I ask the question “So what’s the story?” enough at work that it might be my catch phrase.

But there’s a reason for this.

Stories are powerful.

Notice how many TED Talks start with, not statistics or facts, but a story—often a personal narrative from the speaker’s own life. Marketers have certainly noticed the power of stories. The most compelling commercials don’t just sell you a product; they tell you a story.

Our brains are wired to understand stories. They’re the natural way we communicate, and there is strong scientific evidence that stories are effective in changing attitudes and behavior—both things that are notoriously hard to accomplish.

So why do stories have so much power? And how can we use them in our science communication?

The Power of Stories

If you’ve ever read a horror story and found your heart racing and felt compelled to double check that the front door is indeed locked, you already know that stories can have a physical effect, but you might not realize how strongly that effect is tied to empathy.

When listening to stories, our brains increase production of oxytocin. Oxytocin is a hormone that, among its many roles, affects prosocial behaviors, earning it the name the “love hormone.”

In one study exploring this effect, participants watched one of two versions of a video. One version had a dramatic arc while the other had no tension (i.e., no story), although both featured the same characters: a boy with cancer and his father. The investigators found that the version with the arc caused an increase in cortisol and oxytocin levels. More interestingly, they found that the participants who watched this video were more generous to strangers in a subsequent game played as part of the experiment.

Watching the short video had made them more empathetic—to a degree that they changed their behavior.

In fact, multiple studies have found that storytelling is an effective tactic for driving health behavior change. One such study used patient stories to reduce blood pressure of participants with uncontrolled hypertension. Another used storytelling to improve knowledge about diabetes.

Through stories, we can (despite the adage to the contrary) learn from other people’s mistakes.

Stories are also memorable. They stick in our heads—which is critical for their ability to drive behavior change.

There’s even a memorization technique derived around storytelling. Perhaps you’ve used this technique to cram for a test. Known as mnemonic stories, the story method, or the narrative-chaining method, this memorization technique involves inventing a story woven around the words or concepts you want to remember. One study found that the story method was seven times more effective than a traditional list-memorization technique.

The Essence of Stories

Stories, at their core, are about people (or anthropomorphized animals or objects, as often is the case in children’s stories) facing a challenge. The human element here is critical, because, put simply, people like people.

When I used to run the social media accounts for a clean energy company, I quickly realized that photos with people in them received much more engagement than photos without, even if they were of a lower quality. A beautiful photo of a solar panel reflecting a vibrant sunset received a mere fifth of the likes and shares as a comparatively plain photo of a solar panel with a person standing next to it.

Stories also focus on individual characters, not aggregates, as presented with statistics. The famous saying “a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic” applies to more than just deaths. It applies to everything.

But the power of the stories clearly goes beyond people. That narrative arc—where the character faces a challenge and (except in the case of tragedies) overcomes it—also adds something for our brains.

It obviously adds emotion and tension, but it also adds a familiar pattern. The narrative structure has been ingrained in us since our childhood when we demanded our parents read The Digging-Est Dog to us 1,000 times (statistic provided by my father, who likely can still quote this book).

Narratives provide a structure we can recognize, offering us the ability to predict what will happen next. This ability enables our imaginations to fill in the missing details, making us an active participant in the story.

Science Communication

Stories—in the form of oral folklore, parables, and fables—have been an effective tool to pass down knowledge, traditions, and values for as long as people have walked the Earth.

As such, stories and storytelling should be a standard part of science communication. Explaining a scientific concept by telling a story, for example, the story of the key people involved in its discovery—the scientists, patients, and others—will help people care and therefore learn.

The narrative structure and human element will give your audience something familiar to grip onto as they wrestle with unfamiliar technical and scientific concepts. It will make them more likely to recall and act on their new scientific knowledge.

Paul J. Zak, Ph.D., who led the oxytocin research discussed above, does this beautifully in his article “Why Inspiring Stories Make Us React: The Neuroscience of Narrative.” In this article, he tells his research as a story. This tactic makes his research more memorable, understandable, and enjoyable to read.

Stories capture our attention, encourage us to keep reading, and make us care.

And it’s always easier to learn when it’s something you care about.