Throw in a few characters, to relate to, and strong emotions as well - this post came to mind reading the news on the BBC about the Hawaii earthquake - magnitude six point 'whatever' - what grabbed my attention was the stories that people on the ground had taken the time to send in, conveying what it was like to be in that story, meaning of the facts. News adapts to become a two-way medium, not the old one-way broadcast, evoking empathy above what bleeds leads. Where were you when...

Pinker isn't the first one to consider this - Quine (1953, Two Dogmas of Empiricism) said "The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most causal matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges."