The Cognitive Fire: Why Human Stories Gravitate Toward the Same Sparks

Toward a New Understanding of Narrative, Cognition, and Power

Across cultures and centuries, our stories appear to retell the same handful of patterns. The most famous is the hero’s journey, a cycle Joseph Campbell identified in myths across the globe (Campbell 1949, p. 23). This raises a puzzle: are we endlessly creative, or are we replaying deep cognitive scripts? I argue for the latter. Human stories repeat not because imagination is lacking, but because narrative reflects the neurological architecture of action and intention.

To capture this, I use the metaphor of cognitive fire. Like fire, narrative is:

1. A natural outgrowth of embodied cognition.
2. A transformative technology that enabled cooperation at scale.
3. A double-edged force: it provides the warmth of social cohesion when tended with wisdom, but becomes an uncontrollable wildfire when fueled by algorithmic engagement and bad intent. The ‘firekeepers’ of the past were shamans and storytellers; today, they are platform architects and attention engineers.

Understanding narrative as cognitive fire reframes it not as ornament but as infrastructure: a species-wide operating system that shapes reality itself.

The Grammar of Action: Story as Embodied Simulation

Before humans told stories, we moved through the world. We navigated landscapes, pursued prey, and fled predators. These survival actions—an agent pursuing a goal while overcoming obstacles—form what I call the grammar of action.

Extending the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson on conceptual metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, p. 5), and more recent research on predictive processing and narrative cognition (Hutto and Herschbach 2020), we can see that core story structures are cognitive simulations of sensorimotor experience. Stories mirror the brain’s architecture for planning and problem-solving, which is why they “feel” intuitive.

This explains the global appeal of narratives like The Lion King, whose exile–training–return arc resonates as an externalization of intentional action. The structure is not arbitrary; it echoes the shape of our own embodied intentionality.

Yet not all stories conform. Circular myths, anti-narratives, or character-driven works like Beckett’s Waiting for Godot deliberately frustrate the grammar of action. Their rarity is telling. They require greater cognitive effort, and thus remain culturally marginal. They cannot compete with the frictionless ease of goal-directed arcs. While these “anti-narratives” form the core of significant high literary and artistic traditions, their cultural penetration is often limited to elite circles. The dominance of the hero’s journey across myth, religion, and mass media is less a literary preference than a cognitive inevitability.

This neurological resonance at the individual level is precisely what makes narrative so potent at the collective scale.

The Cooperative Fire: From Survival Tool to Social Glue

The evolutionary function of story was to bind groups together. As Yuval Noah Harari argues, human cooperation rests on “shared fictions” (Harari 2015, p. 24). Narrative became the delivery system for these fictions, turning abstractions into lived experience.

Brian Boyd describes narrative as a species-level adaptation for social cohesion (Boyd 2009, p. 15). A myth of a founding hero transmits survival information, encodes norms, and cements identity. This is the constructive side of cognitive fire: story as warmth, glue, and shared orientation.

Merlin Donald’s model of cultural evolution reinforces this, showing how mimetic, mythic, and theoretic cultures scaffold human cognition across history (Donald 1991). Storytelling is not just entertainment but a cognitive prosthesis that expands collective intelligence.

Narrative Collapse and the Fight for Cognitive Sovereignty

But fire, untended, burns. Because narrative bypasses analysis and appeals directly to embodied cognition, it is the perfect delivery system for ideology and misinformation. Conspiracy theories thrive not through logic but through narrative fit: a lone seeker of truth, a hidden enemy, a climactic revelation. Such structures feel true because they map onto our cognitive defaults.

In the digital age, this process has been industrialized. Shoshana Zuboff documents how engagement-driven platforms function as engines of behavioral modification (Zuboff 2019, p. 8). Algorithms amplify narratives that trigger emotion, outrage, and identification—fuel for what I call narrative collapse: the fracturing of a shared cultural fire into innumerable siloed sparks, each reinforced by algorithmic attention loops. Platform awareness means recognizing that a three-act, hero-vs-villain meme is algorithmically favored over a nuanced, long-form article exploring systemic causes. The very architecture of ’likes’ and ‘shares’ rewards cognitive frictionlessness, accelerating narrative collapse.

Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy of technics sharpens this diagnosis. Technology, he argues, is not external to humanity but constitutive of it—our tools shape memory, attention, and desire (Stiegler 1998, p. 134). Digital media thus act as a pharmakon—both poison and cure (Stiegler 2010, p. 73). Narrative collapse is the poison; the potential for new forms of democratic narrative literacy is the cure.

Toward Narrative Literacy

The challenge of our era is cognitive sovereignty: the right and capacity to govern attention, memory, and meaning-making. Narrative literacy must therefore move beyond propaganda detection to become a civic skill. It should include:

• Structural recognition: Who is the agent? What is the goal? Which obstacles matter, and whose interests do they serve?
• Platform awareness: How do algorithms privilege certain narrative forms? Why does outrage spread faster than nuance?
• Counter-narrative creation: This involves creating and amplifying stories that model complex, empathetic decision-making. For instance, narratives where the ‘hero’ must understand an opponent’s perspective to succeed, or where the resolution is not victory but reconciliation, reflect a more mature narrative literacy suited to a pluralistic world.

Recent research in media studies shows that narrative literacy initiatives can build resilience against manipulation, especially when coupled with participatory storytelling and cross-platform awareness (Couldry and Mejias 2020).

If fire once gave us civilization, narrative literacy may be the flame that preserves it.

This article was developed through an iterative collaboration between our Editor-in-Chief and multiple AI language models. Various LLMs contributed at different stages—from initial ideation and drafting to refinement and technical review. Each AI served as a creative and analytical partner, while human editors maintained final oversight, ensuring accuracy, quality, and alignment with AuthZ's editorial standards.