A Scientific Lens Into Why You Are A Good Storyteller
Part of our work at How to Tell Stories to Children is to help folks remember that storytelling is a skill you already have. In our modern lives, it’s sometimes easy to forget. Surrounded by giants of the industry like JK Rowling and Disney, we often count ourselves out. But recent research suggests that we are all storytellers by birthright.
Scientists have known for years that storytelling has benefits for the listener. According to Jennifer Aaker, a professor of marketing at Stanford, people remember information from a story, “up to 22 times more than facts alone.” But before we can understand why that is, we have to introduce an important shift in perspective. It starts by asking yourself: When you think of storytelling what comes to mind?
Most of us think of the story, meaning the narrative or plotline. That’s exactly what scientists do too, and there’s quite a bit of excellent research like Aaker’s that demonstrates the positive impact that stories have on people. They help us remember information, practice difficult life events, understand new perspectives, and more.
From this point of view, we can picture the listener and the story as two points on a graph connected by a line. By this logic, it’s easy to understand why we’re awed by JK Rowling. Her stories deliver a level of richness and complexity most of us can only dream of. As parents, we might as well provide the best stories possible for our kids and let them do their work. The better the story, the better the benefits to the listener, right?
Story
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Listener
But now consider a second arrangement where we have the listener, the story, and the speaker, represented in the triangle below. This helps bring our focus onto something else: the relationship between speaker and listener. This shift in perspective is integral in understanding why you are a good storyteller, and why storytelling developed in our species in the first place.
Story
/ \
Listener – Speaker
For the first 70,000 years of modern Homo sapiens, stories were an integrated part of the storyteller. There may have been occasional bards and other roving storytellers, but the vast majority of a young person’s stories came from the lips and eyes of parents and trusted elders. The content of the story mattered, to be sure (anthropological evidence indicates that particularly good storytellers were prized among hunter-gatherers), but more important than the story itself was the relationship in which it was shared. Storytelling was (and is) a means of building and maintaining that relationship.
In the modern world it’s easy to forget this. Our children have access to so many stories preserved in books, songs, and videos that we tend to view stories as having a life of their own. But on an evolutionary scale this is a very recent development, a blip in time, something that only began with Gutenberg’s press in the 15th century. Before that, stories had no shelf life. They lived and breathed.
Dr. Brian Boyd of the University of Auckland is one of the leading figures helping to place storytelling within an evolutionary framework. He believes it gives us perspective on why people started telling stories in the first place. “Why,” he asks, “[do] we choose to spend so much time caught up in stories that both teller and told know never happened and never will?”
It’s a curious question. Some stories are true, of course, but most of our biggest and most successful stories are blatant whoppers. What compels a creature, any creature, to spend so much time dealing in untruths? From a purely biological standpoint, it seems like a waste of time. Or does it somehow contribute to the fitness of the species?
Drawing on work from diverse fields like neurology, evolution, psychology, and anthropology, Boyd delivers a grand synthesis with important implications. Storytelling is not an accident, he claims. Neither is it proper to think of it as an entertainment. It’s a cognitive skill that humans evolved that helps us share information, retain each other’s attention, and build trust. In other words, it’s a social skill.
Social creatures need methods to share information and work together. Ultra-social creatures like us need to do more – like earn trust and understand another person’s point of view. Storytelling appears to be one of the most sophisticated ways we have of doing that. In fact, stories are so effective at delivering essential information (like social norms, religious and political views, and even technical skills) that we flock to them like bees to a flower. Just ask yourself whether you’d rather go to a lecture this afternoon or a movie?
The social benefits derived from storytelling may have allowed our ancestors to form more tightly knit groups with a greater dispersal of information and values across its members. These groups were likely more successful than individuals or more loosely organized bands. This, Boyd suggests, is the cauldron, the driving force, that formed storytelling within the human organism, and it helps to explain why stories continue to have such an impact on our lives today. Stories captivate us because they are a sophisticated technology for sharing minds and hearts. They help us feel connected.
“As you hear a story unfold, your brain waves actually start to synchronize with those of the storyteller,” states a recent article in The Atlantic. The author is quoting the work of Uri Hasson, a neuroscientist at Princeton whose TED Talk on storytelling gives a detailed but easy to follow look at the impact of stories on the human brain.
But here’s the best part – you don’t need to know any of this technical jargon to put storytelling to use. It’s something that comes easily and naturally, just like walking. That’s kind of the point.
My partner and I at How to Tell Stories to Children are kindergarten teachers. Sometimes, we like to put parents or visitors on the spot at school by asking them to tell a story. You can tell almost instantly who is comfortable in their skin. Folks who are simply themselves do it best. They search for a minute, tell a brief story – about a ladybug, a snowflake, or something unusual that happened that day – then look up, shrug, and smile.
The kids love it. The stories are rarely amazing, but the children are attentive. They’re interested in who people are, and they read it in their tone, posture, and face as much as in the content of the story. They know when someone is being authentic, and it doesn’t matter if the story is a little short or strange. It’s real.
Contrast this with parents, often highly intelligent, who search their brains, bite their lips, then make excuses because they’re not prepared. They don’t believe they can tell a great story, so they tell nothing at all. We’ve all been there. It’s perfectly understandable. As adults, we forgive and forget. But the message from the children’s point of view rings loud and clear – I have nothing to share with you.
That’s what this article is trying to address. We think you do have something to share.
Parents who doubt themselves are usually focused on the two-way system of storytelling. We call it the Great Story Fallacy: in order to be a great storyteller, I have to tell a great story. There’s nothing wrong with a great story, of course, but it misses the point. Storytelling isn’t primarily about the story. It’s about the relationship with your child. The story is merely the cognitive medium of that relationship.
Think back on some of the storytellers in your own childhood. If you’re like most people, you will remember those moments with a special fondness. You likely felt nurtured. You felt cared for. You may not even recall the story very well, though there are some essential details that probably linger. But you hardly care. What you value is the time and attention, and you probably don’t waste any effort comparing those stories to others you may have read or watched in order to rank them by greatness. The stories were great because you had the attention of this loving adult. Moments like this are something else altogether.
We can bring that same warm feeling to our children today using the same skills our ancestors did 70,000 years ago. On an evolutionary scale, nothing has changed. Storytelling was and is a bonding experience that helps a child moderate her emotions, learn new skills, and feel connected. Not only is storytelling one of the greatest ways to do that, it’s absolutely free. It’s your birthright as a human being.
That’s why you’re a good storyteller. It’s not because you have a contract with Pixar. It’s because you have loved ones.
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Our blog The Storytelling Loop has been read by over 60,000 people across the world. In it, we share tips, research, and examples of how to connect with kids through storytelling. It is a joint project of Silke Rose West and Joseph Sarosy, authors of How to Tell Stories to Children.
