These are notes on story taken from my business books which I recently trashed.
Stories
- predate our culture
- are a trillion dollar USD industry
- help develop kid’s mental abilities
- give insight. Insights change the brain
- are like slowing down the bullets in the matrix
- as metaphor make the unknown known, always have a blind spot though
- for high stakes conversations (not to explain how to do something – i.e. don’t complicate things)
- there are stories we tell about ourselves: little engine that could, damsel in distress
- if we stop telling them, it weakens the neural networks
- teach more than just the point they make
We all make up our world – bits which don’t fit we make a story so that they do – it was the best way of making sense of the world before Aristotle and his friends invented logic
Cognitive neuro-scientist Michael Gazzaniga – visits a patient in NY hospital, her spatial location part of brain gone – all brain function is normal. Lying in bed, reading NY times. He asks her where she is. She says at home in Maine. He asks about the elevators. She replies “do you know how much they cost?”
Dysnarrativia is the inability to tell stories, lose sense of self and others, no empathy
Show people a weeping woman, at first they tell the story that she’s sad, when we change the story (she’s just been married), the emotional interpretation changes
Master plots:
- Poor boy makes good
- Bad man just desserts
- Good man tragic flaw
- Boy means girl, gets or doesn’t get
Psych experiments – tell participants a story of a clergyman donating a kidney – more likely to cooperate than if you tell a story of a clergyman who committed murder.
From age 4 mirror neurons help us to empathise and to predict behaviour
“narrative medicine” – large part of diagnosis is patient’s story. Dan Pink in Whole new Mind, tells the story of Rita Charon – Columbia University Med School – got PHD in English, doctors working with her used to interrupt 2 seconds into 90 seconds, now 23 seconds, and outcomes improved.
Podcasts on story
This No Stupid Questions episode Why are stories stickier than statistics. With this notable quote
The plural of anecdote is not data
