January 31st, 2026
In this essay, I propose a hypothesis for how the techniques of communication developed up to ancient times.
Signals
Animals have been sending signals to each other for millions of years. Ants leave chemical trails that other ants can use to follow them. Bees have developed a signaling system that allows one bee to tell others where a promising source of pollen is. Many animals use auditory signals to communicate important messages about danger or food. Ground hogs whistle to alert their friends of an approaching predator. There are also lots of gestures that communicate important information. Many animals show their teeth to dissuade others from attacking them. Dogs have a wide range of gestures that they use with other dogs. Tail wagging expresses a number of emotional states; lowering the head or lying on the ground also communicate relationship acknowledgement,
Almost all animal signals are genetically driven. That is, there is (almost never) a cultural base for them. Animals of the same species all use the same behaviors to mean the same things. There are a few striking cases of groups of animals developing their own signals. These special cases almost always involve mammals.
Songs
Many species go far beyond simple signals, producing sequences of sounds that we sometimes call “songs”. Whales do it, and so do birds, as well as other animals. These songs communicate more than just single warnings or notifications, but as yet we really don’t know what they mean. We do know that the songs are not burned into the animals’ genes, because the songs change over months and years, and different animals have different songs. We also know that most of the songs last less than a few minutes, and are usually repeated. This tells us that they still fall short of language in their expressiveness, but that they can transmit more personalized information. I would imagine that a typical whale song might mean something like “Hey, everybody! I’m Bobby Blue Whale, and I’m a handsome guy looking for a foxy lady blue whale.” A birdsong might mean something like “I’m the biggest, meanest, toughest sonuvabitch sparrow in the forest, and this is MY territory, and if anybody tries to horn in on MY territory, I’ll kick their butts! And by the way, gals, if you’re looking for a real stud, just drop by any time. My territory has tons of yummy worms.”
These are, of course, entirely imaginary on my part, but I very much doubt that a whale or a bird constantly repeating the same one-minute song over and over is saying anything like “Desiderius Erasmus was a 16th century scholar who wrote some of the first best-selling books in history.”
Language
This is the big leap in communication technique. One measure of the effectiveness of a communication system is the amount of information that it can transmit, measured in bits. By this measure, signals contain only a few bits of information; songs can transmit perhaps a few hundred bits of information. Language is capable of transmitting an infinite amount of information, although this would take an infinite amount of time. Language is not necessarily a truthful form of communication, and the information it can transmit is not necessarily useful information; just look at the terabytes and terabytes of utter crap to be found on the Internet. But language is still a giant leap forward in its communicative capacity.
Of all the species on the planet, only one can produce language. Yep, you’re welcome to walk through the zoo, sneering at all the animals there and taunting them with the fact that you can talk and they cannot.
While language is able to transmit immense amounts of information, its structure is rather tedious; it has difficulty communicating more than a few sentences worth of information at a time. That’s because language is a strictly linear form of communication, so that the end of a long communication could come so much later than the beginning that the audience has forgotten the information at the beginning of the communication and has difficulty assembling all that meaning into a coherent whole. I mean, seriously, how many of the hoi polloi who don’t subscribe to Medium could understand some of the longer articles posted here?
Any big, complicated idea — such as this example of scholarly erudition that you are currently being edified by — drops far more information on you than you can possibly retain in memory. Pop quiz: list the animals cited in the first paragraph of this article. Gotcha!
Thus, although language can theoretically communicate an unlimited amount of information, in practice, the amount of information that humans can absorb from a single chunk of language is rather limited.
We see this problem clearly with the graphical user interfaces on our computers and smartphones. Theoretically, a graphical user interface can offer thousands upon thousands of actions to the user. In practice, it becomes too clumsy to use with anything more than about 100 such verbs. Nowadays, in order to find what you need, you have to click on a small icon at the top of the window, activate a drop-down menu, select the correct item from that menu, then click on the correct tab, scroll down to the appropriate place, then click on the correct button. Sure, that’s technically accessible — but how many times have you struggled because you couldn’t find the right sequence of actions to locate the hidden verb buried under all those steps?
Story
Fear not! Homo Sapiens developed a solution to this problem: a new technique that permits the communication of more data in a manner that the mind can master: the story.
I am proposing that story constitutes a fundamental mental protocol that our brains are built to understand. We’re born with the ability to comprehend complex ideas when they are expressed as stories.
Mnemonics
Here’s a simple example of how well the story-comprehension system works in the brain. Consider the problem that astronomy students have faced for more than a century: how to remember the sequence of star types in the Main Sequence of stars. (A classification system for stars was developed in the nineteenth century; it assigns a letter to each class of stars. Eventually they settled on these letters: A,B,F,G,K,M,N, and O.)
Later, they realized that these star types followed a pattern expressed in the sequence O,B,A,F,G,K,M,N. This sequence is so important that every astronomy student must memorize it. Contemplate for a moment the difficulties you would have getting that sequence right.
Until one day some genius astronomer (who should have earned that Nobel Prize for this creation) came up with a simple way to memorize the letters: this mnemonic: “Oh, Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me Now!” Yes, it’s silly. But it works. Every astronomer in the world can recite this mnemonic in a flash.
Another mnemonic astronomers use helps beginners remember the names of the planets in the order of their distance from the sun: My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas for Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. However, 20 years ago the International Astronomical Union decided that Pluto does not qualify as a planet, so Mom no longer gives us pizzas.
Early story comprehension
Let’s consider two rival stories. Here’s the first:
Itsy-bitsy spider climbed up the gutter spout.
Down came the rain, and washed the spider out.
Out came the sun, and dried up all the rain.
And the itsy-bitsy spider climbed up the spout again.
That’s a complete story in just four sentences. It has a protagonist, an antagonist, a crisis, a resolution, and an edifying moral about perseverance. Any five-year old child can understand this little story and its meaning.
Now let us contemplate another story:
Once upon a time, a handsome prince lived in a shining castle atop a hill.
One day he leapt onto his mighty white charger,
And galloped out the drawbridge and into the forest,
Where they fell into a deep hole, and they both died.
Now, any five-year old child will snort and deny that this is a proper story. You should find that rather striking. Not many five-years can even read; their entire experience with stories comes from those that parents tell them and what they’ve seen on TV. Yet even with this paucity of experience, five-year olds already understand a great deal about how stories work. This is a strong indicator that they are pre-programmed to understand stories.
Folklore
Here’s another brick for the structure I’m building: folklore, the collection of stories a culture holds dear. Folklore is a universal human behavior; everybody has their stories (or “oral traditions”, if you want to sound academic). Those stories encapsulate much of the cultural knowledge that has been amassed over thousands of years.
Some of it conveys knowledge about nature and natural dangers; the Mongols had stories about the dangers of lightning, especially around watercourses.
Much concerns social and moral rules; Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Ugly Duckling” teaches that a child should not be concerned about being different from other children.
Some folklore conveys profound information about the psyche; the Mabinogion’s “Culhwch and Olwen” (“Cool-hoockh and Ol-win”) reveals fundamental psychological principles governing how a boy becomes a man.
Much of our folklore has been integrated into more modern forms. The Fisher King story in the Arthurian legends is a Middle Ages collection of some ancient tales that were fused together in much the same way that the Arthurian legends themselves are a fusion of a number of ancient tales; along the way, some of those tales appear to have undergone major distortions.
Old Geezers’ Incessant Stories
One last clue comes from the irritating habit of old people to repeating the same old stories from their life experiences. (I write this as a card-carrying member of the Glorious Geezer Guild.) Many of these old fogeys are actually demonstrating their wisdom. After all, it is futile to try to tell a young whippersnapper what to do or not do; they’ll usually respond by doing the opposite out of pure cussedness. Instead, a story directs the attention away from the whippersnapper and toward a general principle. It provides the geezer with plausible deniability that they meant to be so rude as to tell the whippersnapper what to do, while simultaneously giving the whippersnapper an ego-preserving suggestion as to what they might just want to do.
Summation
The thesis I am selling here is that stories are a great deal more than entertaining diversions; they are in fact constructs obeying a strict protocol that can present a big, complicated idea in a compact form that our minds can instantly grasp.
Damn! I just realized that I would have done better to present this as a story!
Once upon a time, there was an old geezer who wanted to teach a young whippersnapper…