Biologists don’t like admitting to human exceptionalism – the idea that we have a special place in nature, quite distinct from other animals. But I would argue that this attitude is because they are too close to their subject. Admittedly, in one sense they are perfectly right. We are, after all, not unique in being either a mammal or a great ape. Yet looking at our ability to produce technology, to develop sophisticated cultures and to transform the environment (for good and bad alike), it is surely perverse to suggest thatHomo sapiens is not in some sense special.

What makes us unique?

There has been plenty of argument about what makes us seemingly unique among the animals. In his bookConsciousness, English biologist John Parrington, based at Oxford University, suggests that there are three factors that enable us to stand out. These are our use of language, the way that our deployment of tools and technology has enabled us to radically transform our environment, and the fact that we have a uniquely complex brain structure. For me, these all come together in one clear and distinctive aspect of human behaviour – and it provides the foundations for brainjacking. We are storytellers.

InHow Life Works, science writer Philip Ball notes: ‘One of our attributes that most distinguishes us from other animals is our construction of complex cultures, which rely critically on systems and technologies for passing on information and learning – and thuscausal influence – between generations through means other than genes.’ Arguably, the most important system here is storytelling.

American lecturer in English Jonathan Gottschall refers to us not asHomosapiens, butHomofictus – ‘the great ape with the storytelling mind’. He points out that children don’t have to be trained in what stories are – they are inherently part of being human. He notes: ‘Children don’t need to be tutored in story. We don’t need to bribe them to make stories like we bribe them to eat broccoli. For children, make-believe is as automatic and insuppressible as dreams.’

Strictly speaking, not all use of story is brainjacking. One of the ways we stand out from other animals is as a result of our internal storytelling. Rather than live our lives primarily in the moment, we are constantly telling ourselves the small stories that are responses to questions such as ‘What if?’ and to the deployment of ‘How?’ or ‘Why?’ or ‘What?’. Questions like: