Post #123 May 21, 2018

“Storytelling as a Tradition”

Where did storytelling come from?  How did it start?  Why do we need…and love stories? 

I went to Wikipedia for some answers and found this:

It is likely that oral storytelling has been around as long as human language. Storytelling fulfills the need for human beings to cast their experiences in narrative form. Our ancestors probably gathered around the evening fires and expressed their fears, their beliefs and their heroism through oral narratives. This long tradition of storytelling is evident in ancient cultures such as the Australian Aborigines. Community storytelling offered the security of explanation; how life and its many forms began and why things happen, as well as entertainment and enchantment. Communities were strengthened and maintained through stories that connected the present, the past and the future.

Telling stories is a nurturing act for the listener, who is connected to the storyteller through the story, as well as for the storyteller who is connected to the listeners through the story.

Early storytelling probably originated in simple chants^[.  People sang chants as they worked at grinding corn or sharpening tools. Our early ancestors created myths to explain natural occurrences. They assigned superhuman qualities to ordinary people, thus originating the hero tale.

Early storytelling combined stories, poetry, music, and dance. Those who excelled at storytelling became entertainers, educators, cultural advisors, and historians for the community. Through storytellers, the history of a culture was handed down from generation to generation.

The importance of stories and storytellers throughout human history can be seen in the respect afforded to professional storytellers today.

 Stories help us to explain and understand the world around us.  They illuminate our experience and help us organize it. 

Today, we have so many ways to take in stories, individually and in groups, but in the beginning, stories were mostly experienced communally.  Not unlike today’s moviegoer, stories were a form of theater, whose effect was often entertaining but whose purpose was to find meaning in our daily experience.  Why did this person kill that person?  What happened when the tribe undertook the long journey across the mountains?  Why did the last hunt produce so little meat?

Now we can enjoy and ponder stories through so many different kinds of media.  Printed books, pdf files, audiobooks, downloads on your laptop, phone or tablet.  Storytellers are the conscience of a people.  Storytellers remind their readers and listeners of what’s important, what should be paid attention to.  Storytellers take the raw material of life experience and heighten it for us, season it, compress and amplify it, so we get to experience faraway places and times and people and conflicts without actually having to be there.

Writer Leo Widrich tells us why stories are so important:

“For over 27,000 years, since the first cave paintings were discovered, telling stories has been one of our most fundamental communication methods. Recently a good friend of mine gave me an introduction to the power of storytelling, and I wanted to learn more.

“Here is the science around storytelling and how we can use it to make better decisions every day:

“We all enjoy a good story, whether it's a novel, a movie, or simply something one of our friends is explaining to us. But why do we feel so much more engaged when we hear a narrative about events?

“It's in fact quite simple. If we listen to a PowerPoint presentation with boring bullet points, a certain part in the brain gets activated. Scientists call this Broca's area and Wernicke's area. Overall, it hits our language processing parts in the brain, where we decode words into meaning. And that's it, nothing else happens.

“When we are being told a story, things change dramatically. Not only are the language processing parts in our brain activated, but any other area in our brain that we would use when experiencing the events of the story are too.

“If someone tells us about how delicious certain foods were, our sensory cortex lights up. If it's about motion, our motor cortex gets active:

"Metaphors like "The singer had a velvet voice" and "He had leathery hands" roused the sensory cortex. […] Then, the brains of participants were scanned as they read sentences like "John grasped the object" and "Pablo kicked the ball." The scans revealed activity in the motor cortex, which coordinates the body's movements."

“A story can put your whole brain to work. And yet, it gets better:

“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. The brains of the person telling a story and listening to it can synchronize, says Uri Hasson from Princeton:

"When the woman spoke English, the volunteers understood her story, and their brains synchronized. When she had activity in her insula, an emotional brain region, the listeners did too. When her frontal cortex lit up, so did theirs. By simply telling a story, the woman could plant ideas, thoughts and emotions into the listeners' brains."

“Anything you've experienced, you can get others to experience the same. Or at least, get their brain areas that you've activated that way, active too:

“Now all this is very interesting. We know that we can activate our brains better if we listen to stories. The still unanswered question is: Why is that? Why does the format of a story, where events unfold one after the other, have such a profound impact on our learning?

“The simple answer is this: We are wired that way. A story, if broken down into the simplest form, is a connection of cause and effect. And that is exactly how we think. We think in narratives all day long, no matter if it’s about buying groceries, whether we think about work or our spouse at home. We make up (short) stories in our heads for every action and conversation. In fact, personal stories and gossip make up 65% of our conversations."

“Now, whenever we hear a story, we want to relate it to one of our existing experiences. That's why metaphors work so well with us. While we are busy searching for a similar experience in our brains, we activate a part called insula, which helps us relate to that same experience of pain, joy, or disgust.”

We love stories because we’re wired by Evolution to love stories. The next time you watch a TV show or a film, read a novel or tell your neighbor how what those wacko-head drivers out there did on your way to the store, you’re engaging in an ancient tradition that marks us humans as a quite distinct from our knuckle-walking forefathers.

We’re all storytellers.



The next post to The Word Shed comes on May 28, 2018.  See you then.

Phil B.