Why (and How) Do Stories Matter?

My goal with this essay is to impart as much knowledge as I can about my experiences telling persuasive stories and to highlight some of the psychology and neuroscience research that supports my central claim that the stories we tell each other matter.

That said… While I am a professional storyteller, I’m not a neuroscientist or a psychologist, so why should you even listen to me?

My Background in the Arts

Understanding the nature and purpose of storytelling has been one of the driving interests of my entire life, but it wasn’t something I was consciously aware of for a long time.

In high school, I loved music, art, history, and science—but I had no idea how those interests would (or even could) be merged. So in spite of a long-expressed desire to learn about evolutionary biology and human behavior (ie. economics and psychology), I ultimately chose music as a career path, eventually earning an MA from NYU in composition for film & multimedia and going to work in the music industry.

The thing that makes composing music a phenomenally engaging challenge is that it’s just abstract sound.

The fact that it’s possible to turn sound waves that into something that conveys specific emotions is mind-blowing. It’s what’s always fascinated me about the medium, but without a good foundation in story structure, using it to support the progression of characters and plot in a dramatic narrative is next to impossible. So as I learned more about film scoring and program music, I had no choice but to start immersing myself in the theory and practical application of storytelling.

And as I got older and more experienced, my interest in creating music for film expanded to editing and producing original films of my own. That required me to develop even more knowledge of storytelling.

So I studied screenwriting and the history of drama.

At the same time, thanks in part to Dr. Robert Rowe at NYU and Daniel Levitin’s incredible book, “This is Your Brain On Music”, I started to explore psychology and neuroscience as it pertained to art much more seriously. The disparate interests from my youth were starting to come back together.

But in 2009-10, something else changed for me. After working for a few years in the entertainment industry in NYC and Los Angeles at the height of the “Great Recession”, I had a couple clarifying epiphanies.

Firstly, I realized that I didn’t actually enjoy a lot of the work I was doing and came to understand that if I ever wanted to be happy doing creative work, I was going to have to be in control of the content I was producing instead of simply being hired to help other people execute their vision. Secondly, I was growing more and more frustrated with the conversations I was having with friends and acquaintances in LA who were building their careers with the hopes of gaining positions of cultural authority and yet who—to put this as politely as I can—didn’t know much about anything.

Just after the financial collapse, I could see ignorance and bad philosophy leading people to utterly misdiagnose both the causes and solutions to economic problems in the US, and I started to get concerned about a future where all the writers, filmmakers, and content creators who were sharing their narratives with millions of people every day were actually using that influence to misinform—inadvertently or not.

Looking back on the last decade, I wish I could say I’d actually managed to stem the tide of bad ideas flooding into our society, but at least those epiphanies connected my interests into a singular purpose.

So I set out to learn how to become a more effective storyteller and use stories to share better ideas and values with as many people as possible. Since then, I’ve built a career I’m incredibly proud of using my skills to talk about the importance of individual rights, economic freedom, legal equality, and free speech; the horrors of war and the evils of concentrated power; individualism and genuine tolerance for anything that’s peaceful.

All this led me to where I am today.

Storytelling… For Good

Over the past few years, I helped lead a multi-million dollar messaging and marketing analytics project that studied different approaches to storytelling and aesthetics in media and their effectiveness at reaching a range of specific audiences as Creative Director at the Foundation for Economic Education. At the same time, I’ve been fortunate enough to build a fantastic team that produces a massive amount of content, generating tens of millions of views and reaching hundreds of millions of people on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and of course, YouTube.

Most importantly to me personally, I’ve also developed a successful web series called Out of Frame, on which I routinely talk about the intersection of pop culture and the role art and media plays in shaping the ideas people believe.

As I said above, while I’m a composer, film & video producer, and creative director by training and trade, I’ve always been incredibly fascinated by human behavior and science.

These interests led me to my first foray into studying psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology (especially as those fields applied to music) in the early 2000s. I’ve continued reading books, papers, and attending seminars on neuroscience and psychology ever since—with a particular focus on the way music, art, and film affects people’s thoughts and feelings, and on the nature of persuasive media.

Between my professional experience and my exposure to a large amount of psychological literature over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the way our culture is shaped by the art and media we consume. I strongly believe that art plays a powerful role in our culture, and therefore I think it’s incredibly important that the ideas we embed into our popular stories actually help us better understand the world and support the ideas and values that lead to more prosperity and freedom for all.

And yet, one of the most common objections I see in the comments on Out of Frame videos is:

“Who cares? Why are you even talking about this? It’s just a movie!”

Setting aside that the entire series is dedicated to analyzing the ideas that are baked into movies and other popular media, I talk about it because it actually matters. All of the TV and movies we watch, the music we listen to, and the books, magazines, newspapers, and websites we read influence the way that we see the world.

To understand the impact I’m talking about, we have to start with a fundamental question:

Why Do We Tell Stories?

I think there’s a very good answer to this question, but before I get to that… Let’s start by recognizing that as a species, humans have always told each other stories.

In fact, storytelling predates modern society by several millennia. The earliest known cave paintings are about 40,000 years old, and they provide us with an insight into the earliest attempts at dramatic communication.

You can see this in Lubang Jenji Saléh in Indonesia:

At Lascaux, in France:

And at Cueva de los Manos in Argentina:

At the same time, prehistoric humans were already starting to develop music with drums, resonant rocks, and some of the earliest bone flutes.

Speech, or at least singing and other forms of vocalization came even earlier. The first known hyoid bone from a modern hominid (which allows us to do things like swallow and produce sounds in our throats) is thought to be about 60,000 years old. Once people had the capacity for language, it’s likely that storytelling became the dominant—and in some cases only—method of transmitting information, history, and mythology.

By contrast, the first known written stories are only 4-5,000 years old and originate in Bronze-age Sumeria and Egypt, but they can be found all over the world.

From the Epic of Gilgamesh, to Aesop’s Fables, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey; the plays and poems of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, Plato’s Dialogues to Virgil’s Aeneid; Sun Tzu and Confucius; Viking Eddas; The Bible… We know of hundreds of examples of ancient storytellers using narrative to inform, entertain, and convey cultural values to readers.

No matter what form it’s taken, one thing is clear: As a species, we’ve been refining our storytelling capabilities for tens of thousands of years. And since the advent of the printing press, “hundreds” of known stories turned into millions.

And now, there are well over a hundred and 25 million books available just on the Google Books website alone.

Over time, our stories also got better and more complex. Dramatic rules began to emerge. All this evolution led to the highly refined and sophisticated techniques we have today (read my post on dramatic writing for more on this point), with cinema being arguably the pinnacle of that development.

With movies (and television), storytellers are now able to play with imagery, motion, music, sound, and time in order to express ideas and emotions in incredibly powerful ways. It’s an art form that allows creators to establish compelling characters and create fully immersive worlds that audiences actually believe.

This believability—or “verisimilitude”—will be very important later in the discussion.

A well-told story takes people out of their normal lives and allows them to literally feel what it’s like to be someone else and have experiences they could never have otherwise. Or, as Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic Roger Ebert put it in the 2014 documentary, Life Itself :

“We all are born with a certain package. We are who we are: where we were born, who we were born as, how we were raised. We're kind of stuck inside that person, and the purpose of civilization and growth is to be able to reach out and empathize a little bit with other people. And for me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy. It lets you understand a little bit more about different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us.”

Stories can make us scared or excited. They can make us laugh or cry. They can make us think about ideas and situations we’ve never imagined before, or give us reasons to reflect on our own beliefs and how we feel about society.

We’ve all experienced this.

The fact is simply incontrovertible: Stories have the power to significantly alter our thoughts and emotions, and that makes them an incredible vehicle for persuasive communication.

It’s literally why we tell them to each other.

A few years ago in a keynote speech I listened to at SXSW, Star Wars: Rogue One director, Gareth Edwards offered an idea that I found to be especially compelling. He said:

"I believe that what's sort of going on is, as a race, we're kind of immortal—we reproduce and sort of have clones of ourselves—but the one thing you can't reproduce is experience. And so human bodies are like hardware, but stories are like the software that we sort of download into a child.”

This—I believe—is the answer to the question of “why”.

We tell each other stories because they are by far the most effective means of communicating information and meaning to other people, and we need to convey information and meaning because our entire social world depends on a shared understanding of facts, events, and cultural values. Stories are what allow us as a species to help our kids understand that fire is hot, honesty is good, and murder is wrong. They’re what allow us to connect with each other and solidify lasting bonds with our family and community. Storytelling helps us quickly warn each other of impending danger.

It’s even how we explain the unknown and make sense out of the chaos of nature.

As I said to that YouTube commenter, we tell stories to each other to communicate values and lessons about the world and pass on ideas in a format that is memorable and entertaining.

What’s more, this theory is supported by a ton of evidence. And that brings us to the question of how all this works.

How Stories Affect Us

There are a number of important things to understand about the nature of stories and their affect on human behavior. Unfortunately, I’ve had these conversations with people many times before and I’ve found that it’s really important to understand a more complete scope of the evidence before a clear picture emerges.

1. Narrative Transportation and Empathy

I’ve written about this in other essays and videos, but Narrative Transportation is the theoretical framework surrounding the feeling of being “carried away” by a story, and what role that feeling plays in persuasion.

The idea rose to prominence with Victor Nell’s 1988 book, “Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure”, and it’s been studied by a number of psychologists ever since. In a 1989 paper by John Deighton, Daniel Romer, and Josh McQueen called “Using Drama to Persuade” (Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 16, Issue 3, December 1989, Pages 335–343, https://doi.org/10.1086/209219), they theorized that the effectiveness of persuasive media—in their study’s case, television advertising—was highly predicated on the specific form of its narrative.

In short, the way people react to attempts at persuasion based on argumentation and logic are very different than the way people react to drama.

Television ads are typically a mix of both—simultaneously offering concrete, objective, fact-based reasons for buying a particular product and telling a story about how that product would benefit the customer’s life.

Deighton, Romer, and McQueen categorized a number of TV ads by comparative levels of “drama” (as defined by the presence of plot, characters, and narration) and then showed them to 1,215 people in order to identify patterns in people’s analytical and empathetic response and the degree to which their beliefs about the products being advertised changed.

Keep in mind that when people watch advertising on TV or YouTube, or anywhere else, they are typically aware of the fact that they’re being presented with a sales pitch. This means that we’re all at least somewhat prepared to marshal counterarguments against a brand’s attempt to influence our behavior.

“Sure, that truck looks cool, but what’s the gas mileage? How reliable is it? How expensive? Will I have fun driving it? Is it safe enough for my family?”

—and so on.

These counterarguments often present major barriers to the acceptance of a claim or an argument, and they are especially provoked by new information that conflicts with pre-existing beliefs—especially those which a person feels are integral to their identity.

Side note: Tribalism is a huge driver in how we all perceive new information, no matter what form it takes.

There’s a lot to say on this point, but in the interest of time, I recommend reading Brendan Nyhan on the Backfire Effect; Jonathan Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind” on the way different political tribes’ morality varies and the idea that people’s emotions and beliefs typically determines their “rational” conclusions and not the other way around; and Arnold Kling’s “The Three Languages of Politics”, which we used as the basis for our messaging study at FEE and describes the unique narrative lenses that conservatives, progressives, and libertarians each use to view the world.

Deighton’s team found that employing techniques of drama has the major benefit of bypassing people’s skepticism to the advertising claims being made and reducing the likelihood that they’ll generate counterarguments designed to bolster their pre-existing beliefs:

“When a claim rests on subjective grounds, drama's advantage over [objective/logical] argument is that it does not have to reduce the subjective experience to words and then depend on the credibility of a narrator to communicate it. It can depict the experience directly, with the aim of evoking the feeling itself in its audience.
Bruner (1986) observes that the presence of character may not convince us of a general truth-it may even impede it-but it does vividly instantiate a particular proposition. Drawing on Iser (1978), he states that plot and character recruit the reader's imagination to "perform" the meaning of the drama. Narration interferes with this process. In telling, a narrator does some of the audience's thinking, explaining the events and warranting their meaning. Without a narrator, the verisimilitude of the events alone, through their ability to build empathy, determines how well they back the claim. When verisimilitude is high, the audience may not, in fact, even notice that a claim is being made. On the positive side, nothing intrudes between the audience and the immediacy of the experience shown in the drama. On the negative side, there is no interpreter to underscore the point.
To summarize, we contend that there are two paths by which advertising can persuade. In one, the advertising suggests that a claim is objective, by invoking the rhetorical form of an argument. In the other, the claim is framed as subjective, appeals to personal experience, and is not open to objective testing. Drama is a reliable way to invoke this mode of processing”

There’s a key caveat to all this, though:

“…the appeal to objectivity through argument, invites counterargument and overt expressions of belief. Wells (1988, p. 15) claims that lectures are "ideas that other people are trying to impose on me" and that defenses are erected against them. Although an argument may generate counterargument, it must also evoke positive beliefs if it is to be persuasive. In the appeal to subjective truth through drama, counterargument is less likely to occur. However, drama must evoke expressions of feeling and meet the test of verisimilitude or plausibility of the depicted events.”

The point here is that drama can circumvent the natural counterarguments that will emerge from a more objective approach (and thus lead to stronger belief conversions), but only if the narrative feels sufficiently real.

That led to the establishment of three basic tenets of Transportation Theory:

The audience must actually pay attention to and process the story they’re being told.
They become “transported” through empathy—which means a conscious attempt to understand the experience of the characters and identify with their feelings and understanding of the world being presented; and through mental (or cinematic) imagery—which requires the generation of a strong internal picture of the story’s plot and setting.
The transported audience loses track of reality and becomes immersed in the story.

By 2012, the literature had expanded considerably and University of Sydney professor, Tom van Laer and his team conducted a research review called “The Extended Transportation-Imagery Model: A Meta-Analysis of the Antecedents and Consequences of Consumers’ Narrative Transportation” (Journal of Consumer Research, 40(5), 797-817. https://ssrn.com/abstract=2033192) that looked at 76 different papers on the subject.

According to van Laer, Narrative Transportation occurs when:

The audience sufficiently empathizes with the characters and believes in the world presented in a story; and
The story activates the audiences’ imagination.

Unsurprisingly, over the past several decades, the nature of marketing and advertising has shifted dramatically away from invoking rhetorical arguments (“9 out of 10 dentists agree”, “We have a 5-star safety rating from Car & Driver Magazine”, etc.) and towards subjective and appeals to emotion through narrative.

In some cases, brands now create ads that tell stories without even explicitly mentioning their products at all. Consider, for example, Yeti’s recent branded documentary about an aging hunting dog, “Sam”:

There is no mention of Yeti’s coolers and tumblers. No discussion of their features or benefits. In fact, there’s not a single product shot in the whole film.

The entire purpose of this documentary is to build an emotional attachment between you (as the viewer) and the characters in the film, on the assumption that if you care about them, you will identify those positive feelings with the brand itself—even if subconsciously.

Sophisticated modern marketing campaigns use narrative storytelling to build brand and product affinity among audiences, which will ideally result in a large number of “Marketing Qualified Leads”, who are open to being presented objective arguments in favor of the product through further advertising that will convert those MQLs into either Sales Qualified Leads or directly into customers.

They use these techniques because they work.

But—and this is important—virtually every film or TV show that’s been produced, every book written, and every story anybody has ever told in any medium conveys ideas and values through narrative drama. Again, that’s why we tell stories!

Remember what Deighton, et al, said above:

“When verisimilitude is high, the audience may not, in fact, even notice that a claim is being made.”

This is absolutely critical.

When an audience is effectively transported into the world of The Great Gatsby, Moby Dick, The Old Man and the Sea, Don Quixote, or The Lord of the Rings, they’re being presented with characters and plot that define a set of premises about the world as it is and as the authors believe it should be. We are imbibing lessons about human nature, and those lessons are shaping the way we think about the world around us.

The same thing happens when we’re transported into the world of a film.

If you empathize with the characters and believe in the world of The Wolf of Wall Street, Michael Clayton or Boiler Room, you’re going to get a very different perspective on the nature of business and what’s “normal” than if you watch Tucker: A Man and His Dream or The Pursuit of Happyness.

All of these books and films are “selling” a particular perspective on the world. There’s nothing nefarious about this, it’s just a part of creating art. Artists inherently share their values through their work. But even so, the successful storyteller is still presenting specific themes and philosophies in a fully immersive and transportive (and therefore persuasive) way—and most audiences will never even be consciously aware of it.

They don’t notice that philosophical or moral claims are being made—especially if the stories are well-told. If they’re engaged in the story, they just accept it.

Of course, you might be skeptical that Narrative Transportation is real. After all, most of the studies on the subject (like all psychological studies) rely heavily on subjective experiences self-reported by study participants. You might be wondering if there’s a neurological mechanism in play.

It turns out, there (probably) is.

2. Neuroplasticity

Our brains are surprisingly adaptive.

I first started reading about this in V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee’s fascinating book, “Phantoms in the Brain”, which described ways in which patients’ brains change in response to trauma (such as losing a limb). I’ve since followed up by reading a number of other books and papers, most recently including Mohed Costandi’s simply-titled “Neuroplasticity” from MIT Press.

Neuroscience has come a long way from the days where psychologists believed that our brains solidify and become fixed past early childhood—although of course our brains are most flexible earlier in life.

Without getting into too much detail (which I’m wildly underqualified to explain anyway), the basic idea is that all of our thoughts, memories, feelings, and behaviors are dependent on neural pathways that are created when axons (responsible for transmitting information throughout our nervous system) connect to neurons (nerves which communicate that information to cells), forming synapses across different parts of the the brain.

There are several major groupings:

Arcuate fasciculus (language)
Cerebral peduncle (sensory inputs & motor skills)
Corpus callosum (connects right & left hemispheres, critical to cognitive function)
Pyramidal tracts
- corticospinal (controls facial muscles and some involuntary motor activity)
- corticobulbar (voluntary motor function of limbs)
Medial forebrain bundle (limbic system)
Dorsal column–medial lemniscus pathway (fine-touch, sensory information from the skin)
Retinohypothalamic tract (photosensitivity and circadian rhythm)

There’s also a group of axons connecting the basal ganglia to the limbic system and various dopamine pathways, and these are what neuroscientists believe drive a lot of people’s behavior.

What’s important about this is that these major pathways and the billions of minor ones found throughout the brain can re-form and change over time. In fact, for a new experience, behavior, or idea to turn into a memory, habit, or believe, it requires synapses to change, becoming entirely new pathways.

And the more the new pathways are used, the stronger these connections become, giving certain memories, instinctive actions, and thoughts more power over time.

So, for example, if you listen to the same song over and over, putting you in a certain mood (happy, sad, pumped-up, etc.), the pathways associated with those emotions and behaviors become more prominent and may lead you to feel those emotions more frequently and with more intensity. This can actively reshape your baseline emotional state.

Or, if you watch movies that invoke the same philosophical ideas and inspire the same kinds of thoughts (“most people can’t be trusted”, “rich people are evil”, “technology is going to destroy the earth”, “humans are destroying the planet”, etc.) over and over, it stands to reason that the linguistic and memory pathways you’re invoking will come to dominate your thoughts.

It’s basically habit-forming for your core values and beliefs.

3. Strong emotions create strong memories

We also know that the more a neural pathway is connected to an emotional response, the stronger it’s likely to be. Psychological studies have repeatedly shown that the specificity and intensity of memory recall is heavily affected by our emotions.

For example, from Tony W. Buchanan’s 2007 research review paper, “Retrieval of Emotional Memories” (Psychological Bulletin, 133(5), 761–779. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.133.5.761):

“Emotional events are often remembered with greater accuracy and vividness (though these two characteristics do not always go together) than events lacking an emotional component (Reisberg & Hertel, 2005). This enhanced memory for emotional events has been attributed to interactions between the amygdala and other neural areas such as the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex (PFC) (Cahill & McGaugh, 1996). The amygdala is active during emotional situations, and this activity influences the encoding and consolidation of the memory trace for the emotional event (see LaBar & Cabeza, 2006; Phelps, 2004, for a review). These effects on the “front end” of memory (attention, encoding, the early stages of consolidation) have been well documented…”

This means that the more effective a story is at creating an emotional reaction in the mind of its audience, the more that audience is going to remember the details of the story they’ve been told. In other words, better narratives are more likely to create new neural pathways and strengthen existing ones relevant to the ideas and situations in the story.

But how does this even work? What neurological mechanisms are actually involved?

Enter…

4. Mirror Neurons

This is still a subject of some dispute among neuroscientists, but there’s emerging evidence of a mechanism for behavioral transmission in primates called mirror neurons. Whenever we see some action—walking, jumping, punching, etc.—these neurons fire in the same parts of the brain as if we were engaging in that action ourselves.

Their existence was first theorized in the 1980s by Giacomo Rissolatti, Vittorio Gallese and their team at the University of Parma in Italy through their research on macaques. But since at least 2010, individual mirror neurons have been clearly observed in humans.

Their function is basically to allow us to directly replicate behaviors that we observe in someone else.

As you can imagine, this skill would be especially useful in early childhood development, as it allows infants and children to quickly adapt their behavior to the behavior of their parents and others around them, but it’s also plausibly an important way of fostering empathy and enhancing our ability to accurately read social situations and match other people’s behavior.

In a 2012 interview in UC Berkelee’s Greater Good Magazine, V.S. Ramachandran said that mirror neurons…

“…are involved in empathy for, say, touch or a gentle caress or pain.
For example, pretend somebody pokes my left thumb with a needle. We know that the insular cortex fires cells and we experience a painful sensation. The agony of pain is probably experienced in a region called the anterior cingulate, where there are cells that respond to pain. The next stage in pain processing, we experience the agony, the painfulness, the affective quality of pain.”

While we don’t know for sure if they are directly involved in emotional empathy, Ramachandran suspects so.

“…[mirror neurons] enable me to see you as an intentional being, with purpose and intention. In fact, we suggested nearly a decade ago that mirror neuron dysfunction may be involved in autism. People with autism, ironically sometimes they mimic constantly what you’re doing, but it’s also true that they’re bad at imitation and they don’t have empathy, they don’t have a theory of mind, they can’t infer your intentions, they don’t engage in pretend play. In pretend play, what I do is temporarily say, “I’m going to be this superhero,” so you do role play. That requires a theory of mind.
So take all the properties of mirror neurons, make a list of them, and list all the things that are going wrong in autism—there’s a very good match.”

A 2010 study from Princeton’s Greg J. Stephens, Lauren J. Silbert, and Uri Hansson titled “Speaker–listener neural coupling underlies successful communication" provides even more support for this idea:

“Communication is a shared activity resulting in a transfer of information across brains. The findings shown here indicate that during successful communication, speakers’ and listeners’ brains exhibit joint, temporally coupled, response patterns. Such neural coupling substantially diminishes in the absence of communication, such as when listening to an unintelligible foreign language. Moreover, more extensive speaker–listener neural couplings result in more successful communication. We further show that on average the listener's brain activity mirrors the speaker's brain activity with temporal delays. Such delays are in agreement with the flow of information across communicators and imply a causal relationship by which the speaker's production-based processes induce and shape the neural responses in the listener's brain.”

In layman’s terms, when hearing a story, the listener’s brain literally mirrors the storyteller’s brain—with a delay—and it doesn’t happen when the same story is told in unknown languages or when no story is being told at all. That’s strong evidence of causality, and it means that we have physiological evidence of both visual and verbal empathy that can be applied to the context of storytelling.

So… Let’s put this all together and think about the nature of cinema.

Especially with respect to stories that are told both verbally and visually (and which also incorporate music), it seems likely—at least to me—that mirror neurons play a role in narrative transportation. They could very well be the neurological mechanism for how we are able to literally feel what we are seeing on screen. And their role in emotional empathy might be even greater than that.

Either way, there’s significant neurological evidence for the idea that stories in general, and perhaps movies in particular, have tremendous power to shape people’s thoughts and emotions.

5. the Physiological effects of shared narrative experiences

And as if all that weren’t interesting enough, it seems that stories have even more power when audiences physically share the experience.

The first study I read on this subject involved the shared experiences of a stand-up comedy audience, which I can now no longer fully remember or find online. There are other live comedy-related studies I’ve found that describe the effect of shared laughter on pair bonding, but the most important recent research I’m aware of on this front was commissioned by Cirque du Soleil to study the neurological experience of awe among their audience.

They commissioned Dr. Beau Lotto of the Lab of Misfits. Their study methodology was solid:

“During 10 different Cirque du Soleil performances of “O” in Las Vegas, a total of 280 audience members participated in the experiment, some of which wore state-of-the-art EEG “brain caps,” enabling study administrators to record the neural responses of 23 different “awe moments” during the show. All participants were asked to respond to a series of perception and psychological experiments before and after the show or were prompted via an iPad to report any feelings of awe, providing scientists with deeper, psychological and behavioural insights related to awe.”

And their results are fascinating:

“The study found that experiencing awe:
- Leads to fully living the moment. This finding suggests that in a state of awe, we draw our focus away from our never-ending thoughts and distractions and into the sights and sounds around us. Somehow awe packs enough disruptive punch to immerse ourselves into an experience.
- Enhances our willingness to step into the unknown, including an openness and a disposition to ask questions, lean into new experiences, and be more empathetic toward others.
- Increases our tolerance to risk, creating a lower need for cognitive control and a decreased need to “be right” and the ability to accept information in a less biased manner. This ultimately contributes to an increased curiosity and overall desire to step into the unknown.
- Recalibrates our feelings about the future and reshapes our perceptions about the past. Perhaps the most striking study discovery, this re-framing of one’s positive sense of self may magnify the behavioural effects of an awe experience and suggests a mechanism for more persistent behavioural change. This reinforces the hypothesis that awe may one day be used to foster psychological wellness.
- Puts the brain in a state of bliss, counteracting the effect of stress and reflecting neural characteristics associated with those induced by psychedelics.
- Can lead to increased creativity. Explained by a greater activity in the default mode network, a brain function most commonly associated with self-related thinking, such as meditation, which plays a large role when reflecting on the self or others.

Benefits… and Costs

We’ve now seen that:

Dramatic stories have the power to shape audiences’ thoughts and emotions as long as they’re able to empathize with the characters and feel enough of a sense of verisimilitude to be personally “transported” into the narrative; and that…
Our brains have sufficient plasticity to form new connections and strengthen existing neural pathways for different feelings, memories, and ideas (ie. all the things that constitute our beliefs and behaviors); and that…
The strength of these synaptic connections corresponds to emotionally resonant experiences—meaning that stories which elicit emotional reactions in an audience will play a role in the formation and enhancement of neural pathways that ultimately define those individuals’ habits and baseline feelings/beliefs; and that…
Mirror neurons are the most plausible physiological mechanism behind this phenomenon, as they give us the means to empathy in the context of visual (and probably intellectual) observation of other people’s experiences; and that…
Shared narrative experiences and “awe” create powerful emotions and increase an audiences’ openness to being transported into unfamiliar narratives.

By connecting all of these facts, at this point I hope I’ve fulfilled my promise to explain why we tell stories and how they have the power to change people’s beliefs and behaviors.

The question is: What does it all mean?

On the surface, it means that storytellers of all types—advertisers, writers, filmmakers, orators, songwriters, etc.—can refine their skills and create truly impactful works of art that genuinely influence the way people think and which will ultimately shape our culture.

But here’s the really uncomfortable part… This influence can be positive or negative.

Narrative stories can influence large numbers of people to adopt better values and ideas, such as the way books like Voltaire’s Candide and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense introduced people to the ideas of individual liberty, or how Norman Lear’s All in the Family created an opportunity for millions of Americans to re-think their relationship with racism on a weekly basis… But stories can also be used to promote extremely bad ideas, such as the way Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin made Stalin’s brutal communist dictatorship seem heroic, or how Leni Reifenstahl’s Triumph of the Will rallied German citizens to support Hitler and the Nazi Third Reich.

And contrary to what many people wish to be true, there is a large body of evidence from many decades of psychological research demonstrating that exposure to violent media desensitizes individuals to violence, makes them less empathetic, and even less likely to feel guilt.

Thing is… If you accept that art has the power to make you feel happy, sad, energized, or relaxed; and if you accept that the ideas embedded in stories can ultimately shape our culture, it’s entirely silly to deny that comparably negative effects exist.

But before you accuse me of being Frederic Wertham or Tipper Gore, I want to be clear:

This power is far from unlimited.

As much as they would love to be able to, marketers and advertisers can’t simply tell a good story and get everyone to buy their products. Writers and creators of any kind can’t just get their audiences to instantly buy into their ideas.

For one thing, it’s hard to tell a great story that actually transports an audience into the narrative. It’s insanely hard to do that in 30 or 60 seconds. So there’s already a massively difficult challenge to overcome for anyone who wants to tell persuasive stories.

Beyond that, there are millions of people all telling different stories simultaneously all the time—many of which with messages that are in direct conflict with one another.

The Yeti ad campaign I shared above might indeed be very persuasive in a vacuum… But if you see an equally persuasive brand documentary for one of their competitors, you’re back to square-one in terms of making a decision.

Most importantly, media—regardless of how effective—cannot override people’s agency and power to make choices. The whole point of our prefrontal cortex is to short-circuit the instinctive, unthinking emotional responses coming from our amygdala and allow us to slow down, weigh options, and consciously choose among them.

So while stories do influence the way people think and feel, these limitations are why its’s absurd to say things like “watching violent movies make people behave violently”. We’re all are influenced by all sorts of things simultaneously, we are capable of conscious decision-making, and human behavior is way too complicated to make such an overly-simplistic claim.

Reading books, watching movies, and playing video games isn’t a form of hypnosis. It’s not magic. But the influential power of art and media through storytelling is very real.

What’s more, the power of any narrative is amplified the more times and the more ways it gets told. As we tell and retell the same stories—or even the same kinds of stories—over and over, we ingrain their ideas and messages into our subconscious more and more.

We should care about what those stories are telling us.

Final Thoughts

The stories we tell each other shape our beliefs and values.

Our beliefs shape our culture.

And our culture shapes the societal outcomes we experience as a species.

The fairy tales and fables we tell our children and the dramatic narratives we consume as adults have a lot of power over our thoughts, so it’s important to take responsibility—both as audience-members and storytellers ourselves—for the messages and lessons these stories contain.

After all, the tools of effective storytelling aren’t limited to people with good ideas and good intentions.

It’s often just as easy (and sometimes much easier) to use compelling narratives to promote hatred, fear, and envy as it is to tell stories that help audiences see the value of compassion, courage, and self-reliance. Stories can promote irrationality and mysticism, or they can promote reality and rational thinking. They can be used to provide a truthful framework for understanding factual information, or they can be used to obscure and mislead. They can help us pass on the values that support a free and open society, or they can be used to tear those values down in the name of security, piety, or even under the false guise of social justice.

There are real dangers to uncritically accepting the stories we hear on a daily basis… But there’s also incredible opportunity for people who want to see a brighter future for mankind.

Stories matter, and the more people there are telling great, effective stories that actually convey good ideas, the more our shared narratives have the power to improve the world.

Sean MaloneJune 26, 20201 Comment