> it's that, if there's no story, we often cannot understand what is being said.
There's an interesting corollary here to the mundane art of stakeholder management:
One of the first things you learn in this art form is that, if you don't provide a story, people make up their own. Ten people can look at the same stew of random events and come up with 10-20 different stories about what's happening and why.
I'd say it's not just that stories are interesting; it's that we manufacture stories as a way of parsing and compressing the world into something understandable.
It is very difficult for humans to remember just a set of facts and reason over them. So stories are how we spread the facts out thin and link them. This is also the technique which athlete memorizers use to remember the order of deck of cards. Story telling or associative memory or stream of consciousness is how we remember stuff.
Yes, very important point as well! If there's no story around the facts, we can either ignore the facts, or build a story to fit them in. Stories are where we store facts.
There's an interesting corollary here to the mundane art of stakeholder management:
One of the first things you learn in this art form is that, if you don't provide a story, people make up their own. Ten people can look at the same stew of random events and come up with 10-20 different stories about what's happening and why.
I'd say it's not just that stories are interesting; it's that we manufacture stories as a way of parsing and compressing the world into something understandable.