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People have been telling stories for centuries as a way of passing ideas on. Further, the amount of oxytocin released by the brain predicted how much people were willing to help others for example, donating money to a charity associated with the narrative.”Ī great way to inspire people to change the way they think and behave is through stories. In 2014, Harvard Business Review (HBR) reported research showing how storytelling changes our hormones: “By taking blood draws before and after the narrative, we found that character-driven stories do consistently cause oxytocin synthesis. The brains of the person telling a story and listening to it can synchronise.” Uri Hasson, a Professor of Neuroscience at Princeton, reports: “When we tell stories to others that have really helped us shape our thinking and way of life, we can have the same effect on them too. One reason storytelling is so compelling is because it creates neural coupling in our brains.
#STORIES ABOUT CHANGE TV#
Now, we’re enjoying a new era of digital storytelling, from TV and radio to social media and AR. These stories developed into art (around 30,000 years ago we found cave art depicting a hunt) then music (Aboriginal tribes used music and dance to bring their tales to life) and eventually written literature (early legends, such as the story of Gilgamesh quickly evolved into rules and law). The earliest stories are likely to have emerged as tribal gossip around the campfire, where rumours and unwritten rules (“Where on earth did Bob get all that food?”) proved to be powerful information-sharing and civilising tools. It has shaped our societies, civilisations and cultures – and still does today. It’s our evolutionary super-power.Įvolution has wired our brains for storytelling and this unique skill has played a crucial role in our ascent to the top of the food chain. Without such meaning-making, we would be unable to make predictions about survival and reproduction. Human brains are pattern-detectors, fine-tuned to uncover relationships among the barrage of sensory inputs we face. In psychology, apophenia is the perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things. Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination.” In his best-selling book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, the historian Yuval Noah Harari writes: “Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. From monarchy to money, law to politics, every social structure we know is essentially just a story a group of humans choose to believe. Their language, customs, spirituality and laws were all handed down using stories, dances, myths and legends. The colonists were amazed to discover that the Aboriginal Australians enjoyed a rich and incredibly complex society despite being left untouched by ‘the modern world’ for over 40,000 years. In 1770 Captain Cook claimed Australia for the British Empire. We will never know exactly when storytelling started and how it evolved, but we do know that: Throughout history, humans have used stories to make sense of the unknown and create meaning in their lives. Stories help us feel a part of something larger than ourselves, give us a sense of purpose, and smuggle beliefs and information into our brains in an emotive and memorable way. Since Homo Sapiens first sat around campfires eating roast mammoth, we’ve been using stories to share learning and create meaning for the world around us. This old adage might sound obvious, but when you really start to explore it, you realise how powerful it really is. If you want to change a culture, change the stories. If you want to learn about a culture, listen to the stories.