by
Leo Widrich
In 1748,
the British politician and aristocrat John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich
used a lot of his free time for playing cards. One of the problems he had was
that he greatly enjoyed eating a snack, whilst still keeping one hand free for
the cards.
So he came
up with the idea to eat beef between slices of toast, which would allow him to
finally eat and play cards at the same time. Eating his newly invented
“sandwich”, the name for 2 slices of bread with meat in between, became one of
the most popular meal inventions in the western world.
What’s
interesting about this, is that you are very likely to never forget the story
of who invented the sandwich ever again. Or at least, much less likely to do
so, if it would have been presented to us in bullet points or other purely
information based form.
For over
27,000 years, since the first cave paintings were discovered, telling stories
has been one of our most fundamental communication methods. Since recently a
good friend of mine, gave me an introduction to the power of storytelling, I
wanted to learn more.
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| Bewoonde grotten in de Dordogne. Foto @ Michiel van Kempen |
Here is the
science around storytelling and how we can use it to make better decisions
every day:
Our brain
on stories: How our brains become more active when we tell stories
We all
enjoy a good story, whether it’s a novel, a movie or simply something one of
our friends is explaining to us that they’ve experienced. But why do we feel so
much more engaged when we hear a narrative about events?
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| Een Aladdin-vertelster |
It’s in
fact quite simple. If we listen to a powerpoint presentation with boring bullet
points, a certain part in the brain gets activated. Scientists call this
Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area. Overall, it hits our language processing
parts in the brain, where we decode words into meaning. And that’s it, nothing
else happens.
When we are
being told a story though, things change dramatically found researchers in
Spain. Not only are the language processing parts in our brain activated, but
any other area in our brain, that we would use when experiencing the events of
the story are too.
If someone
tells us about how delicious certain foods were, our sensory cortex lights up,
if it’s about motion, our motor cortex gets active:
“Metaphors
like “The singer had a velvet voice” and “He had leathery hands” roused the
sensory cortex. […] Then, the brains of participants were scanned as they read
sentences like “John grasped the object” and “Pablo kicked the ball.” The scans
revealed activity in the motor cortex, which coordinates the body’s movements.”
A story can
put your whole brain to work. And yet, it gets better:
When we
tell stories to others that have really helped us shape our thinking and way of
life, we can have the same effect on them too. The brains of the person telling
a story and listening to it, can synchronize, says Uri Hasson from Princeton:
“When the
woman spoke English, the volunteers understood her story, and their brains
synchronized. When she had activity in
her insula, an emotional brain region, the listeners did too. When her frontal cortex lit up, so did
theirs. By simply telling a story, the woman could plant ideas, thoughts and
emotions into the listeners’ brains.”
Anything
you’ve experienced, you can get others to experience the same. Or at least, get
their brain areas that you’ve activated that way, active too:
Evolution
has wired our brains for storytelling – how to make use of it
Now all
this is interesting. We know that we can activate our brains better if we
listen to stories. The still unanswered question is: Why is that? Why does the
format of a story, where events unfold one after the other have such a profound
impact on our learning?
The simple
answer is this: We are wired that way. A story, if broken down into the
simplest form is a connection of cause and effect. And that is exactly how we
think.
We think in
narratives all day long, no matter if it is about buying groceries, whether we
think about work or our spouse at home. We make up (short) stories in our heads
for every action and conversation. In fact, Jeremy Hsu found:
“Personal
stories and gossip make up 65% of our conversations.”
Now,
whenever we hear a story, we want to relate it to one of our existing
experiences. That’s why metaphors work so well with us. Whilst we are busy
searching for a similar experience in our brains, we activate a part called
insula, which helps us relate to that same experience of pain, joy, disgust or
else.
The
following graphic probably describes it best:
In a great
experiment, John Bargh at Yale found the following:
“Volunteers
would meet one of the experimenters, believing that they would be starting the
experiment shortly. In reality, the experiment began when the experimenter,
seemingly struggling with an armful of folders, asks the volunteer to briefly
hold their coffee. As the key experimental manipulation, the coffee was either
hot or iced. Subjects then read a description of some individual, and those who
had held the warmer cup tended to rate the individual as having a warmer
personality, with no change in ratings of other attributes.”
We link up
metaphors and literal happenings automatically. Everything in our brain is
looking for the cause and effect relationship of something we’ve previously
experienced.
Let’s dig
into some hands on tips to make use of it:
3 Awesome
ways to use storytelling in every day life
Make others
come up with your idea: Exchange telling suggestions for telling stories:
Do you know
the feeling, when a good friend tells you a story and then two weeks later, you
mention the same story to him, as if it was your idea? This is totally normal
and at the same time, one of the most powerful ways to get people on board with
your ideas and thoughts. According to Uri Hasson from Princeton, a story is the
only way to activate parts in the brain so that a listener turns the story into
their own idea and experience.
The next
time you struggle with getting people on board with your projects and ideas,
simply tell them a story, where the outcome is that doing what you had in mind,
is the best thing to do. According to Princeton researcher Hasson, storytelling
is the only way to plant ideas into other people’s minds.
Write more
persuasively – bring in stories from yourself or an expert:
This is
something that took me a long time to understand. If you start out writing,
it’s only natural to think “I don’t have a lot of experience with this, how can
I make my post believable if I use personal stories?”. The best way to get
around this is by simply exchanging stories to those of experts. When this blog
used to be a social media blog, I would ask for quotes from the top folks in
the industry or simply find great passages they had written online. It’s a
great way to add credibility and at the same time, tell a story.
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| Vertelster Olga Orman |
The simple
story is more successful than the complicated one:
When we
think of stories, it is often easy to convince ourselves that they have to be
complex and detailed to be interesting. The truth is however, that the simpler
a story, the more likely it will stick. Using simple language as well as a low
complexity is the best way to activate the brain regions that make us truly
relate to the situation and happenings in the story. This is a similar reason
to why multitasking is so hard for us. Try for example to reduce the number
adjectives or complicated nouns in a presentation or article and exchange them
with more simple, yet heartfelt language.
Quick last
fact: Our brain learns to ignore certain overused words and phrases that used
to make stories awesome
Oh and one
last thing. Scientists, in the midst of researching the topic of storytelling
have also discovered, that certain words and phrases have lost all storytelling
power:
“Some
scientists have contended that figures of speech like “a rough day” are so
familiar that they are treated simply as words and no more.”
This means,
that the frontal cortex – the area of your brain responsible to experience
emotions, can’t be activated with these phrases. It’s something that might be
worth remembering when crafting your next story.
Storytelling
is one of the most powerful techniques we have as humans to communicate and
motivate. What are your best tips for telling stories? Have you had similar
experiences with telling stories? I’d love your thoughts on this topic in the
comments.
[from
Buffer, November 29th, 2012]
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