspondence should be addressed to Susana Martinez-Conde at smart@neuralcorrelate.com.
https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1180-19.2019
Copyright © 2019 the authors
The Journal of Neuroscience, October 16, 2019 •39(42):8285– 8290 • 8285
porates “story” in an effective, engaging, meaningful fashion will
produce the most impactful result, it reflects an even broader
truth: that the best stories win in politics, in history, in criminal
justice, and even in arenas guided by a focus on objectively test-
able claims, namely, science.
Storytelling engages not just people’s intellect, but also their
feelings: a bald recitation of facts invariably lacks the impact (and
the enduring power) of a coherent narrative that awakens one’s
emotions. Indeed, when major discoveries generate little interest
among the lay public, there is likely a disconnect between the
scientific content and its emotional impact. Similarly, when large
sections of society are used to relying on misinformation and
biased data, pointing to scientific facts is not effective. Recent
research indicates that the truth or falsehood of a story does not
necessarily influence people’s reactions to it, or their appreciation
of the narrative (Hartung et al., 2017). Further, people choose
information sources with which they share personal biases and
beliefs (Higgins, 2016). Emotional engagement generated through
personal science narratives could help counteract these predispo-
sitions and generate the audience involvement that traditional
science communication has found lacking. Narrative improves
information processing, increasing recall of, and interest in, the
story (Glaser et al., 2009;Hong and Lin-Siegler, 2012). Moreover,
narrative increases recall of any scientific material presented in
the story (To¨pper et al., 2014).
Because storytellers have significant freedom to craft narra-
tives, they can effectively convey information about multivariate
components of the scientific endeavor, from the experimental
results themselves to the human efforts behind the studies. Sto-
ries about how scientists struggled either intellectually or in their
personal lives, and then overcame those struggles, have been
shown to improve not only the engagement of high school stu-
dents in science materials, but also boost academic performance
(Lin-Siegler et al., 2016). First-person narratives, in particular,
can make science personally relevant and encourage personal
investment in the topic (Downs, 2014).
Where research communication by and for academics typi-
cally downplays emotion, narrative storytelling can be used to
capture lay audiences and encourage excitement about impor-
tant scientific discoveries that may not have clear or immediate
applied value (Martinez-Conde and Macknik, 2017b). In a recent
study, embedding climate change information in an emotional
story structure affected proenvironmental donation behavior.
Thus, eliciting emotional arousal likely improves the odds that
listeners will not only engage with the material, but also act on it
as a result (Morris et al., 2019). Most researchers have at some
point experienced astonishment and wonder in connection with
research findings: there is every reason to believe that those same
discoveries can prompt similar emotions in nonspecialists. Evok-
ing emotions and wonder is sometimes achieved by not telling a
straightforward story. Research shows that a story with fictional
characters that act in a morally or emotionally ambiguous fashion
leads to a deeper (moral) evaluation in the reader or viewer (e.g.,
Eden et al., 2017). Thus, if one wants to evoke (moral) reflection
via a science narrative, it may be better to not make the moral
content of the narrative too straightforward, but rather more
ambiguous. This allows for more “moral rumination” (a term
coined by American psychologist John Dewey) in the reader than
a simple “from A to B” narrative.
Here we explore some of the techniques intrinsic to crafting
scientific narrative, as well as the reasons why scientific storytell-
ing may be an optimal way of communicating research discover-
ies to broad audiences. Importantly, whereas some scientists
believe that science communication means extreme simplifica-
tion, we argue instead for a narrative approach that does justice to
the science while also inspiring the general public. The sections
below are centered on the lectures and personal stories presented
during the 2019 Storytelling Session at the Society for Neurosci-
ence annual conference.
Our storytelling brains
The neuroscience of language has traditionally focused on under-
standing how the comprehension and production of words and
single sentences is implemented in our brains. Despite the impor-
tance of stories in our everyday lives, the neuroscience of narra-
tive has only recently begun to be an area of active research. An
interesting observation from this line of work is that regions that
are not traditionally thought to be part of a “language network”
in the brain become consistently activated when people listen to
narratives. Example areas are the precuneus/posterior cingulate
cortex, and mPFC. Indeed, in a relatively early observation, Ferstl
et al. (2008) made the case for an “extended language network,”
including these areas next to traditional temporal and inferior
frontal “language” regions. The posterior midline activations
have been linked to the larger time span of narratives (compared
with single sentences) (Lerner et al., 2011). The medial prefrontal
activations, in turn, have been related to the “mentalizing” as-
pects (Tamir et al., 2016) and immersive properties (Hsu et al.,
2014) of narratives.
An intriguing point to note is the overlap of the regions acti-
vated during narrative comprehension and the so-called default
mode network (Buckner and Carroll, 2007;Buckner et al., 2008;
Hassabis et al., 2014;Yuan et al., 2018). This overlap may be
meaningful in the sense that the “resting state” invites narrative
construction. The type or content of the mind wandering that
takes place during the resting state is unconstrained (and un-
known), but it is conceivable that it has narrative structure
(Jacobs and Willems, 2018). In extension to the view that the
default mode network is the brain’s “default” working mode, the
research on narrative comprehension suggests that this default
could be more closely related to narratives than appreciated so
far, a position that should interest neuroscientists interested in
resting state studies.
Is there another reason for researchers to be interested in nar-
ratives and their neural underpinnings? The interest for neuro-
scientists across disciplines is that narratives naturally contain
parts of cognition that are traditionally studied in artificial task
contexts, making narratives an ideal research tool to study cog-
nition in a more contextualized fashion (Willems and Jacobs,
2016). Indeed, recent work has started to use narratives to gain
better understanding of classical research topics in neuroscience.
Examples are language comprehension (Chow et al., 2014;Lopo-
polo et al., 2017), social understanding (Tamir et al., 2016), mem-
ory encoding (Milivojevic et al., 2016), and event segmentation
(Whitney et al., 2009;Zacks et al., 2010; for extensive discussion,
see Hasson et al., 2018). In the next section, we discuss mental
simulation as an example of a research topic that lends itself well
for study using narratives.
The stories playing in our mind’s theater
A research topic that lends itself perfectly for study within a nar-
rative context is mental simulation. Part of the pleasure that we
derive from engaging with narratives lies in their potential to
evoke mental images. We do not just process the words and sen-
tence on a page, but we can experience what happens in the story
in a vivid manner, by mentally simulating the content of a narra-
8286 •J. Neurosci., October 16, 2019 •39(42):8285– 8290 Martinez-Conde et al. •The Storytelling Brain
tive. We can see what is being described, and even feel what the
characters feel, using our own minds to live the fiction world.
The laboratory of R.M.W. has empirically studied mental sim-
ulation during narrative understanding (Willems and Jacobs,
2016). Their work distinguishes between more “literal” and more
“social” mental simulations. The first are related to the concrete
actions or sensory descriptions that are part of a story (i.e., the
description of scenery or a main character that rushes through
traffic on her way home). The second refer to descriptions of
mental states, such as the thoughts, intentions, and feelings of
characters. Both types of simulations are important for building
up a mental story world.
R.M.W. and collaborators have measured brain activation
and eye movements during reading, followed by postreading self-
reports (on readers’ engagement with, and appreciation of, the
narratives). Their data provide an indication of how “sensitive” a
given reader may be to the different parts of the narrative that
allow for mental simulation. Recent results have revealed a criti-
cal effect of personal preference in the reader’s experience (some-
times even more so than the specifics of the story). For instance,
whereas changing the narrative perspective (from “she” to “I”)
does not appear to influence the mental simulations of readers
(Hartung et al., 2017), some readers do prefer sensorimotor sim-
ulations, and others prefer mental state simulations (Nijhof and
Willems, 2015).
Surprisingly, the researchers also found that action descrip-
tions speed up reading, whereas mental state descriptions slow
down reading (Mak and Willems, 2019). The discovery that ac-
tion descriptions speed up reading is counterintuitive, as imag-
ining actions is known to be time-consuming and suggests that
the mental images formed during reading are unlike those that we
deliberately form, for instance, when we relive an experience.
Future research will need to uncover the specifics of mental
simulation during narrative. What is important to note here is
that, by using narratives, the researchers were able to tap into
mental simulation as it unfolded naturally in readers. This re-
vealed individual differences that tend to go overlooked in more
constrained task settings.
Tell the truth, but tell it slant
In the current era of post-truth gloom, the quest for objective
truth has become more critical than ever. There have been calls
for scientists and journalists to join forces in this common en-
deavor and call out falsehoods, whether due to innocent mistakes
or frank attempts to mislead (Martinez-Conde and Macknik,
2017a). Indeed, science journalism programs, such as the Knight
Science Journalism Program at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, have already begun programs focused on integrity of
story and detailed fact-checking of information (Borel et al.,
2018). This echoes the basic premise of the scientific method,
which teaches us that we only attain truth by stubbornly stripping
away the misinformation that stands in its way (Martinez-Conde
and Macknik, 2017a). Accuracy is essential in even the best nar-
rative, which draws its power from the truths that underlie the
story.
D.B., a newspaper science journalist and Pulitzer prize win-
ner, explains that her storytelling is firmly grounded in scientific
facts:
“‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant, success in circuit lies,’
once wrote the great 19th century American poet Emily
Dickinson (Dickinson, 2000). And she concluded that
verse with, ‘The truth must dazzle gradually, lest every man
be blind.’ I realized early on that I needed to find ways to
seduce readers, who might not be very interested in sci-
ence, into my subject. Dickinson’s words inspired me to let
the story itself carry readers through the more challenging
technical issues in the science.”
“My journey into narrative science storytelling started
with the Dickinson quote because of its emphasis on truth;
accuracy is an essential part of science writing. But I also
felt that what brings readers to science are not the facts
themselves, but how the narrator crafts the tale. Rather
than preaching to the choir by writing for a readership that
already supports science, I strive to bring back to the fold
those who have turned away and concluded that science is
boring, hard, and not important to their lives, when indeed
it is the opposite: fascinating and essential to our daily
existence.”
“I have turned over and over to storytelling techniques
to allow scientific truths to dazzle. My book Love at Goon
Park, for instance, follows the life of the controversial, ec-
centric, and brilliant 20th century psychologist, Harry
Harlow, to explore the science of relationships, and pursue
the essential question of why family and friendship are so
important to human health. More recently, my book, The
poisoner’s handbook, tells the story of two crusading scien-
tists in the 1920s as they tried to figure out how to catch
killers, letting the true stories of a murderous decade in
New York City provide the backdrop for explaining the
basic chemistry of poisons. This book is in current use in
multiple high school classes as a way to show students that
chemistry is fascinating.”
The magic in storytelling
Storytelling is important in human cognition and human inter-
action, and perhaps especially so in performance and narrative
arts, from literature to standup comedy, to theater, cinema, and
stage magic.
Here we focus on the performance of magic, which like science
communication, inherently encompasses a story. Further paral-
lels may be drawn between the changes that take place during a
magic show and those that occur in the course of a scientific discov-
ery. Thus, investigating the structure of magic performances could
help us identify what makes for a good science story.
J.I.S., a professional magician, writer, and activist in the world
of scientific skepticism (the social movement that promotes a
scientific worldview, critical thinking, and rational inquiry), is
interested in the role of storytelling in magic and how it may
relate to that in other performance arts:
“Storytelling in magic performances (and likely in other
narrative forms too) can be explicit or implicit. The explicit
use of narrative in magic includes performances that are
accompanied by a spoken word ‘story.’ This kind of ‘pre-
sentation’ (a term used by magicians to describe such
scripting) has long been an element of conjuring. More
recently, the explicit use of story has been heralded within
certain artistic circles in magic, as exemplified by Jeff
McBride’s ‘Mystery School’ in Las Vegas, one of the only
existing schools organized for the study of magic.”
“Whereas the explicit use of storytelling in magic has its
limits, ‘story’ itself may be implicit to magic. When Teller,
of Penn and Teller, says that ‘Every magic trick is a story’
(personal communication), what he is likely alluding to is
that every magic trick possesses an inherent plot, with a
Martinez-Conde et al. •The Storytelling Brain J. Neurosci., October 16, 2019 •39(42):8285– 8290 • 8287
beginning, a middle, and an end. This is so because every
magical ‘effect’ involves a change of state, to wit: An object
is present. It vanishes. The object is gone. Or: An object is
green. It transforms. It is now red. Or: An object is de-
stroyed. A magical transformation occurs. The object is
restored. Hence, every magic trick is a story, even in the
absence of a spoken script.”
The above-mentioned convergence between magic and scien-
tific storytelling also suggests that breaking down magic stories
and investigating them scientifically could help researchers un-
derstand the psychological and neuroscientific mechanisms of
storytelling. From this perspective, magic could provide a proto-
col of investigation of cognitive mechanisms, which might eluci-
date how the brain tracks and perceives change, a major
constituent of storytelling.
Whereas a shared interest in the human experience has al-
ready resulted in fruitful collaborations between magicians and
neuroscientists (Macknik et al., 2008;Cui et al., 2011;Otero-
Millan et al., 2011;Rieiro et al., 2013), scientists have just begun
to investigate the impact of narrative on the magic experience
(Williams and McOwan, 2014). J.I.S. proposes that future re-
search on magic may attempt to isolate and examine features that
set magic apart from other performing arts, and the audience’s
experience of those arts.
At the heart of strong magic lies an experience of cognitive
dissonance that is not a requisite element of other performance or
narrative arts. Magic at its best confronts the viewer with an in-
herently dissonant experience, namely, convincing visual evi-
dence of an event or phenomenon that the viewer knows
intellectually to be impossible. Whereas magicians routinely put
to use the cognitive toolkit that all theatrical artists have used for
millennia, they also create an experience unlike those produced
by other arts.
Yet, the cognitive dissonance that is inherent to magic tricks
can lead to frustration and resentment, which can manifest in
audiences as heckling, proposing supposed (and often wrong)
explanations of the tricks, and other challenges. Magicians’ use of
explicit storytelling is often in service to resolving dissonance: not
by providing an explanation, but by engaging spectators’ emo-
tions, including the experience of wonder. The magician Whit
Haydn speaks of this dissonance as a “pointy place” that people
find it uncomfortable to sit on. Thus, he says: “The sword of
magic is concealed in the cloak of theater.”
Further areas of collaboration between magicians and scien-
tists, exemplified by historical and contemporary conjurers, such
as Harry Houdini, James Randi, and J.I.S. himself, are in the
efforts to debunk pseudoscientific thinking and practices (in-
cluding psychic fraud and other new age theosophies). This work,
which currently extends to dispelling misinformation in areas
such as climate change, or the antivaccination movement, may
also benefit from the lessons of narrative storytelling.
Thus far, we have addressed storytelling, as well as its neural
bases and consequences, in the context of neurotypical brains.
Next, we consider the unique challenges and opportunities that
neuroscience communication and storytelling present in the
context of neurodivergent speakers and/or neurodiverse audi-
ences.
Who gets to tell the story? Science communication,
neurodiversity, and personal advocacy
Storytelling is intimately linked with the culture and background
of the storyteller. Historically, the white/male perspective has
dominated science stories, but this is changing as STEM graduate
students are increasingly female and cross-cultural. Individuals
from different cultures may be primed to hear science stories
from their own cultural perspective, finding more relevance.
G.J.Q. describes his scientific mentoring in Puerto Rico:
“Creating a family-like atmosphere in the laboratory facil-
itates group cohesiveness and increases communication
skills in Latino trainees (Quirk, 2019). The effort by scien-
tific societies to make symposium panels more gender and
ethnically diverse is changing the face of the scientific com-
municator and generating role models that will help sci-
ence stories evolve.”
Although the intersection of neurodiversity and science com-
munication is a more recent concept, it has achieved significant
appreciation and media presence, in no small part thanks to the
16-year-old environmental activist Greta Thunberg. Thunberg,
who is autistic, has made the argument that her neurodivergence
has helped her see through propaganda and political misdirec-
tion concerning climate change. She asserts that she became an
activist not despite her autism, but because of it (Silberman,
2019).
Neuroscience storytelling presents the possibility, as well as
the challenge, of discussing brain function, and individual differ-
ences in neural processing, while engaging the brains of ‘differ-
ently wired’ individuals. Future efforts should aim to deepen
current understanding of the science and society interface in the
context of neurodiverse audiences, or those integrated by pa-
tients and their communities. Such an exchange may be especially
powerful when the science communicators are themselves neu-
rodivergent or afflicted with neurological and/or psychiatric dis-
orders. In those cases, communicators may be particularly well
suited to bridge existing gaps between neuroscience education,
research, and advocacy. The following subsections are concerned
with science communication by speakers and/or for audiences on
the autism spectrum (Science communication on the spectrum),
or suffering from mental illness (Destigmatizing and improving
communication on mental illness).
Science communication on the spectrum
In 2006, 4 years after having been diagnosed with Asperger’s, N.B.
attended a lecture on autism at an academic institution. His ex-
perience illustrates a communication gap between autism re-
searchers and people who are autistic:
“Since my diagnosis, I had spent significant time studying
primary sources, the writings of other people in the autism
spectrum, and come to understand that some personal fea-
tures that I thought unique, such as being hyperflexible
(Curdlesnoot, 2007), or disliking being called by my given
name (Analkant, 2009), were autistic traits. I felt that self-
reported stories had the potential to help researchers who
might be otherwise unaware of the observations and expe-
riences of autistic authors.”
“Thus, when the speaker speculated that autistics’ gazes
are drawn more to mouths than eyes because mouths are
the source of speech (Klin et al., 2002), I objected that such
behavior arises not from the mouth’s movement as an at-
tractive force, but from direct eye contact gaze as an aver-
sive force for people on the spectrum. Because my
argument was based on personal experience, it was dis-
missed as subjective.”
8288 •J. Neurosci., October 16, 2019 •39(42):8285– 8290 Martinez-Conde et al. •The Storytelling Brain
Although more recent research now acknowledges that eye
contact is aversive to autistics (Neumann et al., 2006), collabor-
ative efforts between autism researchers (who are frequently neu-
rotypical) and autistic individuals (who are life-long experts) are
too often lacking, leading to missed opportunities and delaying
research advances.
Autistics’ descriptions of their own experiences, and their ob-
servations of the ways in which they differ from neurotypicals, are
invaluable sources of hypotheses to investigate, as well as ways of
properly interpreting research. Some such stories are available at
#actuallyautistic.
Destigmatizing and improving communication on
mental illness
Mental disorders cost the United States significantly more than
any other medical condition: close to $200 billion in lost earnings
alone (National Institutes of Health, 2008). Finding cures for
mental illness is an important issue at a societal level, and also
because patients and their families suffer greatly. Yet, despite
decades of modern research on mental illness, including rela-
tively recent studies of the structure of human genome and ge-
netic associations by thousands of dedicated scientists (Wellcome
Trust Case Control Consortium, 2007;Gormley et al., 2016),
present understanding of the causes and underlying mechanisms
of mental illness remains unsatisfactory. As a consequence, suc-
cessful treatment is often elusive. Recent data suggest that mental
illness is caused by a combination of heredity and environment,
the latter involving multiple factors, including malnutrition, pre-
natal and birth complications, stress, drug abuse, and others
(Howes and Murray, 2014;Nimgaonkar et al., 2017;Misiak et al.,
2018), which act in complex interplay with one another and with
an individual’s genes. But it remains exceedingly hard to identify
the biological and chemical processes for mental illness, in part
because these disorders are diagnosed through observations of
behaviors rather than through more precise tests. Unlike cancer
and heart disease, mental illness has no objective measures; there
are no biological markers in current use that help diagnose men-
tal illness. It is also becoming clear that specific mental disorders
are not well categorized. There is some evidence that various
mental illnesses overlap at the level of behaviors as well as their
neurobiological substrates (Witt et al., 2017). For example, there
is current scientific consensus that the PFC is the main site of
disruption in people with schizophrenia (Selemon and Zecevic,
2015), although its network of connections with other parts of the
brain may be abnormal, too. Yet, what these abnormalities are
and how exactly the brain malfunctions in any given mental
problem remain largely unknown.
These difficulties contribute to, and are compounded by, the
association of mental illness with societal stigma (Carrara et al.,
2019;Charette-Dussault and Corbie`re, 2019;Heim et al., 2019).
Improved communication among researchers, clinicians, patient
communities, and the public may mitigate stigma by conveying
that mental illness is a brain disease, and not fundamentally dif-
ferent from ailments that affect other organs of the body, such as
heart or kidney disease.
B.K.L., a scientist who specializes in the study of mental dis-
orders, was diagnosed in 2015 with metastatic melanoma and
underwent immunotherapy treatment. The resulting frontal cor-
tex inflammation presented as mental illness:
“I experienced not just the terror and difficulty of living
with mental illness (Lipska and McArdle, 2018), but also
how other people react to mentally ill individuals. I had
first-hand evidence that mental illness is a disease of the
brain (Insel and Cuthbert, 2015). My outlook on mental
illness shifted to being more tolerant, understanding, and
motivated to share knowledge about brain and mental
disorders.”
B.K.L.’s unique perspective, as both a patient and a neurosci-
entist, lends great weight to her message on the importance of
addressing mental illness as a brain disease, and what neurosci-
ence as a field can do to reduce the stigma of such ailments in
society.
In conclusion, there is a compelling need for researchers to
disseminate their findings widely to the public in an accessible
fashion. The audiences for these communications may include
those who are disinterested in science, as well as people with
widely varying preferences for how material is presented. Com-
municators themselves may differ in their approaches, as well as
in their first-person experiences of their area of study. Here we
argue that crafting objective, replicable facts into narrative scien-
tific storytelling is an effective means of communicating research
discoveries to nonspecialists. Storytelling not only creates emo-
tional connections to draw in the listener, but, like the narratives
that often accompany magic performances, can help ease an au-
dience’s discomfort or frustration with the information pre-
sented. Thus, well-crafted stories can help neuroscientists close
communication gaps between science and society, especially in
the case of neurodiverse and patient populations.
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