“Story is not neutral,” Tara Bohn says. “Every narrative carries a biological and emotional consequence, whether we acknowledge it or not.”
In an industry built on scale, speed, and saturation, the statement sounds almost countercultural by reframing storytelling as something far more intimate. But for Bohn, it is not provocation. It is an observation. Stories, she argues, do not simply pass through audiences. They rewire attention, emotion, and memory in ways that accumulate quietly over time.
Bohn’s authority on the subject rests not on theory alone, but on lived professional experience shaped by an uncommon career spanning behavioural science and global entertainment, including published academic research and roles at institutions such as Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Amazon, MGM Studios, and her recent leadership of a joint venture between Sony Pictures and The Guardian. Bohn has overseen more than sixteen seasons of commissioned television across the United States, the United Kingdom, and international markets.
“I think of storytelling as a form of ethical contact,” she explains. “You’re entering someone’s nervous system, not just their imagination.”
Bohn’s claim is supported by evidence that the brain often fails to distinguish between real-world and simulated experience. It processes screen stimuli as if they were lived reality. This is why she resists framing film and television as content. “It’s a somatic experience,” she says. That distinction, she suggests, has become urgent.
Attention, Saturation, And The Cost Of Meaning Making
Bohn believes that social media and the rise of short-form content have fundamentally altered the conditions for enjoying long-form storytelling, leading to a decline in the ability and motivation to engage with complexity. “The transformation in how audiences experience film and television is a structural consequence of the digital environment,” she notes, “which is just the initiating force in a larger dilemma.”
When streaming and digital became the default, they reshaped not just viewing habits, but the incentives governing how stories are made. In a culture organised around competition for attention, stories are increasingly designed to quickly and superficially activate the nervous system. They provoke response, capture attention, and move on.
“The way we focus our attention fundamentally builds our emotional and mental architecture. When immediacy is prioritised over coherence, storytelling shifts from integration to stimulation. We may feel engaged, but the nervous system is repeatedly triggered without being given anything deeper to metabolise, and sustained activation without integration results in exhaustion.”
Industry research now reflects this strain, with audiences reporting diminishing satisfaction despite unprecedented choice. But she cautions against reading these signals purely as market data. “These aren’t just metrics,” she says. “They’re symptoms.” Treating attention as endlessly renewable, she argues, misunderstands how the nervous system actually works, and why depth, not volume, is what ultimately sustains meaning.
Multiple industry and cognitive studies also suggest that increased choice correlates with longer browsing times, shorter engagement, and lower reported satisfaction. To Bohn, these findings mirror what the nervous system is already signalling. Overload disguised as abundance.
A Different Point Of Entry
Early in her career, Bohn taught people recovering from traumatic brain injuries to map their experiences using narrative frameworks. The exercise was not metaphorical. It was functional. “When someone’s identity has been disrupted,” she has explained, “story often becomes a way to rebuild coherence.”
Bohn feels that we see the same mechanism at work at scale in film and television. Those same stories can shape feelings across millions of people at once, but that does not make them any less personal.
When Bohn eventually left a PhD track to enter film and television, her north star was unified by the conviction that human experience, whether lived or simulated, is the most enduring source of meaning and connection to ourselves and to each other. She later completed another graduate program in Screenwriting, emphasising how that experience felt crucial to my career pivot. Informing her of her sensitivity to the process and making her more attuned to creative needs.
Her executive and producing career has included globally distributed series such as Reacher, A Very Royal Scandal, Nine Perfect Strangers, Carnival Row, The Wilds, and The Outlaws, projects that collectively generated billions of viewing minutes and received major industry recognition, including BAFTA, Emmy, and Academy Award nominations.
“I’ve never separated science and art,” Bohn says. “One explains what the body is doing. The other lets us feel it.”
She did, however, feel pressured to hide her graduate background from non-creative types when entering the entertainment industry over a decade ago. “Human beings like clean categories,” she says. “They like to know where things and people belong. It is an evolutionary instinct as much as it is a business model.”
But as culture shifts and industries demand interdisciplinary fluency, what once inhibited her now appears essential.
Taste As Cultural And Emotional Intelligence
In an era where algorithms surface content based on habitual data and lowest-common-denominator patterns, Bohn believes the concept of taste must be reclaimed.
Taste, in her view, is often misunderstood. It is not instinct alone, nor is it mere preference. It is pattern recognition shaped by empathy, psychology, culture, and lived experience.
“What we call taste,” she says, “is often an intuitive understanding of how an audience wants to feel, or what they want to experience, before they know how to name it.”
That understanding cannot be manufactured quickly. It is refined through exposure to contradiction, struggle, and reflection over time. For Bohn, depth is creativity’s most powerful defense. Without it, creative decisions flatten. Stories may function, but they rarely resonate.
For Bohn, the growing conversation around neuroscience and storytelling is frequently misread. She does not see the crossover as reducing story to data or turning feeling into formula. Instead, she believes the most powerful artists have always worked this way, whether or not they described it in scientific terms.
“I think our greatest artists are scientists in their own right,” she says. “They’re testing hypotheses about feeling, attention, and meaning through intuition while pushing technical boundaries.”
That intuition, she argues, is not abstract. It is embodied intelligence, a sensitivity shaped by lived experience and emotional awareness. The best storytellers understand how emotion moves through the body, when to apply pressure, when to hold back, and how long a moment needs to breathe before it lands.
AI And The Ethics Of Attention
For Bohn, artificial intelligence intensifies an attention problem that already exists in digital culture and increasingly spills into contemporary storytelling. Tools that amplify volume and output without discernment risk accelerate the very conditions that exhaust audiences and flatten meaning.
She argues that traditional creators and artists work from a desire to earn emotion rather than engineer it. Their sense of impact comes not from manipulation, but from resonance. “That’s exactly why authorship and intention matter,” Bohn stresses, particularly as artificial intelligence reshapes the attention economy.
“Story is an exchange built on empathy,” she says. “If you’re entering someone’s nervous system, you’re responsible for what you normalise and what you challenge.” Without that empathic responsibility, Bohn suggests, any exchange risks slipping from connection into exploitation.
Why Stillness Still Matters
Bohn’s thinking leads her to the defence of movie theatres not as nostalgia, but as a design constraint. A dark room, a fixed screen, and the social contract not to scroll enforce immersive attention that contemporary media rarely allows. Perhaps, as she suggests, we are not just watching a screen. We are participating in a collective ritual.
That ritual is under pressure. Cinema admissions across the UK totalled 123.5 million in 2025, a 2% decrease on 2024 and nearly 30% lower than pre-COVID levels in 2019, according to figures released this week as part of the BFI’s annual statistical report. Across Europe, admissions fell 8.8% in 2024, according to the European Audiovisual Observatory.
Yet Bohn argues that the theatre’s value lies precisely in what cannot be optimised. “That stillness matters,” she says. “It’s a cognitive luxury that trains us to stay with complexity instead of fleeing it.” In an attention economy defined by interruption and acceleration, cinema remains one of the few spaces designed to support sustained focus and emotional integration.
While traditional cinema faces clear challenges, analysts forecast that the global television and video market will approach 1 trillion dollars in annual revenue by 2030. For Bohn, this contrast only sharpens the point. The defining competition is not for volume, but for resonance.
The future of storytelling, she suggests, belongs to those who prioritise making contact over content. “We’ve been conditioned for excess,” she says, “but what lasts, what’s remembered is precision. One deeply authentic emotional beat is more powerful than spectacle.”
The cultural reception of Hamnet reflects that distinction. A work whose emotion overwhelms precisely because it is restrained, held, and allowed to unfold, drawing audiences into a shared intensity that lingers long after the experience ends.
Bohn suggests that even the narrative of Hamnet becomes a meditation on shared ritual, transforming grief into art and revealing the quiet power of being witnessed. It reminds us that feeling deepens in communion, and that art offers not escape, but companionship.
