What can stories teach us about the real world? How can stories change our behavior? From research on cognitive maps, we know that hippocampal neurons form maps of physical space and time. Here, we propose that the same neural processes underlie engagement with fictional stories: during story processing we create cognitive maps of various domains—spatial, social, moral, etc.—that we can later use for real-world navigation. This perspective can also inspire new methodological tools for assessing story processing, and we give an example showing how a story can be modeled as paths taken on a cognitive map. In summary, we see stories as affording paths that guide our navigation through multiple dimensions of life, which raises the implication that the function of stories, including their moral content, is not only to be understood at the level of abstract and linguistically coherent propositions, but at the fundamental level of navigation.

Frederic Bartlett pioneered the research on serial reproduction in 1932 and suggested that the stereotypical or schematicform of narratives consists in rationalization, a causal connection within a story and its plot. We conducted the largestretelling experiment to date with two different studies (19,086 retellings; 12,840 participants) that both reach the conclu-sion that retelling of narratives is focused on the precise preservation of the storys degree of happiness and sadness, evenwhen many other aspects related to coherence and rationalization of the story deteriorate. These findings, supported by anovel statistical model with Bayesian estimation, suggest that the happiness and sadness of a story operates as the anchorof stability for both reception-encoding and for reproduction-retrieval of narratives. We suggest that happiness and sadnessin narratives function not simply as discrete emotions, but also as verdicts concerning the outcome of a story.