We all have been fascinated by the illustrious stories of the epics such as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. Similarly, many around the world have been mesmerized by the Iliad and the Odyssey. Some of us have been inspired by these stories. Some of us have used teachings from these great epics in personal decision making. Some of us have used the characters and stories as political ploy. Overall, these epics prove that the human storytelling capabilities are extremely unique and kind of bizarre. We spend an enormous amount of our waking lives hallucinating realities that do not exist. Why do we do this? 

Most stories are like mayflies, they live for a day and vanish. But a rare few like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana – are practically immortal. They have survived for thousands of years, mutating across languages, crossing oceans, and ultimately shaping the political and social reality of over a billion people today.

But why?

If we strip away the religious and cultural reverence for a moment, and look at these texts, especially the Ramayana and the Mahabharata through the hard, objective lenses, a fascinating picture emerges. These epics are not just stories. They are highly optimized pieces of cognitive software, perfectly engineered to leverage the neural architecture of the human brain. To put it simply, they are pieces of art crafted to play with the human brain on a mass scale – not necessarily in a bad or good way. 

Here is the science of why the Mahabharata and Ramayana live forever.

The Evolutionary Origins: Why Do We Need Epics?

Let’s say you are connected to a few hundred or thousand friends and followers in the social media platforms, virtually. But in real life how many people are you connected to? Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar famously proposed “Dunbar’s Number“, the cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships, roughly estimated at 150. For most of our history, humans lived in small bands. We maintained group cohesion through physical grooming and gossip. However, as agriculture allowed populations to swell into the thousands and millions, “grooming” was no longer enough. How do you get 10,000 strangers to cooperate without killing each other?

The answer was shared fiction. Fiction acts as a flight simulator for the brain creating a virtual reality . (“flight simulator”: A pilot practices crash landings without actually plummeting into the ocean, your brain practices tricky social situations through stories, without any real-world fallout.) 

Say you read a novel where a character discovers their best friend has been lying to them for years. You’ve never been in that exact spot, but as you read, your mind is quietly running drills: How would I react? Would I confront them? Walk away? Forgive? You’re feeling the anger, the betrayal, the confusion — all from the safety of your home. By the time something even remotely similar happens in your actual life, your brain isn’t starting from scratch. It has already logged some practice hours. You’ve rehearsed the emotions, weighed possible responses, and built a little social muscle memory, all because you got lost in a good story. Now, three people who really liked the novel may think in a similar way, making them cooperative.  

The Mahabharata and Ramayana evolved as supreme survival manuals in the form of immensely immersive stories. They are also vast, encyclopedic databases of human behavior, encoded in narrative form. When a society listened to the Ramayana, they were not just hearing about a prince, Dasharathi rescuing his wife; they were a collection of shared code of conduct (Dharma) regarding family, duty, and authority – and all through immersive storytelling. By standardizing these behavioral expectations, these stories allowed massive, disparate tribes across the Indian subcontinent to trust one another and cooperate on a scale that Dunbar’s number alone would never permit.

The Neuroscience of the Epics

What separates these epics from a forgotten folktale? The answer lies in how they hijack our neurochemistry.

Kind of “Wi-Fi” of the Mind

Everybody must have a family member who tells a story or an incident in such a way that it feels like you were there. This may be due to ‘neural coupling’. When we listen to an engaging story, the brain waves of the listener begin to synchronize with those of the storyteller. If the story is highly compelling, the listener’s brain areas involved in emotion, visual processing, and language light up in the exact same patterns as the speaker’s. The Mahabharata, with its intricate moral dilemmas (like Arjuna’s paralysis on the battlefield of Kurukshetra), forces the reader’s prefrontal cortex to work in overdrive. We are cognitively forced to simulate Arjuna’s agonizing choices. And remember these epics (or parts of them) were traditionally told as stories in Gurukul (school) and elsewhere  even before they were written as books. 

The Dopamine Hook and The Oxytocin Engine 

You start to read or listen to a story for different reasons. But whatever that may be, is not enough to keep you reading the story; you need a consistent dose of change in plot or introduction of subplot—ups and downs—overall, some kind of repetition with unpredictable endings. As an example, in Mahabharata, Yudhisthir plays a gambling game (a game of dice or Dyuta-krida) with Shakuni—and loses everything for the first time, his belongings, his kingdom, even his wife Yagyaseni Draupadi (though that was contested if he lost his wife or not). Then by the mercy of Dhritarashtra they become free. The repetition happens when Shakuni and Yudhisthir play the game of dice again. Now the bet is not physical but the most valuable of all time—the time needed for Duryodhan to build a strong army. The bet is that the Pandavas have to dwell in the forest for 12 years and in disguise anonymously for one more year. Similar setting with slightly different outcomes.

  Furthermore, neuroeconomist Paul Zak has demonstrated that stories featuring highly relatable character struggles trigger the release of oxytocin, a neurochemical associated with empathy and trust. As an example, The Ramayana is deeply rooted in visceral human emotions: a father’s grief (Dasharatha), a brother’s loyalty (Lakshmana), a husband’s desperate search (Rama) for his beloved wife (Sita). These are biologically primal triggers. They ensure a steady drip of oxytocin, binding the listener to the characters with the same neurochemical glue usually reserved for real-world family members.

The Mathematical Framework of Storytelling

The structural geometry of these epics are also fascinating. You can mathematically quantify why some myths endure while others collapse under their own weight.

Network Theory and the Small-World Phenomenon

In 2012, physicists Ralph Kenna and Pádraig Mac Carron analyzed the social networks of characters in the Greek Iliad, the Old English Beowulf, and the Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge. They found something astounding: the character interactions in these enduring myths mathematically matched the network topology of real human societies.

If we apply this network theory to the Mahabharata—which boasts thousands of named characters—we see a classic “scale-free network” with “small-world” properties.

• In a poorly written fantasy story, the social network of characters is mathematically artificial. Everyone knows everyone, or the connections are random.
• In the Mahabharata, characters cluster around highly connected “hubs” (Krishna, Bhishma, Yudhishtira), just as humans cluster around leaders in real life. 

Because the mathematical structure of the Mahabharata’s social network mirrors actual human society, our brains process it effortlessly. It feels “real” because its mathematical geometry is real.

Fractal Narrative and Emotional Arcs

Researchers at the University of Vermont used data mining to analyze 1,700 books, finding that almost all stories follow just six basic mathematical trajectories of emotional valence. The Mahabharata and Ramayana are unique because they are fractal.

A fractal is a mathematical shape that exhibits self-similarity at every scale. If you look at the macro-arc of the Mahabharata, it is a tragedy of a family tearing itself apart (a “fall-rise-fall” arc). But nested within it are hundreds of micro-stories, the story of Nala and Damayanti, the story of Savitri—which follow their own perfect emotional arcs. This fractal nesting gives the brain a constant dopaminergic reward loop, sustaining attention over the weeks it traditionally took to recite these epics.

The Universal Blueprint of Immortality

Are the Indian epics entirely unique? Not from a neuroscientific perspective. They share a universal cognitive blueprint with other immortal texts.

The Greek Iliad and Odyssey: Like the Mahabharata, the Iliad is a story of a great war catalyzed by a crisis of ego and honor. Both heavily feature the intervention of divine beings in human affairs, triggering our brain’s “Theory of Mind” (our ability to attribute mental states to others, including invisible gods).

The Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh: The oldest written epic deals with the terror of mortality and the search for eternal life.

The Malian Epic of Sunjata: A West African epic detailing the exile and triumphant return of a prince, structurally echoing the Ramayana.

Why did these specific stories survive? Anthropologist Pascal Boyer proposed the theory of Minimally Counterintuitive (MCI) concepts. Human memory is a sieve. If a story is entirely mundane (a man goes to the market and buys some tomato, onion and potato), it is forgotten. If a story is too bizarre (a square and a circle that sings in the color blue), the brain rejects it as noise.

The sweet spot for human memory is an incredibly relatable, realistic social scenario combined with just one or two rule-breaking, supernatural elements.

• Gilgamesh: A relatable grieving friend + a man who survived a global flood.
• The Odyssey: A man who just wants to go home + a one-eyed giant.
• The Ramayana: A prince trying to save his wife + a monkey who can fly and carry mountains (and other godly things).

This MCI formula is the exact algorithmic recipe for maximum neurological retention.

From Story to Messiah

Finally, we must address the most profound transformation of these texts. How does a story transition from a campfire tale to a socio-political force that can crown kings, build temples, and dictate modern elections? How do figures like Rama or Krishna transition from epic heroes to infallible, politically significant Messiahs?

This is where individual neuroscience scales up into the mathematics of the “Hive Mind”—a concept studied in evolutionary sociology as Cultural Group Selection. For a vast civilization to act as a unified “hive,” it requires a “Schelling point” (a concept from Game Theory). A Schelling point is a solution that people will tend to choose by default in the absence of communication, because it feels natural or special. In the Indian subcontinent, as kingdoms rose and fell, the population needed an anchor, an ultimate Schelling point to define their identity. Over centuries, through the process of memetic evolution, the figure of Rama evolved. He was no longer just a king in a story; the story was weaponized (in a sociological sense) to represent the ultimate ideal of governance (Ram Rajya).

Biologically, humans possess a Hyperactive Agency Detection Device (HADD). Evolution wired us to attribute agency and intention to our environment (e.g., assuming a rustling bush is a predator, not the wind). This cognitive bias makes the human brain highly susceptible to elevating powerful narrative figures into literal, omnipresent gods.

When a society faces political instability, foreign invasions, or rapid change, the collective anxiety of the “hive” spikes. The brain seeks cognitive safety. The epic hero, now elevated to a Messiah, provides an infallible, uncorruptible focal point. Believing in the Messiah becomes a “costly signal” of group loyalty. By identifying with the epic, millions of individuals synchronize their moral compasses, allowing political leaders who align themselves with the epic to mobilize entire civilizations.

Appendix: 

Dunbar’s Number: Dunbar, 1992

Flight Simulator: Shown by cognitive scientist Keith Oatley and psychologist Raymond Mar in Mar & Oatley, 2008.

Neural Coupling: Neuroscientist Uri Hasson has pioneered the concept of “neural coupling.”

Synchronization of brain area: Stephens, Silbert, & Hasson, 2010.

Highly relatable character helps release oxytocin: Zak, 2015

Network of myths resembles human society: Mac Carron & Kenna, 2012

Fractal nature of epics: Reagan et al., 2016

Minimally counterintuitive concepts: Boyer, 2001

Cultural Group Selection: Boyd & Richerson, 1985

Memetic evolution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene 

Natural foundations of religion: Barrett, 2000