The Storytelling Animal
insert youtube embed here.
This is a video for anyone that wants to know why storytelling is so effective and will be sprinkled with incredible effective tips to improve your own storytelling. It will serve as a really good reminder as to why you should continue to strive to implement story into more and more parts of your life, including things like job interviews, blog posts, youtube videos, dating, networking, playing with your kids, the list is endless.
Below are very succinct exerts from the book 'The Storytelling Animal' by Jonathan Gottschall. This author did a fantastic job of collecting examples of how important story is to humans, or as he puts it.. Story is for humans and water is for fish. Although the book is written to be easily digestible and enjoyed by everyone, the taste of the book is especially good for anyone who enjoys evolutionary psychology. Basically how evolution shapes our brains, and how stories played a critical part in that.
Storytelling, whether through reading, watching, or listening, is like casting a spell on humans. You are easily entrapped when it begins and barely recognized that you are now under it’s spell.
Daydreaming is a form of storytelling that we tell ourselves. Everything from rehearsing a conversation to reimagining how an interaction could have gone.
Most of the excitement from things like sports and nature documentaries come from the narrative being built around the activity.
Evolution is known to be very utilitarian. If there were once two early tribes of humans who were equal in every way, except one told stories during periods of rest, and the other just rested or hunted more, which of the two tribes survived till today? Perhaps story is an evolutionary powerful asset.
Children are natural born storytellers and can perform it without instruction. Interestingly, all there stories are about some kind of trouble. Further, boys trouble’s focus around aggressive behavior and girls trouble’s focus around domestic behavior.
Stories without trouble are incredibly uninteresting. Even stories of pure wish fulfillment are boring.
The more trouble a story has, the more interesting it is to the audience.
Storytelling is like a life simulator without the consequences. Although we can’t recall every story we’ve heard, our brains are documenting them through implicit memory.
Stories are so visceral for humans that we react to them as if they were really happening. Think horror, comedy or tragedy.
Dreams are seemingly random, but the strongly ingrained storytelling mechanics of the brain create method out of madness.
Most dreams are actually full of trouble. Good dreams are quite rare, but we tend to forgot that they are full of trouble.
Our brain stem evolved to not act on the actions we take in our dreams. It is possible that evolution preferred paralysis over turning off our storytelling mind.
If you find these tidbits interesting, I encourage you to watch the video, or even better, read the book. It is chock-full of examples, evidence, references and the like. If you have specific questions about the above, you can ask in the comments and I’ll try to answer.
Oh, and this is only half the book. I will post the other half some other time.
Happy storytelling!