Post-its for your Brain or Why Coffee is better than Strategy
If you make your first dating experiences at the age of 16 and would like to have found your partner for life at the age of 35 at the latest, you will get to know better or worse suitable partners during this period. The strategy is to reject all potential candidates in the first third of the dating period in order to get an overview of the situation. After that you should decide which one is better than all the previous ones. If you follow this strategy, the chance of finding the best possible partner is 37 percent - with any other choice, the chance is just five percent." - Bettina Monn
»Most people can identify books that have made great impressions on them and, subjectively, changed the way they think. Some can even point to a book that has changed their life. Stephen King, for example, said that Lord of the Flies changed his life, ›because it is both a story with a message and because it is a great tale of adventure.‹ Joyce Carol Oates pointed to Alice in Wonderland as ›the book that most influenced her imaginative life.‹ It seems plausible that if something as simple as a book can leave the impression that one's life has been changed, then perhaps it is powerful enough to cause changes in brain function and structure.« – Gregory S. Berns
Bettina Monn, multimedia producer, wanted to know (in her bachelor thesis at the University of Applied Sciences Graubünden/CH) how people fall in love efficiently - and how people remember facts best. Monn created two animated films for her work. In the first film, entitled "Liebe nach Plan" (“Love according to plan”), she presents the most important facts about falling in love as an objective explanatory video. In the second film she tells the same facts packed into a story that begins with the words "I met my first great love at 17. It was clear to me that we were made for each other and that nothing in the world could separate us. But then my partner suddenly wanted to try something new - without me. My heart leapt into a thousand pieces..."
Both films explain how to find the perfect partner among 7.5 billion people worldwide. And Monn wants to know which of the two versions of the film has the better learning effect on the audience.
The result is not surprising and yet astonishing: storytelling has a positive influence on learning success. The viewers of the film version with story have a 15.6 percent higher learning success and can remember facts much better than the comparison group that receives the factual explanatory video. Even though Monn´s sample is small, this bachelor's thesis can be seen as current evidence of the effect of storytelling.
Tip: Both movies - with and without storytelling - as well as a summary can be found on Bettina Monn's website / "Liebe nach Plan".
A well told story, on the other hand, not only activates the left hemisphere of the brain, but many more areas - such as the motor cortex, which controls complex movement sequences, or the somatosensory cortex, which supports the interpretation and feeling of haptic perceptions such as movements on the skin. Stories also activate the prefrontal cortex at the front of our brain. This part is connected to the limbic system that controls our emotions.
In stories we not only feel what is said, we also compare what we hear with what we experience. The Spanish neuroscientist Julio Gonzalez even proved this comparison of experiences with individual words. With the help of an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) he observed the brain of patients during the information acquisition and processing of certain words. It was clearly visible that concrete terms such as "coffee" or "perfume" activated a large number of brain areas, including olfactory sensor areas, for example. In the case of abstract or neutral terms like "concept" or "strategy", however, most of these areas remained dark.
This also explains why it is easier to listen to a story, just as it is easier to tell a story – in comparison to listen and talk about abstract topics. Abstract terms require more focus, concentration and energy from the speaker, because only the Broca-Wernicke area can be used to process and output these terms. On the other hand, those who tell stories can rely on the help of many other regions of the brain.
Speakers of a complex, abstract text therefore usually have to rely on a speech manuscript for their presentation. In contrast, a story is much easier to recite freely. Often only a few keywords are enough to support the speaker's thoughts and he or she can fill in the gaps to the whole story without a manuscript.
Cognitive psychologists refer in this context to the different methods of how knowledge is stored in the brain: We memorize factual knowledge differently than episodic knowledge and accordingly have a factual memory and an episodic memory.
Specialist knowledge with which we do not associate our own experiences (such as the question about the capital of a country, unless you have a personal connection to the place), or abstract knowledge (such as the question about the definition of the term "truth") require a completely different effort of our brain.
No wonder, then, that listeners to a presentation find it more difficult to register and memorize abstract knowledge. Not to mention the speakers themselves. A simple experiment by marketing professor Jennifer Aaker at the Stanford Graduate School of Business confirms this. Aaker asked her students to give a one-minute presentation - a "pitch”. Only one in ten of her students used storytelling techniques in this pitch. All others presented using conventional methods, with facts, data and statistics. Aaker then asked everyone to write down what they had memorized from their fellow students' pitches. Of the numerous statistics, only five percent of the audience were able to reproduce them, while 63 percent remembered the stories.
But is this learning effect through stories also permanent? This is exactly what neuroscientists from the Faculty of Economics at Emory University Atlanta wanted to find out:
Both films explain how to find the perfect partner among 7.5 billion people worldwide. And Monn wants to know which of the two versions of the film has the better learning effect on the audience.
The result is not surprising and yet astonishing: storytelling has a positive influence on learning success. The viewers of the film version with story have a 15.6 percent higher learning success and can remember facts much better than the comparison group that receives the factual explanatory video. Even though Monn´s sample is small, this bachelor's thesis can be seen as current evidence of the effect of storytelling.
Tip: Both movies - with and without storytelling - as well as a summary can be found on Bettina Monn's website / "Liebe nach Plan".
Activating left and right
Storytelling is more attention-grabbing and memorable than rational information. The reason for this is the way our brain processes stories. Neuroscans prove that the processing of rational information in our brain is limited to two areas: the Broca area, the area of our brain responsible for speech production, and the Wernicke area, the area responsible for speech comprehension. Both areas can be seen in the scan on the left side of the human brain.A well told story, on the other hand, not only activates the left hemisphere of the brain, but many more areas - such as the motor cortex, which controls complex movement sequences, or the somatosensory cortex, which supports the interpretation and feeling of haptic perceptions such as movements on the skin. Stories also activate the prefrontal cortex at the front of our brain. This part is connected to the limbic system that controls our emotions.
In stories we not only feel what is said, we also compare what we hear with what we experience. The Spanish neuroscientist Julio Gonzalez even proved this comparison of experiences with individual words. With the help of an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) he observed the brain of patients during the information acquisition and processing of certain words. It was clearly visible that concrete terms such as "coffee" or "perfume" activated a large number of brain areas, including olfactory sensor areas, for example. In the case of abstract or neutral terms like "concept" or "strategy", however, most of these areas remained dark.
This also explains why it is easier to listen to a story, just as it is easier to tell a story – in comparison to listen and talk about abstract topics. Abstract terms require more focus, concentration and energy from the speaker, because only the Broca-Wernicke area can be used to process and output these terms. On the other hand, those who tell stories can rely on the help of many other regions of the brain.
Speakers of a complex, abstract text therefore usually have to rely on a speech manuscript for their presentation. In contrast, a story is much easier to recite freely. Often only a few keywords are enough to support the speaker's thoughts and he or she can fill in the gaps to the whole story without a manuscript.
Cognitive psychologists refer in this context to the different methods of how knowledge is stored in the brain: We memorize factual knowledge differently than episodic knowledge and accordingly have a factual memory and an episodic memory.
Knowledge stored differently
Knowledge that we draw from memories and experience (episodic knowledge) is much better anchored and easier to access than pure factual knowledge: When we remember the "Mona Lisa", we recall an image in our mind's eye. When we remember a line of a song, we go through the melody in our mind to match the text, and when we ask about our parents' house, we recall a whole host of memories that help us to return to the physical place in our thoughts.Specialist knowledge with which we do not associate our own experiences (such as the question about the capital of a country, unless you have a personal connection to the place), or abstract knowledge (such as the question about the definition of the term "truth") require a completely different effort of our brain.
No wonder, then, that listeners to a presentation find it more difficult to register and memorize abstract knowledge. Not to mention the speakers themselves. A simple experiment by marketing professor Jennifer Aaker at the Stanford Graduate School of Business confirms this. Aaker asked her students to give a one-minute presentation - a "pitch”. Only one in ten of her students used storytelling techniques in this pitch. All others presented using conventional methods, with facts, data and statistics. Aaker then asked everyone to write down what they had memorized from their fellow students' pitches. Of the numerous statistics, only five percent of the audience were able to reproduce them, while 63 percent remembered the stories.
But is this learning effect through stories also permanent? This is exactly what neuroscientists from the Faculty of Economics at Emory University Atlanta wanted to find out:
»Most people can identify books that have made great impressions on them and, subjectively, changed the way they think. Some can even point to a book that has changed their life. Stephen King, for example, said that Lord of the Flies changed his life, ›because it is both a story with a message and because it is a great tale of adventure.‹ Joyce Carol Oates pointed to Alice in Wonderland as ›the book that most influenced her imaginative life.‹ It seems plausible that if something as simple as a book can leave the impression that one's life has been changed, then perhaps it is powerful enough to cause changes in brain function and structure.« – Gregory S. Berns
Gregory Berns and his team investigated the influence that stories have on the brain in the long term by asking their study participants to read a story regularly the night before they go to sleep. And indeed, their assumption was confirmed. MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) was indeed used to detect changes in various brain regions that were not visible in the non-reading comparison group. But this long-lasting learning effect is also related to how we deal with information packaged in stories. Because we take factual knowledge very superficially. We merely "register" this information. We experience and learn information that is conveyed in stories. We immerse ourselves in stories, are right in the middle of them and are fully involved.
Whatever brain area we use to record and perceive stories, the fact is that they attach themselves to our memory like post-its - and this is the effect that everyone as a speaker wants: to leave a lasting impression.
Whatever brain area we use to record and perceive stories, the fact is that they attach themselves to our memory like post-its - and this is the effect that everyone as a speaker wants: to leave a lasting impression.
