The Neuroscience of Storytelling

How It Works and Why Your Business Needs To Harness It

Ever wonder why you can remember that juicy gossip from last week better than you can remember the statistic you learned in a presentation last week? Yeah, there’s a reason for that. There are many reasons actually! Read on to learn why the human brain loves stories so much and how you can use this to your advantage in your business.

THE BACKSTORY

Since humans could communicate, we’ve been telling stories. The ability to share stories ensured that we could share resources, advice, tools, and knowledge. It allowed us to pool our resources to better our changes of survival. It also gave us something else that helped us survive connection. Being able to build relationships with each other in communities, in tribes, contributed to our survival efforts exponentially. We relied on each other and learned from each other.

There are many traits that have faded off as humans have evolved over the centuries but the need for storytelling has held on. We tell stories in 65% of our everyday conversations from talking about our day to gossiping about the neighbor to sharing a wild fact we heard on a documentary.

While we’ve continued to tell stories in our daily lives, it’s relatively new to the business world. The business world has historically relied on jargon and “business speak” to communicate (think “synergy”) but they’re finding that it’s no longer resonating. Our world moves so fast that we graze right past the overdone “business speak” and get back to what is holding our attention.

The marketing world started paying attention to this first and incorporated storytelling into campaigns, finding a lot of success. The rest of the business world is taking note and companies are finding that developing their brand story and using stories to connect with their clients and employees is really working.

The data show us why it’s working. Our brains are hardwired for narrative. Over the decades, the effects of storytelling on the brain have been studied at the world’s top universities and research institutions. The results of those studies show up in several fascinating ways.

NEURAL COUPLING

Neural coupling is the phenomenon that hearing the story of an experience draws up our own memories of similar experiences to that story. For example, hearing a story of someone walking a dog makes us think of our dog, and walking our dog, and a movie we saw where a dog was walked, and another story we heard about lots of dogs being walked. Tying stories into our presentations allows our audience to vividly imagine them through the lens of their own experiences.

DOPAMINE

When we experience something that elicits an emotion within us, dopamine is released. That sense of empathy we feel with a dopamine release solidifies our connection to that current story and actually makes us more likely to act. A study at Stanford University shows us this when participants saw a video of a father and son dealing with the emotional roller coaster of childhood cancer, they were more likely to donate to childhood related causes than those that saw a neutral video of a father and son taking a walk. Storytelling has a deep and far reaching effect on our thoughts and behaviors.

CORTEX RESPONSES

It creates a physical response as well. When we hear stories, the sensory and motor cortexes of our brain are activated as if we were actually experiencing the story. For example, if we have a super powerful description of food in a story, our mouths will start to water as if the food was in front of us. Knowing this can help us tap into stories in a totally new way.

MIRRORING

The concept of mirroring is one that is so great for us as presenters. All these amazing ways that our audience’s brains are affected by stories? Turns out the storyteller’s brain is affected in the same ways. This makes presentations with stories in them easier for us to recall when presenting and allow us to tap into our passion while presenting that much more authentically.

SO NOW WHAT?

So now that we know all this, what do we do? Incorporate stories into your speaking. Make sure they’re targeted at experiences your audience is most likely to relate with. This will help them connect to you and your message in a way that inspires them to take real action.

The moral of the story is, storytelling works. It really, really works. Knowing how it works can help you customize your stories to tap into the minds and hearts of your audience in the deepest, most inspiring ways.

Ready to give it a try? Tag @eandmcreative on Instagram with your storytelling wins!