- 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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathos The ancient greeks were right about lot of things, that's for sure. Also, this was something I heard on NPR recently, putting this phenomenon in layman terms. "If we stated how many children in Africa died of starvation or disease today, what would be your reaction? Would you really care? What if we filmed a documentary or film, following only one child and his attempts to survive, which ultimately fail? Wouldn't that get you to cry?" the human brain is so imperfect in the most beautiful way.. We're not and will never be truly logical or analytical. EDIT: for instance, the human brain thinks logarithmically while a true AI might not.
That emotional response is why the Kony 2012 campaign worked so well, as the director was taking advantage of our willingness to hear sad stories of Kony's horror
I've taught 8th graders for ten years now. Mathematics too. Typically not the most engaged audience, paired with a relatively story-challenged subject matter. Storytelling is my daily lifeline when listener attention spans shorten or wander to the great beyond. Nice to see an article backing, empirically, success through storytelling. Thanks.
Does this mean some stories are "better" than others, objectively? Can you measure a story's value by how much of the brain it affects, or by the amount of empathy listeners feel toward its characters? I'm wondering this because there are many storylines that are proven to "work" -- think hero's journey, the classic fantasy trope in everything from the Odyssey to the Lion King -- and some types of story are much more likely to draw emotion than others (and therefore be more memorable and impressionable). EDIT: for instance, have some of the greatest storytellers of all time found the "right" way to our brains in the same way that the processed food giants began to about thirty years ago? I think it's very cool that storytelling can be "solved."
That seems an "extreme" thought. I am "extremely" in agreement with your query. I'm "extremely" wondering also what other phrases are now so "extremely" bland and used to extremes as to now go unnoticed by listeners. I also think it would be extremely useful for one to have a list of bland words that will deflect off the prefrontal cortexes of listeners.
This made me wonder about an NPR story on memory, and research into how people mistakenly remember events that happened to other people, as their own memories, and if there is a connection to that phenomena. I tried to make a quick search for it, but came up empty.
That completely reminds me that I heard the exact same story on NPR too and then made a quick search for it and came up empty. Or, did I? I know that I listened to a story or two on NPR about some "sequester" thing too. In all seriousness, great stories anchor great ideas and movements all of the time. Mention civil rights to so many people and the stories of MLK's "I have a dream" and Rosa Parks's will most likely come to the forefront of their memories.