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Why Telling a Story is the Most Powerful Way to Activate Our Brains (lifehacker.com)
94 points by sethbannon on Nov 6, 2013 | hide | past | favorite | 26 comments



"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


And here I was thinking that all my bullshitting wasn't paying off!


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.


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.


"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"?


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?


I expect that's not all of it, but it's obviously a huge part. If there were no people walking, I bet they would have noticed that, though that's also unusual...


Completely agree. I was amazed how quickly I could learn to memorize the order of half a deck of cards by turning each card into a concrete visual. http://www.memrise.com/course/44056/the-10k-memory-competiti...



One of the most influential books I've ever read was Foer's 'Moonwalking with Einstein' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_with_Einstein

Memory development is one of the best investments into yourself. A bunch of other things people strive for (foreign language learning, being great public speaking) is corollary of having a good memory.


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..


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?


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.


<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>


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.


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


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?


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.


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.


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.



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), 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


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


"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.


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


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




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