Why Telling a Story is the Most Powerful Way to Activate Our Brains
lifehacker.com
lifehacker.com
-- Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, Science of Discworld II
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.
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.
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.
Isn't that because the answer to one question is "some big number" and the answer to the other question is "none"?
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 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..
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?
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>
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 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 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.
Here's another very lively quote about this idea of telling stories: http://chri.sto.ph/tell-a-story
My guess is pg and YC partners treat marketing-speak similarly.