The Brain Science Of Story Telling Lisa Cron Summary
The Brain Science of Storytelling
The New Oxford American Dictionary defines ‘Story’ as “an account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment.” Lisa Cron offers a more robust definition which reflects more on what should be at the heart of a compelling story : “A story is how ‘what happens’ (plot) affects ‘someone’ (protagonist) who is trying to achieve what turns out to be a difficult ‘goal’ (story question), and ‘how he or she changes’ (story arc) as a result” (11). As stories can be transmitted orally, visually, or via print media, and received by listeners/viewers/readers respectively, we will for convenience, refer to a ‘story’ as one being told by a ‘storyteller’ to his/her ‘listeners’. As part of human evolution, our brains are ‘hardwired’ for storytelling. This essay will support this claim by examining research findings of …show more content…
Neuroscience and the writings of Lisa Cron relating to three key benefits of a compelling story : empathy, learning by mental simulation of the communicated experiences of others, and deriving ‘meaning’ from a story.
When we listen to a captivating story, our emotional investment in the story manifests as brain signals which in turn trigger our body’s reaction to the story. Uri Hasson states that “A story is the only way to activate the brain so that listeners turn the story into their own idea and experience” and “Storytelling is the only way to plant ideas into other peoples’ minds” (qtd. in Friel). Listening to a good story fires up our ‘insular cortex’ – the part of our brain which enables us to understand what characters in the story are going through, their emotions and situations. This empathy with characters in the story is what makes us truly ‘human’ and helps us develop inter-relational awareness and bonding with others
in a complex world. Paul Zac observes how two neurochemicals cortisol and oxytocin affect our bodies when we react to an emotional story (qtd. in Rodriguez 2). Cortisol is a stress-inducing hormone produced in our bodies when the exciting and stressful parts of the story elicit anxiety and conflict in us, while oxytocin is a ‘bonding’ neuropeptide released in our bodies when we care and ‘root’ for a story character. When both cortisol and oxytocin combine, thereby fusing ‘anxiety’ and ‘care’ in us, we experience a psychological ‘phenomenon’ called ‘narrative transportation’ (Smith 4) : we are ‘transported’ to the ‘world of the story’ to the extent that we may even exhibit physical symptoms similar to those being felt by the story character/s themselves. In his 2017 Nobel Lecture, the Japanese-born British writer Kazuo Ishiguro says, “There are large, glamorous industries around stories ; the book industry, the movie industry, the television industry, the theatre industry. But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another : This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?” (31). Indeed, well told-stories are about the connectedness between people, and the affinity between storyteller, listener, and story character/s. Cron divulges that “Emotions determine the meaning of everything – if we’re not feeling, we’re not conscious” and “all story is emotion based – if we’re not feeling, we’re not reading” (44). The human brain is hardwired such that we respond to compelling stories emotionally and want to ‘get into the skin’ of the story character/s we empathise with. Stories allow us to learn by letting us simulate situations which we ourselves have not experienced directly. Steven Pinker states,“Fictional narratives supply us with a mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday and the outcomes of strategies we could deploy in them” (qtd. in Cron 9). This quote brings to mind scenes of our prehistoric caveman ancestors communicating cautionary tales, verbally or in sign language or through cave paintings, to family members and friends to warn them of the dangers of the hunt and to show how they emerge victorious in getting their prey. Young or inexperienced hunters receiving these hunting stories learn of the dangers and tactics of the hunt by mentally simulating the actions and hunting experiences communicated by veteran hunter-storytellers. What is even more interesting is that the storyteller is able to transfer his/her experiences directly to his/her listener’s brain by a process called ‘neural coupling’ (Widrich 4). This process is bi-directional and synchronised in the sense that the mental stimulation of the communicated story does not only occur in the listener’s brain but also in the storyteller’s. In a TED talk, Jonathan Gottschall explains that experiments with ‘functional Magnetic Resource Imaging’(fMRI) show that the listener’s brain mirrors that of the storyteller but the brain activity of the listener is that of an active participant and not merely a passive observer of the story events (12:26). In any riveting story where a protagonist strives to achieve his/her difficult ‘goal’ and faces up to his/her inner struggle, Cron says that this situation allows us to “sit back and vicariously experience someone else suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, the better to learn how to dodge those darts should they ever be aimed at us” (168). Our hardwired brains then take over to interpret and decipher what motivates the protagonist, what makes him/her tick, and to anticipate not only what the protagonist would do but what we ourselves would do if we were in the protagonist’s shoes. This hardwiring of our brains is what makes us crave a good story in order to satisfy our curiosity to find out more (such as by turning pages), to gain insight and learn valuable life lessons from the story. The hardwiring influence of story can thus be seen as an evolutionary tool for human survival in that such ‘wiring’ allows us not only to learn how to solve problems and survive through examples of how story characters succeed or fail in the face of their difficulties, but also how to thrive and prosper by understanding our intricate world better through story situations. In the search for motivation and meaning in a story, the hardwired brain looks for a logical cause-and-effect story trajectory, meaningful cues and patterns throughout the course of the story and a satisfying conclusion. According to Cron, “From birth, our brain’s primary goal is to make causal connections – if this, then that, therefore this” and so “a (good) story follows a cause-and-effect trajectory from start to finish” (144). A coherent and logical narrative structure is one where each story “scene is triggered by the one that preceded it” (Cron 165). In following a story, our brain craves a logical sequence and innately asks of significant story scenes questions such as “what happens next?”, “so what?” and “to what end?” in our relentless bid to understand the reason and relevance of each scene and to discern the direction and thrust of the story. V.S. Ramachandran states that “Humans excel at visual imagery. Our brains evolved this ability to create an internal mental picture or model of the world in which we can rehearse forthcoming actions, […]” (qtd. in Cron 105). What this means is that the “specific” always trumps the “generic” in effective storytelling because we humans are wired to “think in specific images” instead of in “conceptual, abstract, or general” terms (Cron 103). Thus in order not to sideline the story listener into constantly second-guessing what the story is really saying, Cron advises storytellers that “sensory details”, “metaphors”, and the forces “underlying the protagonist’s actions” must be relevant to the storyline and made “specific, tangible and visceral” instead of being “vague, abstract, or generic” (Cron 122-123). Harrison Monarth states, “neurological research tells us that a happy ending to a story triggers the limbic system, our brain’s reward center, to release dopamine which makes us feel more hopeful and optimistic” (Harvard Business Review). Inspiring stories which bring new meaning and value to our lives often leave us with a sense of closure, hope, and enthusiasm. Such warm feelings are due to the mentioned dopamine, a ‘happiness’ chemical released by the brain when we experience uplifting moments of delight and relief from stress such as laughter and pleasure. When listening to a story, our brains are thus hardwired to search for relevant patterns and nuances and we then use our powers of visualization, analysis and imagination to draw logical and meaningful conclusions from our decoding of the story data.
Brain Science has shown us that well-told stories cause our brain to fire and release neurochemicals which induce empathy, immersion into the story world and the pleasure and satisfaction of learning from and finding useful meaning in a good tale. Stories thus also function as a useful learning tool for survival in human evolution by passing on adaptive and social survival skills. In explaining how humans process the constant stream of information filtering through our minds and relate the data to our store of “accumulated wisdom”, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio states that storytelling is the solution “to the problem of how to make all this wisdom understandable, transmissible, persuasive, enforceable – in a word, of how to make it stick […]” because “storytelling is something brains do, naturally and implicitly…(It) should be no surprise that it pervades the entire fabric of human societies and cultures” (qtd. in Cron 8). Echoing this, the screenwriting guru Robert McKee quotes, “Story is about eternal, universal forms…” (quotefancy site). Indeed, these quotes testify to the practice of storytelling across all human cultures since the birth of Humankind, because our brains are story processors and we are “hardwired” to think and make sense of our world in terms of story.
(1,595 words)
Works Cited
Cron, Lisa. Wired For Story. 1st ed., Ten Speed Press, 2012.
Damasio, Antonio R. Self Comes To Mind : Constructing The Conscious Brain. Pantheon, 2010.
Friel, Fran. "Fiction And The Happy Brain - Amazing Stories". Amazing Stories, 2013, http://amazingstoriesmag.com/2013/01/fiction-and-the-happy-brain/. Accessed 25 Apr 2018.
Gottschall, Jonathan. "Jonathan Gottschall: Storytelling Animal [Tedx Talk]". Youtube, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7pkS6e178A. Accessed 25 Apr 2018.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. My Twentieth Century Evening And Other Small Breakthroughs : The Nobel Lecture. 1st ed., Faber & Faber Ltd, 2017.
"Mckee Robert Quote: “Story Is About Eternal, Universal Forms, Not Formulas.”". Quotefancy.Com, 2018, https://quotefancy.com/quote/1583565/Robert-McKee-Story-is-about-eternal-universal-forms-not-formulas. Accessed 25 Apr 2018.
Monarth, Harrison. "The Irresistible Power Of Storytelling As A Strategic Business Tool". Harvard Business Review, 2014, https://hbr.org/2014/03/the-irresistible-power-of-storytelling-as-a-strategic-business-tool. Accessed 25 Apr 2018.
Ramachandran, V. S. The Tell-Tale Brain. W. W. Norton, 2011.
Rodriguez, Giovanni. "Forbes Welcome". Forbes.Com, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/giovannirodriguez/2017/07/21/this-is-your-brain-on-storytelling-the-chemistry-of-modern-communication/. Accessed 25 Apr 2018.
Smith, Adam, Jeremy. "The Science Of The Story". Berkeley News, 2016, http://news.berkeley.edu/berkeley_blog/the-science-of-the-story/. Accessed 25 Apr 2018.
Stevenson, Angus, and Christine A Lindberg. New Oxford American Dictionary. 3rd ed., Oxford University Press, 2010.
Widrich, Leo. "The Science Of Storytelling : What Listening To A Story Does To Our Brains". Social, 2016, https://blog.bufferapp.com/science-of-storytelling-why-telling-a-story-is-the-most-powerful-way-to-activate-our-brains. Accessed 25 Apr 2018.
The New Oxford American Dictionary defines ‘Story’ as “an account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment.” Lisa Cron offers a more robust definition which reflects more on what should be at the heart of a compelling story : “A story is how ‘what happens’ (plot) affects ‘someone’ (protagonist) who is trying to achieve what turns out to be a difficult ‘goal’ (story question), and ‘how he or she changes’ (story arc) as a result” (11). As stories can be transmitted orally, visually, or via print media, and received by listeners/viewers/readers respectively, we will for convenience, refer to a ‘story’ as one being told by a ‘storyteller’ to his/her ‘listeners’. As part of human evolution, our brains are ‘hardwired’ for storytelling. This essay will support this claim by examining research findings of …show more content…
Neuroscience and the writings of Lisa Cron relating to three key benefits of a compelling story : empathy, learning by mental simulation of the communicated experiences of others, and deriving ‘meaning’ from a story.
When we listen to a captivating story, our emotional investment in the story manifests as brain signals which in turn trigger our body’s reaction to the story. Uri Hasson states that “A story is the only way to activate the brain so that listeners turn the story into their own idea and experience” and “Storytelling is the only way to plant ideas into other peoples’ minds” (qtd. in Friel). Listening to a good story fires up our ‘insular cortex’ – the part of our brain which enables us to understand what characters in the story are going through, their emotions and situations. This empathy with characters in the story is what makes us truly ‘human’ and helps us develop inter-relational awareness and bonding with others
in a complex world. Paul Zac observes how two neurochemicals cortisol and oxytocin affect our bodies when we react to an emotional story (qtd. in Rodriguez 2). Cortisol is a stress-inducing hormone produced in our bodies when the exciting and stressful parts of the story elicit anxiety and conflict in us, while oxytocin is a ‘bonding’ neuropeptide released in our bodies when we care and ‘root’ for a story character. When both cortisol and oxytocin combine, thereby fusing ‘anxiety’ and ‘care’ in us, we experience a psychological ‘phenomenon’ called ‘narrative transportation’ (Smith 4) : we are ‘transported’ to the ‘world of the story’ to the extent that we may even exhibit physical symptoms similar to those being felt by the story character/s themselves. In his 2017 Nobel Lecture, the Japanese-born British writer Kazuo Ishiguro says, “There are large, glamorous industries around stories ; the book industry, the movie industry, the television industry, the theatre industry. But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another : This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?” (31). Indeed, well told-stories are about the connectedness between people, and the affinity between storyteller, listener, and story character/s. Cron divulges that “Emotions determine the meaning of everything – if we’re not feeling, we’re not conscious” and “all story is emotion based – if we’re not feeling, we’re not reading” (44). The human brain is hardwired such that we respond to compelling stories emotionally and want to ‘get into the skin’ of the story character/s we empathise with. Stories allow us to learn by letting us simulate situations which we ourselves have not experienced directly. Steven Pinker states,“Fictional narratives supply us with a mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday and the outcomes of strategies we could deploy in them” (qtd. in Cron 9). This quote brings to mind scenes of our prehistoric caveman ancestors communicating cautionary tales, verbally or in sign language or through cave paintings, to family members and friends to warn them of the dangers of the hunt and to show how they emerge victorious in getting their prey. Young or inexperienced hunters receiving these hunting stories learn of the dangers and tactics of the hunt by mentally simulating the actions and hunting experiences communicated by veteran hunter-storytellers. What is even more interesting is that the storyteller is able to transfer his/her experiences directly to his/her listener’s brain by a process called ‘neural coupling’ (Widrich 4). This process is bi-directional and synchronised in the sense that the mental stimulation of the communicated story does not only occur in the listener’s brain but also in the storyteller’s. In a TED talk, Jonathan Gottschall explains that experiments with ‘functional Magnetic Resource Imaging’(fMRI) show that the listener’s brain mirrors that of the storyteller but the brain activity of the listener is that of an active participant and not merely a passive observer of the story events (12:26). In any riveting story where a protagonist strives to achieve his/her difficult ‘goal’ and faces up to his/her inner struggle, Cron says that this situation allows us to “sit back and vicariously experience someone else suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, the better to learn how to dodge those darts should they ever be aimed at us” (168). Our hardwired brains then take over to interpret and decipher what motivates the protagonist, what makes him/her tick, and to anticipate not only what the protagonist would do but what we ourselves would do if we were in the protagonist’s shoes. This hardwiring of our brains is what makes us crave a good story in order to satisfy our curiosity to find out more (such as by turning pages), to gain insight and learn valuable life lessons from the story. The hardwiring influence of story can thus be seen as an evolutionary tool for human survival in that such ‘wiring’ allows us not only to learn how to solve problems and survive through examples of how story characters succeed or fail in the face of their difficulties, but also how to thrive and prosper by understanding our intricate world better through story situations. In the search for motivation and meaning in a story, the hardwired brain looks for a logical cause-and-effect story trajectory, meaningful cues and patterns throughout the course of the story and a satisfying conclusion. According to Cron, “From birth, our brain’s primary goal is to make causal connections – if this, then that, therefore this” and so “a (good) story follows a cause-and-effect trajectory from start to finish” (144). A coherent and logical narrative structure is one where each story “scene is triggered by the one that preceded it” (Cron 165). In following a story, our brain craves a logical sequence and innately asks of significant story scenes questions such as “what happens next?”, “so what?” and “to what end?” in our relentless bid to understand the reason and relevance of each scene and to discern the direction and thrust of the story. V.S. Ramachandran states that “Humans excel at visual imagery. Our brains evolved this ability to create an internal mental picture or model of the world in which we can rehearse forthcoming actions, […]” (qtd. in Cron 105). What this means is that the “specific” always trumps the “generic” in effective storytelling because we humans are wired to “think in specific images” instead of in “conceptual, abstract, or general” terms (Cron 103). Thus in order not to sideline the story listener into constantly second-guessing what the story is really saying, Cron advises storytellers that “sensory details”, “metaphors”, and the forces “underlying the protagonist’s actions” must be relevant to the storyline and made “specific, tangible and visceral” instead of being “vague, abstract, or generic” (Cron 122-123). Harrison Monarth states, “neurological research tells us that a happy ending to a story triggers the limbic system, our brain’s reward center, to release dopamine which makes us feel more hopeful and optimistic” (Harvard Business Review). Inspiring stories which bring new meaning and value to our lives often leave us with a sense of closure, hope, and enthusiasm. Such warm feelings are due to the mentioned dopamine, a ‘happiness’ chemical released by the brain when we experience uplifting moments of delight and relief from stress such as laughter and pleasure. When listening to a story, our brains are thus hardwired to search for relevant patterns and nuances and we then use our powers of visualization, analysis and imagination to draw logical and meaningful conclusions from our decoding of the story data.
Brain Science has shown us that well-told stories cause our brain to fire and release neurochemicals which induce empathy, immersion into the story world and the pleasure and satisfaction of learning from and finding useful meaning in a good tale. Stories thus also function as a useful learning tool for survival in human evolution by passing on adaptive and social survival skills. In explaining how humans process the constant stream of information filtering through our minds and relate the data to our store of “accumulated wisdom”, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio states that storytelling is the solution “to the problem of how to make all this wisdom understandable, transmissible, persuasive, enforceable – in a word, of how to make it stick […]” because “storytelling is something brains do, naturally and implicitly…(It) should be no surprise that it pervades the entire fabric of human societies and cultures” (qtd. in Cron 8). Echoing this, the screenwriting guru Robert McKee quotes, “Story is about eternal, universal forms…” (quotefancy site). Indeed, these quotes testify to the practice of storytelling across all human cultures since the birth of Humankind, because our brains are story processors and we are “hardwired” to think and make sense of our world in terms of story.
(1,595 words)
Works Cited
Cron, Lisa. Wired For Story. 1st ed., Ten Speed Press, 2012.
Damasio, Antonio R. Self Comes To Mind : Constructing The Conscious Brain. Pantheon, 2010.
Friel, Fran. "Fiction And The Happy Brain - Amazing Stories". Amazing Stories, 2013, http://amazingstoriesmag.com/2013/01/fiction-and-the-happy-brain/. Accessed 25 Apr 2018.
Gottschall, Jonathan. "Jonathan Gottschall: Storytelling Animal [Tedx Talk]". Youtube, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7pkS6e178A. Accessed 25 Apr 2018.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. My Twentieth Century Evening And Other Small Breakthroughs : The Nobel Lecture. 1st ed., Faber & Faber Ltd, 2017.
"Mckee Robert Quote: “Story Is About Eternal, Universal Forms, Not Formulas.”". Quotefancy.Com, 2018, https://quotefancy.com/quote/1583565/Robert-McKee-Story-is-about-eternal-universal-forms-not-formulas. Accessed 25 Apr 2018.
Monarth, Harrison. "The Irresistible Power Of Storytelling As A Strategic Business Tool". Harvard Business Review, 2014, https://hbr.org/2014/03/the-irresistible-power-of-storytelling-as-a-strategic-business-tool. Accessed 25 Apr 2018.
Ramachandran, V. S. The Tell-Tale Brain. W. W. Norton, 2011.
Rodriguez, Giovanni. "Forbes Welcome". Forbes.Com, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/giovannirodriguez/2017/07/21/this-is-your-brain-on-storytelling-the-chemistry-of-modern-communication/. Accessed 25 Apr 2018.
Smith, Adam, Jeremy. "The Science Of The Story". Berkeley News, 2016, http://news.berkeley.edu/berkeley_blog/the-science-of-the-story/. Accessed 25 Apr 2018.
Stevenson, Angus, and Christine A Lindberg. New Oxford American Dictionary. 3rd ed., Oxford University Press, 2010.
Widrich, Leo. "The Science Of Storytelling : What Listening To A Story Does To Our Brains". Social, 2016, https://blog.bufferapp.com/science-of-storytelling-why-telling-a-story-is-the-most-powerful-way-to-activate-our-brains. Accessed 25 Apr 2018.