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This is Your Brain on Stories

6/7/2016

6 Comments

 
Picture
We’ve heard a lot lately about the power of stories, and about how the content of a good story stays with listeners more than any other type of information (e.g. facts, statistics, or even analogies). Now scientists are beginning to understand why.

 
According to a recent New York Times article, scientists recently mapped the experience of listening to podcasts, (specifically NPR’s “The Moth Radio Hour”) using a scanner to track brain activity. They laid out a detailed map of the brain as it absorbed and responded to each story: “Widely dispersed sensory, emotional and memory networks were humming, across both hemispheres of the brain; no story was ‘contained’ in any one part of the brain, as some textbooks have suggested.”

The researchers broke the stories into units of meaning—e.g. social elements, locations and emotions—and found that these concepts fell into 12 categories that tended to cause activation in the same parts of people’s brains at the same points throughout the stories. They then retested that model by seeing how it predicted M.R.I. activity while the volunteers listened to another Moth story. The “kaleidoscope of activation” explains why any of us can get so utterly entranced by a good tale that time flies as we listen to it—yet we remember it long after.


We want to hear: Have you ever felt completely engrossed when listening to a good story? Do you use stories in your business life, and do you have a favorite you’d like to share? To join the conversation, click "comments" on our Community of Practice Forum.
 
If you would like to read more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our book: Be Quiet, Be Heard: The Paradox of Persuasion

6 Comments
Buzz Stapczynski
6/7/2016 09:46:29 am

From what I have read the master story teller was Abraham Lincoln. Whether it was a homespun tail or biblical story, he was famous for using stories to disarm, persuade or illustrate his points.

Reply
susan
6/7/2016 09:58:40 am

So true, Buzz. Lincoln was a master story teller. Perhaps this is partly the cause of his persona living through time. Stories are what we remember when we forget all else.

Reply
Paul Schlobohm
6/8/2016 10:49:46 am

Sometimes a colleague will ask me a question (How did the meeting go?) for which he was anticipating a relatively short response (Great! or Boring!) and without realizing it I'll find myself going on and on ... telling a story instead of making a statement....because the nuances of the answer are important to me. Then he'll say I did it again and we'll have a good chuckle.

Reply
susan
6/8/2016 12:52:25 pm

Thanks for this Paul. Often a story gets greater nuance in fewer words. We have noticed that without a story people need more words to keep trying to explain an abstract idea that would have been captured more eloquently in a story.

Reply
Thomas
6/14/2016 11:02:18 am

I tell stories to staff all the time. They usually roll their eyes when I do. But I like the way a story diffuses an intense situation and makes employees use their own ideas to find the solution or path to a solution. Also like Jesus taught in parables some people got it and others didn't. This lets me sift through employees to find who is worth investing in based off of their response to a story. Do they say, "Ok, nice story, but what are you going to do about...?" or do the say, "I see, maybe I can go and do..."

Reply
susan
6/14/2016 06:19:08 pm

No doubt that stories are powerful, Thomas. Harder to be sure that the intent of our story has the impact we want on the person who hears it!

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  • Courses
    • All Courses
    • BreakThrough Conflict
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    • Live Virtual
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    • Testimonials on Virtual Learning
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    • About the Glasers
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  • Contact