Human working memory and cognitive processing retain and digest structured narrative information significantly better than unstructured lists of facts.
"And our brains aren't very good at remembering lists. I mean, I always will joke with my students, when you go to the grocery store, how many items do you need to buy before you have to write something down? For me, it's three. I just can't remember much in lists. If you provide a structure to the information, it makes it much easier. It increases processing ability... We understand story better than just a random list of things." (said at 0:29:35)
Experimental cognitive research demonstrates that structuring information into a story or processing items within a narrative framework significantly improves memory retention and incidental recall compared to standard or unstructured list-processing conditions.
- supports: Adaptive Memory: Story Processing Improves Recall Performance. (Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior 2026)
"Across all four experiments, after a brief delay, the story processing condition produced either enhanced or comparable incidental recall performance to the survival processing scenario, and both of those conditions produced enhanced recall performance relative to the pleasantness processing scenario. These results suggest that processing information in the context of a story, like survival processing, may represent one of the best deep processing tasks identified to date." (abstract, results, passage verified)
pubmedfull study (doi)