The Art and Science of Storytelling

The Art and Science of Storytelling
by Russ Gonnering at Brownstone Institute

There was a boy named Joey…

In the late 1970’s we were living in a wonderful lower duplex in a suburb of Milwaukee. We had become acquainted with a couple of about the same age, also with two children, also the same age as our two. The children got along fine, and we shared many great times together.

A few years later, as our family grew, we moved a few miles away but kept up contact. Their older son, Joey, was extremely bright and was accepted to Harvard College on an academic scholarship. We found out he was majoring in STORYTELLING!!

What? What sort of a major is that? Something like basketweaving? What a waste, I thought. He could have studied Physics and been another Richard Feynman! He certainly was smart enough. Or what about History to prepare him for Law School? Or Economics or Political Science? Storytelling…REALLY???

Little did I realize at the time that Joey was WAY ahead of the curve. The simple truth is that whatever you do, if it involves interaction with people, you will be better at it if you understand the power of storytelling.

That is certainly true if you are a teacher (in the broadest sense of that word). Personal connection is critical to impart information…any information. That includes the impartation of data. While the data may be necessary, using skills of storytelling makes it much more likely that the audience will listen to it. 

Using a story produces measurable neurophysiologic changes in the listener and allows the higher decision-making areas of the brain the chance to evaluate the data. It “opens” the door! 

A good storyteller makes 3 connections to the data: the Context, the Conflict, and the Outcome. Stuart Briscoe, a world-renowned pastor, would characterize the connections as: What? So What? and Now What? I was fortunate enough to have attended the church he pastored for many years, and I still remember those sermons. No sleeping through those, for sure!

Think back to courses you may have taken, lectures you may have heard, or even movies or plays you may have viewed. Do you remember some of them more clearly than others? Does something like the speech at Stirling by William Wallace in Braveheart still stick in your memory?

You have come to fight as free men and free men you are! What will you do with that freedom? Fight and you may die. Run and you may live…at least awhile. And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that, for one chance…just one chance to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they will never take OUR FREEDOM!

If so, then you have experienced the neurophysiologic effect of neural coupling. The listener’s (or viewer’s) brain activity spatially and temporally matches that of the speaker. Read that sentence again…The brain activity is the same! In some instances, the activity of the listener slightly precedes that of that of the speaker! There is anticipation when there is a connection.

Storytelling is ancient. It goes back to prehistory and is much more developed in the spoken word. Written stories only became widespread with the use of movable type. Some of the most important works we consider as “literature” are older than books. Consider the Odyssey of Homer, dealing with the breakup of the ancient Mycenaean world of the Bronze Age. The story of the Trojan War is one such element of that breakup and gives more than just the facts of a war that may or may not be completely factual. The true importance of that work is not necessarily the facts of the war, but the insight into human character.

The beginning line, Tell me O Muse of a man who suffered much after sacking the holy city of Troy, states it clearly. This is the story of a man and by extension, mankind, at that time. And the importance of suffering is critical, and that suffering may have been precipitated by an action.

While the story is impactful in translation, it is even more so when heard spoken in the original language. You may not completely understand the content, even if read in an interlinear translation while listening, but you will be exposed to acoustic elements that were integral to the original. These acoustic elements of meter, cadence, rhythm, and rhyme add cues affecting the neural coupling that “opens the door to the cortex.” 

Here’s another example. First, read the English translation of the lyrics to Nesson Dorma from Turandot by Puccini:

Nobody shall sleep!
Nobody shall sleep!
Even you, oh Princess,
in your cold room,
watch the stars,
that tremble with love and with hope.
But my secret is hidden within me,
my name no one shall know…
No…No!
On your mouth, I will tell it when the light shines.
And my kiss will dissolve the silence that makes you mine!
(No one will know his name and we must, alas, die.)
Vanish, o night!
Set, stars! Set, stars!
At dawn, I will win! I will win! I will win!

Now listen to it sung by Luciano Pavarotti while reading the words on the screen. Is there a difference?

Eric Havelock, the Professor of Classics and investigator into the relationship between orality and literature, described his experience listening to a radio address by Adolf Hitler in October 1939:

The strident, vehement staccato sentences clanged out and reverberated and chased each other along, series after series, flooding over us, battering us, half drowning us, and yet kept us rooted there listening to a foreign tongue which we somehow could nevertheless imagine that we understood. This oral spell had been transmitted in the twinkling of an eye, across thousands of miles, had been automatically picked up and amplified and poured over us.

Clearly, storytelling is both art and science. Will Storr has a complete and compelling book, The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better. John Walsh has an equally valuable book, The Art of Storytelling: Easy Steps to Presenting an Unforgettable Story. Both are useful for those who want to dive more deeply into the subject.

Storytelling has tremendous power, and that power has been recognized by leaders in screenwriting, business, the law, medicine, and, of course, politics. True to form, when something is important, it can be monetized and there are companies that will teach storytelling for a price. One of the most interesting, which combines art and sophisticated science, is the Vox Institute in Switzerland, where all aspects of verbal and nonverbal communication are analyzed and improved.

Today, much of our communication is not oral but written or digitally written. Is storytelling also important in those modes? Certainly, it forms the basis for nonfiction. Think of the nine “Smiley” books by John le Carre, or the equally addictive historical fiction Camulod Chronicles by Jack Whyte. The stories in these series are addictive even without the acoustic elements that aid in the neural coupling (unless they are read aloud, hence the importance of book readings). Here, the style of the content takes on added importance. One still can follow the What? So What? and Now What? formula but must add a hook. The best one I have found is to humanize the content—make the people the story.

That seems to be the key to works of nonfiction as well. Let me tell you a story: In November 2007, I was a newly minted Master of Medical Management grad from the Marshall School of Business at USC. I subscribed to the Harvard Business Journal and read each issue with diligence. This one jumped out at me: A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making by David Snowden and Mary Boone. The authors discussed dimensions of activity a leader meets (Simple, Complicated, Complex, and Chaotic) and grounded their content with descriptions of how real leaders acted in those situations. 

I was so taken by the introduction of the Complex and its differentiation from the Complicated that I sought out David and spent some time with him. He is a consummate storyteller. If you follow no other link, follow this one. The realization that this understanding of the difference between the truly Complex and the merely Complicated would be extremely important to the problems facing healthcare started me on a journey to learn more. Unfortunately, I approached this truly Complex problem as though it was merely Complicated and read every article on “Complexity” and “Healthcare” I could find. I became totally lost. It was only after I realized I must understand Complexity itself that I could understand how to apply it.

The start of that understanding came from reading Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos by M. Mitchell Waldrop. By telling the stories of the individuals influential in the foundation of The Santa Fe Institute, Waldrop emphasizes the ideas of Complexity and not just the applications. I could then start at the roots and the trunk of the tree and see the logical progression to the branches and the leaves.

Complexity Science seems to have a significant number of such authors who make something that is…well, complex, easy to understand using stories. Melanie Mitchell does it in Complexity: A Guided Tour and Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans. 

 In Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies, Geoffrey West explains years of work through the ideas of researchers discovering the basis for laws describing allometric scaling and life. Along the way, you will learn about how Tusko, a giant elephant, LSD, and the dose calculated for the medicines you take are all interrelated. 

Scott Page does the same in The Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You. Did you ever wonder what starts a standing ovation? Why do some continue and others fail? Read this and you will know.

A regular reader of Brownstone Journal has the daily opportunity to see the power of storytelling across multiple disciplines. For a larger dose of this, I would recommend Jeffrey Tucker’s Spirits of America: On the Semiquincentennial. Tucker has used stories, some of others, some of his own experience, to weave together an amalgam of the concepts that have molded the United States over 250 years and to show how they are relevant to our own present experience.

But storytelling can have a dark side as well. In this 10-minute video, Professor Dame Marina Warner of All Souls College, The University of Oxford, and President of the Royal Society of Literature gives a concise account of the power of stories and the practice of rhetoric. She rightly bemoans the loss of importance of mastering rhetoric in our modern world. This mirrors the work of David Logan, my own mentor at USC in his multipart study on the loss of rhetoric in modern education available here. 

The importance of rhetoric has NOT been lost, however, in areas of marketing and sales. Unfortunately, Professor Warner bolsters her points by stating rhetoric is a defense against “misinformation,” especially that spread by those who questioned the effectiveness of the Covid “vaccine.” Tragically, she proves her point, but not, I imagine, in the way she had hoped.

So…What is your story? Can you relate it? Will it impact your audience? Will you do something to improve it?

The Art and Science of Storytelling
by Russ Gonnering at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society