

Why Telling a Story is the Most Powerful Way to Activate Our Brains - sethbannon
http://lifehacker.com/5965703/the-science-of-storytelling-why-telling-a-story-is-the-most-powerful-way-to-activate-our-brains

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patrickmay
"We are not Homo sapiens, Wise Man. We are the third chimpanzee. What
distinguishes us from the ordinary chimpanzee Pan troglodytes and the bonobo
chimpanzee Pan paniscus, is something far more subtle than our enormous brain,
three times as large as theirs in proportion to body weight. It is what that
brain makes possible. And the most significant contribution that our large
brain made to our approach to the universe was to endow us with the power of
story. We are Pan narrans, the storytelling ape."

\-- Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, Science of Discworld II

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rfnslyr
And here I was thinking that all my bullshitting _wasn 't_ paying off!

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grellas
In law, we are taught, "make it fresh and vivid." Stories do that when they
are well told. People relate. It makes an abstraction real to them by bringing
their experience into play. It gives them a hook by which to remember an
important point. This does _not_ mean, "tell a story every time you want to
make a point" because straining for effect while trying to persuade, even in
trying to weave stories into your narrative, is self-defeating. The point is
not to show how how clever or artful you are, it is to make your points in
ways that will stick. To do that, you need above all to be sincere and
credible. You need to use the power of logic where it applies. You need to
bring in emotive elements when apt and when they fit naturally into your
narrative. You need to use imagery that is original, not borrowed, drawing
from your experience if possible and then from the use of a vigorous
imagination. And you need to do all this with forceful use of language, with
active style that moves quickly without pausing to try to impress.

When you do all that, and do it well, you will find your audience at each
level _relating_ to you and to what you are saying. Stories can add powerfully
to that relational effect. Like a fellow out in nature watching birds from
afar and suddenly seeing them up close and vividly through magnification, your
hearer or reader will find himself drawn close to what might otherwise be a
distant narrative through stories that enliven the very things he is eager to
see. Your audience _wants_ to relate. Help them along with this with stories
where apt. If knowing the science behind this helps, apply that as well. But,
at least as far as effective communication goes, don't forget the broader
context. We get bored and glaze over all too easily. Make it fresh and vivid.
Make it original. Make it memorable. Then you will have spoken or written
well. And your audience will value what you give them.

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jliechti1
_Our brain learns to ignore certain overused words and phrases that used to
make stories awesome. Scientists, in the midst of researching the topic of
storytelling have also discovered, that certain words and phrases have lost
all storytelling power._

This is interesting. It's not just words, but events as well. It seems our
minds are quite adept at finding things that are unordinary. If you asked
someone living in a city environment "How many people did you see walking
today?", no one would be able to answer. However, if you asked "How many
people did you see riding unicycles today?", you would likely get a pretty
definite response.

I've spent a good amount of time learning memory techniques to retain
information that is largely abstract/arbitrary (learning Japanese/Chinese
characters for example). The key to these techniques is to take something
abstract and figure out how it encode it in concrete images/stories (a mental
"bookkeeping" system like Roman Rooms is helpful as well). However, _the
strength of the encoding relies on how memorable your images are_. In essence,
you are creating a mapping between the brain's ability to work with images and
abstract knowledge. Generally, the more crazy, ridiculous or absurd these
image/stories are, the more memorable they will be, and thus the easier it
will be to remember whatever you are trying to remember.

A task that normally seems extremely difficult (say, memorizing the Periodic
Table, or the order of a deck of cards, or even just remembering people's
names!), becomes almost trivial if you map the knowledge into something the
brain is easier to understand.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
_" If you asked someone living in a city environment "How many people did you
see walking today?", no one would be able to answer. However, if you asked
"How many people did you see riding unicycles today?", you would likely get a
pretty definite response."_

Isn't that because the answer to one question is "some big number" and the
answer to the other question is "none"?

~~~
jliechti1
Perhaps the point I was going for may be better illustrated if you compare
single observations:

What can you remember about the person standing in front of you in the ATM
line this morning?

What can you remember about the unicyclist you saw this morning?

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Here_it_Comes
In the building where I live I have a neighbour that I thought he was 60 (or
less) years old because it was very vitalized, moved very well.. and one day I
happened to talk to him, he told me he is 74 years old, he obtained two
university degrees when he was young, he had been a teacher, he also was a
calligraphy national award and finalist of a novelist award..

I asked him what's his secret to being so active and vitalize at his age.. he
told me "it's all in the mind" he then proceeds to tell me that he reads and
_writes_ every day (he is writing a piece of a novel everyday) I then ask him
what is a better exercise to keep the mind active, reading or writing? his
answer, "absolutely the writing, writing is the backing of the imagination"..
and then I see this article on hacker news and start connecting dots..

~~~
hackinthebochs
On that same note I've often wondered how useful it would be if our IDEs
actually recorded our keystrokes as we developed code. The problem with
commits is that we only see the end result. There is usually a process of
evolution of code, and through this evolution we can fully understand the end
result. So much information about a codebase is lost because we only see the
end result.

Git and Mercurial are steps in the right direction here. You see groups of
changes as one unit, and the philosophy of these systems is one of frequent
commits. But what if we went even further and could see code evolve as its
being typed?

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mattyw
I find being told a story is a great way of learning a new code base. Often
the architecture only makes sense given some historical context, and being
told the story of this helps me understand why certain bits are where.

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mrcactu5
<rant>i find blogging very hard. the exercise of creating a narrative --
putting it together for other people --

when I write a blog, I always get a sinking feeling that nobody is reading -
and it's probably true. however, the more I talk to people the more I get hurt
for not having these thoughts written down everywhere.

there once was a time when it was hard to tell a story. publishers offered a
platform for people to distribute their own content. the limitations of their
resources led to competition for people submit their material to them. this is
how we get Harper-Collins.

these days with the Cloud, Heroku, Amazon AWS, and so on, we can publish
whatever rag we want and the WHOLE WORLD has access to it. for the first time
in history information has become cheap.

with this unprecedented amount of information available -- every CD I have
every purchased is on youtube. Or else it's on Spotify.

with instagram and wordpress everyone has a chance to tell their story. we are
able to find common ground in exactly the way we want. most of the time we
just play Candy Crush Saga.

my lingering doubt... with all this crap available, should I add to the mix? I
thought the answer was no, but it seems to be yes. </rant>

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trustfundbaby
Weirdly enough (and this is completely pulled out of my posterior) I think
this ties into why things like snapchat, facebook photos, and instagram took
off as wildly as they did ... people love images. They seem to process them
faster, and remember them longer.

By telling a story, you force the user to visualize your narrative, and this
in turn makes it easier for people to remember what you tell them.

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sillysaurus2
Interesting premise. I've noticed most people use conversation (which is
storytelling) as a substitute for writing essays. The main benefit in writing
your thoughts is the ideas you generate by doing so. This happens in
conversation too, but more randomly and usually less effectively.

 _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._

Actually, I think in images. The only dialogue in my head is my own voice.
Whether I'm doing mathematics or programming, it's images combined with me
speaking internally about it (trying to reason my way through it). Perhaps
that's a "story", but it'd be a boring one. Maybe there's a more precise term?

When you're reasoning through a problem, what does it look and sound like to
you, mentally? Does anyone else think in pictures?

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dhaneshnm
I think in images and then try to verbalize it when I need to express
it.Mostly when I am doing coding or math,the solution most of the time strikes
me as an image then I go about implementing it. I think most of us think more
in images than words.

~~~
sillysaurus2
_I think most of us think more in images than words._

I thought so too, but interestingly the imagery is completely different for
different people. Einstein often spoke of "thinking with music," and Ramanujan
claimed to think of solutions by picturing a goddess delivering them to him as
drops of blood.

Here's a concrete example of the difference: When I see "13/12", I think of a
pie shape with a small sliver filled in, like if you filled in the area
between the hands of a clock pointing at 12 and 1. That's the "one-twelfth"
part, so the whole thought becomes "one plus [that image]". People seem to
think of fractions differently; sometimes purely as an abstraction rather than
visualizing what the numbers mean.

Someone should write a webapp to poll the community / explore the different
ways people think about various tasks. I bet $5 that Bret Victor's mental
imagery is more powerful than ours. Naturally, we'd want to change our
thinking to match his process, if we had the option to. The only reason we
can't is because we don't know what his mind looks like when he's problem
solving. Making a webapp that enables us, as a community, to explore these
differences is perhaps a step in that direction.

~~~
dhaneshnm
I doubt most people know they have particular thinking pattern and when they
think in images v/s words or in any other form. A web poll would be nice
though.

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cm-t
So that might explain in a way why it is working:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging)

[https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=rubber+duck](https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=rubber+duck)

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jonsen
And why the most effective lectures are those where the lecturer weaves a
coherent and supportive story around what has to be learned.

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GBKS
Funny, I was thinking a lot about this recently for an iPhone app I've been
working on. It's essentially a simple photo collage & caption creator (Capcam
-
[http://www.germanysbestkeptsecret.com/capcam](http://www.germanysbestkeptsecret.com/capcam)),
but what I realized when using it was that it was a great way to compress and
communicate a whole experience. It might sound trivial, but rephrasing things
that way (stories over features) resonates a lot more with people.

Here's another very lively quote about this idea of telling stories:
[http://chri.sto.ph/tell-a-story](http://chri.sto.ph/tell-a-story)

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jason_wang
_" 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."_

My guess is pg and YC partners treat marketing-speak similarly.

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snoonan
This is very strongly backed in language learning. I love this concise example
in action:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K11o19YNvk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K11o19YNvk)

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svovaf
Great post! So story tellers are the smartest people ever? :)

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jonsen
I don't know. But I've certainly met many smart people who are great story
tellers.

