The fascinating ritual of reading a story to the child. And what it reveals about humans

Delia Gondar reads a book to her daughters Delia Maria and Conchita before sleeping at their home in Marianao, Cuba, around 1955.Evans (Three Lions/Getty Images) (Getty Images)

The day ends. After a long day, neither the little ones nor you can do more, but that would never excuse you skipping the inescapable ritual of reading them a story. And it is something that you continue to enjoy, although that intangible watch that we all have inside warns you that it has an expiration date and that it is getting closer. Soon, girls will flatly reject the prospect of being told stories, because they will only care about being a simulacrum of adults. But that hasn't happened yet. No, not yet, and you get ready to comply with it and enjoy it.

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Our brain is not like a computer

We are made of stories. I write this sentence aware that it will hardly win an award for originality. I enter it in the Google search engine and, in fact, I see that Eduardo Galeano wrote it at some point. But I would venture to say that even he should not have been the first to think about it; Actually, as soon as you take a moment to look for something that defines us perfectly, there are many possibilities to notice it.

If we have seen something again and again in these pages is that our brain is panicked of chaos, nonsense, that things happen without a reason. Our prodigious neurons constantly capture the information they receive and analyze it without interruption, and the power of our mind builds patterns, stories, orders the pieces that at first glance are not related and seeks a meaning to everything.

In the universe, in the world, before us and even within us, every action has a reaction. That is what allows science to move forward, to understand the causes of observable facts, which in turn will take us even further. But it would be too much to say that there is a story as such, a story with a purpose, a meaning, some vicissitudes and an end consistent with what happened until then. That would enter, more than in the field of science, in that of religions, which also have their corresponding list of heroes and villains, the sauce of any self-respecting story. In fact, they are in themselves stories that chase away the ghost of the unpredictable and seemingly meaningless.

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So, yes, we are made of stories. Our very existence is a story. We need stories, even if they don't end well, and we have been looking hard for them since childhood. It is a proven fact that, despite the proliferation of screens, the overstimulation of stories that surround us, there are still millions of children who, every night, fall asleep while an adult reads them a story. It does not matter that the supports have changed, that there are now formats with greater capacity to reach the child's mind to catch their attention; The image of a father or mother reading a story to their child, usually taken from an illustrated book, could seem an anomaly, something more typical of an older world, one in which adults wove stories to exorcise dangers and threats, and thus accompany the little ones in their particular descent into the depths of sleep.

We may think that the stories we tell have changed a lot over the thousands of years we've been here. After all, the adventures of Homo sapiens who lived in a cave are not the same as those of a Sapiens who surfs the internet, talks to his office colleagues through a screen or chooses what to see from a wide range of options from the sofa. And yet, there is something atavistic about those stories, in how they are constructed, that has remained unchanged. Nothing strange, if we take into account that, although we believe that we have evolved a lot, we still have practically the same brain as that of our venerable ancestors. A brain that continues to decipher reality and interpret it as it did then, and that is why it is stimulated by the same things. As José Enrique Campillo affirms, our brain was not created to conceive neither the vastness of the universe nor the infinitesimality of the quantum, both realities that have burst among us, with which a neural tissue designed for the most immediate and forceful present has to deal with, in essence the same brain with which hunter-gatherers had to manage to survive in an eminently hostile world.

But the most curious thing is that, in the end, it is very likely that the mechanism with which we manage to assemble the story that explains these vast concepts will be built in a similar way to how our most remote ancestors did. The story that catches us is the one that manages to interrupt our inner monologue, the one that accompanies us at every moment and that is continuously giving that meaning that we need so much to anything we meet, even on the street, and that, in reality, does not have to be related to anything. Our brain has been responsible for giving coherence to events that are, to a large extent, fortuitous and even chaotic.

Therefore, for a story to captivate us, it has to have a beginning that breaks with what was planned and, thus, captures our attention. Or even contain some magic words that, in a certain way, act as an incantation, a rite that indicates that we abandoned what we knew to enter a new world; in this sense, "Once Upon a Time" can be as effective as "Today Mom Died. Or maybe yesterday. I don't know." Different strategies, same result.

If this is the first time we read the story we are now telling our daughters, when we lay our eyes on the written text, the combination of what we see and the action of our brain will decipher what, previously, the author coded. And the most fascinating thing is that our mind, and by extension that of the girls who listen to us, will build reality at the same pace with which we scan each word, and even advance what goes next, in a dizzying succession of possibilities until there is only one option left. In a way, it is like when the predictive keyboard of the mobile suggests words, while we are typing, until we are left with the final version.

Every night, with each reading, in a gloom barely broken by a small lamp, one of the most fascinating processes of a day full of almost magical moments takes place. Because, by reading what someone previously imagined, perhaps relying on images created by an illustrator, we are setting in motion powerful mental processes, which surely go as unnoticed as those that allow us to decipher the time on the dial of a watch, simply because they have become everyday. But at the same time, by verbalizing them, we are adding layers upon layers of magic. If each reading is unique, if each reader reconstructs in his own way what the author previously imagined, so does the child from what he hears, from his own perspective, not yet as hormado as ours.

And the truly wonderful thing is that, from that sum of unique stories that come from various sources (the author, the adult who reads, the child who listens), one of those moments capable of lasting will emerge. Maybe that's why it still has some ritual to tell a story to a child. Perhaps that is why, too, it has managed to stay up against the tsunami of new supports and platforms. And hopefully it will continue to do so.

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