Why don’t animals tell stories?

Humans spend most of their conversational time sharing stories. Watching stories on TV, or reading them on social media consumes a significant proportion of our leisure time.

It’s not hard to see why: we encode our experience as affective responses, a story is merely an expression of those reactions. In a sense we are stories - we convert our experience of the world into stories in our heads. When we tell a story we are, literally, expressing our selves.

For a social creature it’s easy to imagine the evolutionary advantage of sharing stories: if I went somewhere, was attacked by a scary creature and barely escaped with my life, my family might want to know about that.

So here’s the odd thing: why don’t other creatures tell stories?

It’s safe to assume that cognition is fundamentally similar across a variety of species - in essence, we are all storing our reactions to the world; we all have a nervous system that encodes experience as stories.

We would expect to see storytelling in other social creatures where there is clearly a genetic advantage. So do we?

Well yes - but not necessarily where we might expect to find it. Bees, it seems, tell stories: the dance that they perform to tell other bees of good locations has all the requisite elements - they must encode the affectively significant elements of their experience, and relate them to fellow bees - which they do in the form of dance.

But this begs the question: if it’s such a cool trick, why isn’t storytelling more widespread? Other species have culture (Japanese crows for example, who leaned to crack nuts at crossings, then wait for the lights to turn red to collect them). Possibly whales tell stories - whalesong is sufficiently complex for this to be possible.  But I wonder why, for example, dogs don’t tell stories.

You might assume that storytelling requires an exceptional level of cognitive capability - if it weren’t for the bee example. Storytelling is actually pretty simple trick to pull off. Humans’ vocal chords separate them from close relatives - such as Bonobo chimps - but complex vocalisations are not a prerequisite for storytelling. There are many ways to tell a story - you just need to be able to reflect your experience externally somehow.

Even if you are sceptical regarding my account of cognition we can frame the question in more conventional terms: many organisms have memories - why aren’t they sharing these memories?

So storytelling remains something of a mystery.