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The Red Papers:
And yet, in parallel, when anyone really wanted to persuade and move
people, they still automatically turned to story — teachers, politicians,
lawyers, salesmen, and Fascist dictators alike.
The world’s
oldest profession:
Storytelling
The reason is simple. We are hardwired to process the information that
comes into our minds from the outside world using story structure.
For more than , years it has been the method we use to
comprehend the world.
Story may be even older than “telling.” Language is a relative newcomer
on the evolutionary scale of things, but recent neurological research
suggests that a predisposition to understand the world through narrative
may be hardwired into neural circuitry that evolved over millennia.
Kendall Haven’s seminal book on storytelling, Story Proof: The Science Behind
the Startling Power of Story, draws on the works of neuroscientists Steven
Pinker (The Language Instinct, ) and H.P. Newquist (The Great Brain Book,
). Haven writes, “It is also interesting to note that the frontal lobes,
which house the circuitry for decision making and conscious thought, are
not directly connected to the brain areas that process raw sensory input.”
That is to say, raw sensory input — sounds, sights, smells — goes first to
intermediate processing areas of the brain, and these parts are “the exact
areas [of the brain] that are activated when humans create stories.” This
is remarkable. We do not comprehend directly what our eyes or ears
perceive. Before we register it, sensory information is intercepted and
taken away to a part of the brain tasked with shaping it into proto-story
material. Only then is it passed on to consciousness. The sensory data
is like Play-Doh®. It is shaped first before the conscious mind gets to
examine it. Noam Chomsky has shown that the structures of grammar are
hardwired into the brain, and it appears the mechanisms for a “grammar
of story” are similarly hardwired into the brain’s structure. These neural
structures are then repeatedly reinforced and strengthened in a child’s first
years through an endless diet of stories.