New Science Reveals Why We Are All Good Storytellers
Recent research suggests that we are all storytellers by birthright, and there’s a reason each one of us does it uniquely well - it leads to healthy connections with our kids. In our modern lives, that’s sometimes easy to forget. Not only are we busy, we’re surrounded by giants of the industry like JK Rowling and Disney, making it easy for parents to count ourselves out. But a new perspective is shedding light on why you might be a better storyteller than you think.
Scientists have already known for years that storytelling has benefits for the listener. They help us remember important information, practice difficult life events, understand new perspectives, build focus, and more. 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 why does storytelling have all these benefits? What makes it so effective? To answer that question, it helps to introduce an important shift in perspective. It begins by asking yourself: When you think of storytelling what comes to mind?
Most of us think think of books, fairy tales, and movies. In other words, we think of the story, the narrative or plot line. That’s what most scientists do too, and there’s quite a bit of research like Aaker’s that demonstrates the positive impacts that stories have on people.
We could represent this typical picture of storytelling as two points on a graph (the story and the listener) 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 that most of us can only dream of. As parents, we might as well borrow her stories and let the magic flow to our children.
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 brings our focus onto something new: the relationship between speaker and listener. In this model, the story is something that activates and mediates that relationship. 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
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Listener – Speaker
For the first 70,000 years of modern Homo sapiens, stories were an integral 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 of parents and trusted elders. The content of the story mattered (anthropological evidence indicates that particularly good storytellers were prized among hunter-gatherers), but central to the story itself was the relationship in which it was shared. Storytelling was (and is) a means of building and maintaining that relationship.
Today, 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 and has had little impact on how our minds work. 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 good question. Some stories are true, of course, but most of our biggest and most successful stories are blatant whoppers. From a purely biological standpoint, what would compel a creature, any creature, to spend so much time dealing in untruths? It almost seems like a waste of time. Or does storytelling somehow contribute to our success as a species?
Drawing on work from the fields of 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 skill that humans evolved to help 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. Ants do this by sharing pheromones. Bees dance. We speak. But we do something more too.
Humans have a tendency to build national and international social structures with millions of members that transcend natural boundaries and span huge portions of the globe. Because of this tendency, some scientists have begun to label Homo sapiens as super-social, and super-social creatures like you and me need to do more than ants. We need to earn each other’s trust and understand another’s point of view.
Storytelling appears to be one of our most sophisticated ways of doing that. They are a major component of the invisible glue that binds our social groups together and gives them a collective sense of identity. In fact, stories are so effective at dispersing essential information (like social norms, religious and political views, and even technical skills) that we flock to them like bees to a flower.
We seek stories out, and when we hear the right ones they seem to fit inside our minds like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. Stories describe our mental states, our values, and emotions with a precision rarely found elsewhere. Just ask yourself: Would you rather go to a lecture this afternoon or a movie?
The social benefits derived from storytelling may have helped our ancestors form tightly knit groups with a greater dispersal of information and values across its membership. These groups were likely more successful than individuals or more loosely organized bands with cruder forms of information sharing. This, Boyd suggests, is the cauldron, the driving force that shaped the storytelling skill within the rapidly developing minds of the human organism, and it helps to explain why stories continue to have such a lasting impact on our lives today. Stories captivate us because they are one of our best technologies for sharing hearts and minds.
“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 is an excellent introduction into the the impact of storytelling on the human brain.
But here’s the best part – you don’t need to know any of this to put storytelling to good use. It comes just as easily and naturally as walking, because our ancestors already worked it out for us.
My partner and I at How to Tell Stories to Children aren’t researchers, we’re kindergarten teachers. Sometimes we 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 always 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 have something to share. It’s not a bestseller. It’s a deepening relationship with your kids, mediated by this age worn method called storytelling. It’s like a blanket of social fabric that wraps the two of you together, keeping you warm and cozy.
Parents who doubt themselves are usually guilty of what we call the Great Story Fallacy: In order to be a great storyteller, I have to tell a great story. This is unnecessarily focused on the two-way street of storytelling shared above. 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. Returning to the simple image of storytelling as a triangle - with listener, speaker, and story - may help you find renewed strength.
If you don’t believe this, try thinking back on some of the storytellers from your own childhood. If you’re like most people, you will remember those moments with evident fondness. You likely felt nurtured. You felt cared for. You may or may not recall the story very well, though there are probably a few essential details that linger. But you hardly care. What you value is the time and attention, and you probably don’t waste effort by 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. You had a special relationship, something that made you feel included, wanted, at least for that moment. Stories like that 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. 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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If this article meant something to you, please consider helping us spread the love of storytelling by sharing it! You can find more on storytelling, including a simple method, practice exercises, and sample stories in our book How to Tell Stories to Children and in our blog The Storytelling Loop, now read by over 60,000 people. Our goal is to empower parents and teachers to raise healthy and diverse children.
