Living in a hyperkinetic world bombarded by innumerable pieces of data/stimuli per second can make it easy to forget that there was once a more simple way to communicate information. Before the computer, before the television, before the radio, or even the printing press, there were cave paintings. There were campfire folk tales. There were stories.
As axiomatic a notion as "storytelling" might be too most, there's nevertheless an all to pervasive sensibility for the citizenry of the (post)modern world to take such a simplistic means of communicating for granted.
Leo Widrich of Lifehacker has taken it upon himself to study up on the not-so-simple history and science of the (perhaps) ephemeral art of storytelling.
Widrich's analytic dissertation presents the idea that only one specific part of a human's brain is engaged while listening to a "powerpoint presentation with boring bullet points." This part of the brain, according to Widrich, is the Broca's and Wernicke's area: The area of the brain dealing with language processing (how we find meaning in words).
"And that's it," says Widrich. "Nothing else happens."
Taking off where a story in the New York Times last March left off, Widrich explains that "things change dramatically" in one's brain after hearing a story (as opposed to staid powerpoint presentation, for example).
"Not only are the language processing parts in our brain activated, but any other area in our brain that we would use when experiencing the events of the story are too."
According to the Times' article upon which Widrich draws the first part of his facts, when descriptive words detailing smells and taste, etc., are used to describe something - allowing the listener to "experience" the information being transferred as opposed to merely "hearing" about it - said listener's brain is engaged in other places aside from just its language-processing hubs.
"The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated," the article says.
More brain activity means better understanding, of course.
Also, in hearing a story of one experience - that triggers a sensation of selfsame experience in one's own life - the listener's insula is activated. The insula being the part of the brain that, according to Widrich, "helps us relate to that same experience of pain, joy, or disgust."
This is why metaphors are an integral element of most stories, as they convey a sense of thoughtful description that makes the listener connect in a more significant way ("Her hands were leathery" is far more descriptive than "Her hands were dry"). By connecting the description more easily to an experience, the process of communication becomes for more efficacious.
All of this comes to mean that rather than telling someone something, if a speaker truly wants to impart real, understandable information to his listener, it's best he tell a story. Or, as Widrich quoted Princeton's Uri Hasson: "By simply telling a story, the [speaker can] plant ideas, thoughts and emotions into the listeners' brains."
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