1138: It's Just Science

For a long-time, Back To The Future was my favourite time travel documentary. It's just ... science. Marty McFly was short (like me), uncool (like me) ... but still had a great-looking girlfriend. There we differed. At 15, I had no girlfriend of any kind. The movie 'transported' me in the sense I mentioned yesterday. When humans encounter stories that resonate, they become the characters. This isn't a metaphor. Nicole Speer and others have shown that stories activate neural representations of visual and motor experiences. When Marty McFly flips his skateboard (okay, that was cool) our brains simulate that action. In fact, we engage and understand stories by simulating the story world and updating our simulation as things change. Just like life. Our brains aren't just watching great stories, they are bathing in Cortisol (stress), Dopamine (motivation) and Oxytocin (love and bonding). Partly because of this, studies show that stories: Get more attention than other types of communication Are remembered up to 12x more than statistics Change the way we experience the world In 2002, J Bruce Moseley – a knee surgeon – operated on 165 patients in a controlled experiment. Half got the knee surgery they were promised, half just got the anaesthetic, the scars and the belief that they'd had the operation. The relief felt by both groups was the same. When I tell my clients that people who tell better stories get better lives, I mean it literally. Stories are powerful ... but why? Why do our brains take them so seriously? I'll dig into that (and what it means for business leaders, tomorrow.) Nick ------------------- The Stories Mean Business podcast with Nick Warren. One Idea A Day, Every Day. Get deeper into business storytelling: https://storiesmeanbusiness.com/storybusiness/ https://storiesmeanbusiness.com/podcast