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Storytelling: Your Skeleton Key to the Brain

7 April 2010 3 Comments

If you watched the Hope For Haiti Now telecast in January, you couldn’t help but notice all the stories being told about Haitian victims of the earthquake. Chances are you also couldn’t help but notice the tear running down your cheek or your hand reaching for the telephone. That’s because storytelling is the most powerful way of making an impression — and being remembered.

Storytelling is a key political technique.  American presidential candidates, for example, tell voters who they are in stories. (“Born in a log cabin,” and the “skinny kid with the funny name” are but variations on ever-popular rags-to-riches tales like Joseph, Aladdin, Cinderella, Dickens’ David Copperfield, and everything written by Horatio Alger.)  According to Barack Obama’s chief speechwriter, Jon Favreau, narrative is at the core of the president’s every speech: “Tell a story. That’s the most important part of every speech, more than any given line. Does it tell a story from beginning to end?”

It’s an important technique in marketing products as well.  All those commercials where a product helps boy get girl, for example, are merely modern retellings of ancient romance stories.  Today men no longer have to slay dragons for the beautiful maiden, they just have to buy her the right beer.

Aesop, as depicted in a 15th century German history book, in clothing of that era. Image credit: Wikipedia

Moral lessons were passed from generation to generation in stories like Aesops Fables, depicted here in a 15th century German history book. Image credit: Wikipedia

People Think in Stories

The human brain is hard-wired for stories. We know our ancestors told each other stories 32,000 years ago by the cave paintings they used to illustrate them. Long before humans developed writing they passed down their history, culture, and traditions orally through stories that eventually got written down as the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Torah, and other canonical works. Tales such as Aesops Fables and Grimm’s Fairy Tales were passed orally from illiterate generation to illiterate generation to teach moral lessons.

Today, our human love of stories is expressed in every part of our lives. Personal stories and gossip make up 65% of our conversations.  My research has found that a big reason people like reality television is its traditional story structure: Unlike ongoing traditional TV series, reality shows have an established beginning, middle, and end — and not just any ending, but a just resolution.

Stories Are Persuasive

Because our brains are built for stories, they absorb stories more readily than other kinds of information.  Recent psychological studies suggest that people are more open to ideas when they’re listening to stories than when they’re listening to factual information. Advertisements in story form evoke more positive reactions than those that directly present a product’s features. Even flavors sell better when their names suggest a story — “Georgia peach,” for example, instead of “Peach.”

Stories Are Memorable

Stories enable us to transcend our brains’ usual memory limitations, serving, in the words of Mike Speiser, as “one of mankind’s most efficient compression algorithms.”  Thus, he explains, memory champions are able to quickly remember the order of a deck of cards by inventing a story about them as they view them.

Bottom line: No matter what your field, if you want your message to be persuasive and remembered, deliver it in the way people were made to receive it: in story form.

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