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What do scientific research and great storytelling have in common? Both start with a vision, rely on collaboration, and aim to create something meaningful. At AlmaScience, we’ve been blending cutting-edge research with a compelling narrative to bring you three new videos showcasing our journey into sustainability, innovation, and smart technologies.

Science and Storytelling

Scientific concepts and discoveries gain greater impact when shared through compelling stories that resonate with an initial circle of audiences. Stories can transform abstract concepts and complex principles into accessible narratives, helping people grasp knowledge, connect, relate, engage, and ultimately share the information.

There are many parallels between the architecture of knowledge in science and the editing process in storytelling. Storytelling can illuminate scientific concepts, constructing a story that often mirrors the rigorous process of scientific validation: an agreed-upon intellectual structure that encourages the constructive exchanges of ideas, active collaboration in advancing knowledge, and consensus-building to ensure fact-checked, reliable information.

Neuroscience and Creativity

“Imagination creates reality.”
– Richard Wagner, music composer (1813–1883)

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
– Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist (1879–1955)

Imagination transforms everyday things and rituals once taken for granted into new habits and behaviors. This is particularly evident in the emergence of the “Green Awakening” and the change of mindset it brought upon the development of new technologies.

Imagination also shapes our evenings into moving images and narratives filled with intrigues, complex plots, and relatable characters. Scripts for films and series are becoming so captivating that we have increasingly transformed in “Nocturnal Animals” locked into the “Silo” of our screens. 

Astonishingly, both the tangible and the intangible – things and stories – are born from the same source: the brain, that singular body organ shaping our perceptions and ideas. Imagination integrates sensory experiences, abstract thinking, and creativity. This thought process driven by neurons firing in intricate patterns emerges from the secretive "darkroom" of the brain.

“Locked inside the black vault of our skulls, stuck forever in the solitude of our own hallucinated universe, story is a portal, a hallucination within the hallucination, the closest we'll ever really come to escape.”
– Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling

Other elements influence our ability to innovate and create. Genes play a role by shaping neural development, cognitive traits, and tendencies toward creativity. Our environment also shapes the architecture of our minds. The places we grow up in, the stories told around the table, our cultural exposure – books and music surrounding us, all contribute to our creative potential.

The innate curiosity we have as children adds to this constellation. Did we feel the call for the unknown? Did we show early signs of being problem solvers? Were we adamant in questioning and countering established truths? Did we dismantle our household electronic devices? 

Our roles and expertise as inventors and/or storytellers might have dipped its conductive ink into these memories. What we focus on, create, and act upon – or against – in specific fields of knowledge as adults often derive from childhood and teenage first experiences.

Then, through our career paths, the innovations we strive to create, the stories we choose to tell, ignite new pathways toward shaping who we become and how our choices resonate in a wider world.

In the beginning, there is nothing.
An abyssal virgin page. 
A blank canvas.
Then...
The birth of an idea.
Febrile thoughts fire up.
Sketches, first drafts…
Fragmented notes.

What if…?
A first pitch – but to whom? Perhaps to the mirror.
Is it a story designed to provoke change? 
Is it a subject matter we feel important to script into a story?

“All good science emerges from an imaginative conception of what might be true”, wrote V.S. Ramachandran in The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human. Humans are innate storytellers, at times with embellishing narratives, fables and myths. And no doubt, the most groundbreaking inventions require compelling stories to bring them to prominence. This is why computer scientists have embraced lyrical expression in the last half-century to pitch their innovations.

“Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born”, wrote Alan Kay, now 84, a computer scientist at Xerox PARC who pioneered the first modern windowed computer desktop interface. Echoing this, Arthur C. Clarke, the iconic British science fiction author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, remarked: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable to magic”.

A case in point: Innovation and Storytelling

Consider one of the defining documentaries of the 21st century: An Inconvenient Truth (2006), directed by Davis Guggenheim. This non-fiction account spoke of the devastating effects of climate change and marked a turning point in raising awareness about the climate crisis.

Narrated by former US Vice President Al Gore, the documentary presented a harrowing picture of a planet under threat from rising CO2 emissions due to human activity. Its tagline, “By far the most terrifying film you will ever see”, was grounded in facts, quotes, and reasoning. It was reality, not fiction.

How could a documentary succeed in voicing the issues brought about by climate change that others struggled to convey for years, despite the number of concerned scientists and scholars who spent decades researching, documenting, and gathering evidence…

The answer is storytelling. 
The film distilled complex data into a narrative that resonated with non-scientific audiences, proving that the most pressing issues need stories to galvanize action. It worked. The film won the Oscar for Best Documentary and expanded its audience reach. The key to its effectiveness was engaging all of us, inhabitants of planet Earth. We all had had a responsibility in this “inconvenient truth.”

Science and storytelling: close allies in the pursuit of truth

The thin line between hallucination and logic, reality and fiction, facts and perceptions, findings and metaphors, is always trembling. 

Science had to build its floating laboratories (a metaphor) above the turbulent waters of imagination and perception, using structural pillars to establish fundamental results. Valid and approved findings advanced knowledge and addressed unanswered questions. Similarly, other fields of science, such as anthropology or ethnography, have inspired the verification methods and validation workflows applied to the investigation of non-fiction narratives. 

The fascinating link between neuroscience and storytelling – how imagination shapes narratives – 
reveals how storytelling itself arises from a complex interplay of brain regions, cognitive functions, and environmental influences, impossible to comprehend without scientific studies. 

The recent breakthroughs in mapping the brain’s dynamic networks is the result of relentless, centuries-long work of scientists navigating trials and errors, as well as stagnation and sparks of technological advancements.

The interlaced relationship between science and non-fiction storytelling spoke of rigor and precision when researching subject matters that could affect and change perception about a person, a place, or a phenomenon. Scientific truth has its own compelling storyline, though constantly challenged. The belief in truth, and in absolute truth, has been shaped by and embedded in many stories. 

Conversely, without a shared code of conduct, science could lose its foundation. Left unchecked, it might weave stories that hypothesize how systems function without rigorous study, or shape designs to serve biased goals.

Similarly, documentaries and non-fictional lens-based storytelling were grounded in the ethical principles of investigative journalism, otherwise they could have easily been replaced by blatant propaganda. 

The concept of truth – in science, storytelling, society, and politics – and the pursuit of truth is so often shaken by rebellious waves of skepticism that it might well deserve its own crusade. Some epochs seem to serve truth better than others.

The emphasis on truth has been passed down through generations across a vast array of disciplines. From the expansion of scientific knowledge to the evolution of narrative techniques, truth has been a cornerstone of scientific discovery and, for a time, of non-fiction storytelling.

Fact-based inquiry was initially developed by the philosophers of Ancient Greece (5th–4th century BCE). The Greek philosophers Aristotle and Plato emphasized reason and empirical observation as pathways to uncovering universal truths. Aristotle’s method of systematic observation and classification laid the groundwork for evidence-based inquiry.

The art of asking questions: a shared foundation of philosophy, science, journalism, cultural theory

We turn to V.S. Ramachandran once again: “Science should be question-driven, not methodology-driven”.

Observation and precision have long been the intangible servants of truth in biology, quantum science, or the study of apes. And the ability to ask questions, paired with curiosity, observation, humility and attentive listening, have nurtured the creative process in developing storylines where people who had not been given a voice could have space to express.

The quest for truth reached its zenith during the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, where pioneers like Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton used experimental observation and mathematical precision as entry points to deeper knowledge.

Later, thinkers like Kant and Descartes added dimensions of rationality, skepticism, and the pursuit of objective truth. For much of the 20th century, truth remained inseparable from progress, viewed through the lens of a microscope or the frame of a Leica camera. Photojournalism embedded it in its metadata through the prohibition of cropping authored pictures. Context and the choice of composition could not be altered or truncated. On topic: Truth in photography.

The pursuit of objective truth was tightly woven into numerous professions and disciplines across the social sciences, sealed by codes of ethics and of professional conduct, binding agreements, collaborations, and workflows allowing proofreading, fact-checking, and additional research where needed.

The shifting tides of truth in the Digital Age: the emergence of Tribal Narratives

For nearly three centuries, science and storytelling shared a common structure: a commitment to systematic, reproducible methods as pathways to truthful information. This paradigm, forged during the Enlightenment, matured through deliberate workflows in both fields.

Then came the internet. Digital media forced a rethinking of how to convey stories and connect with audiences. Participation became key, and communication strategies evolved to prioritize selecting the best possible medium for each story. Visibility and attention became buzzwords. 

When the frameworks supporting the verification of information began to crumble, social media had introduced a massive influx of storytellers, lowering the barriers to publishing even more. Speed became the sword of Damocles in content production. From amateurs to influencers, daily content producers became masters at capturing an audience. In volume and voices, the cacophony became white noise, soon giving rise to informational bubbles. 

Truth was replaced by influence.
Algorithms prioritized engagement. Content designed to provoke fear, anger, and hatred was amplified over measured, factual narratives. Truth became secondary: likes, shares, and clicks replaced the slow, ethical processes essential to investigative journalism and scientific inquiry.

This phenomenon created a paradox: platforms that enabled storytelling simultaneously depleted it of rigor, accountability, collaboration, and the negotiation of factual information. Perceptions, hallucinations, rumors, and conspiracies unleashed a fertile playground for populism and social bias.

Is scientific truth regaining momentum?

It took 18 years for An Inconvenient Truth to enter social and political discourse, even as beliefs and disbeliefs continue to diverge significantly. The delay came at a high cost: lives lost to landslides, fires, earthquakes, and food insecurity caused by climate change. In 2022 alone, disasters triggered a record 32.6 million internal displacements, with 98% caused by weather-related hazards such as floods, storms, wildfires, and droughts, according to the International Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC).

At the end of the day, it is up to us – young and old – to choose the world we feel closest to. From the pursuit of verifiable knowledge and the art of storytelling to innovations that can inspire real change in behaviors, actions, and beliefs, we must strive for what is safer for children and what safeguards our planet.

Behind the scenes at AlmaScience

AlmaScience, the CoLab specializing in functional natural materials and green electronics, teamed up with Porto-based film production company Bubble Creative Studio to produce a series of three films, shining a light on some of our most remarkable green tech solutions developed by the company.

At AlmaScience, every discovery, breakthrough, and innovation begins with a question - and every question becomes a story. From rethinking how we package goods to creating green(er) electronics, science drives our mission to shape a more sustainable future.

But science isn’t just about the data. It’s about people, ideas, and the journey of turning possibilities into reality. That’s why we believe in the power of storytelling to make complex ideas resonate and inspire action.

We’ve captured this fusion of science and storytelling in three exclusive videos.

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