The Science of Storytelling: Why Telling a Story is the Most Powerful Way to Activate Our Brains
Leo Widrich
A good story can make or break a presentation, article, or
conversation. But why is that? When Buffer co-founder Leo Widrich started to market his product
through stories instead of benefits and bullet points, sign-ups went through
the roof. Here he shares the science of why storytelling is so uniquely
powerful.
In 1748, the British politician and aristocrat John Montagu, the
4th Earl of Sandwich, spent a lot of his free time playing cards. He greatly
enjoyed eating a snack while 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 two 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. Recently a good friend
of mine gave me an introduction to the power of storytelling, and I wanted to
learn more.
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. But why do we feel so
much more engaged when we hear a narrative about events?
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, things change dramatically. 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."
Comments
Post a Comment