In the beginning, there was story. And it was good. For over 100,000 years of human history, we created and shared stories to bring meaning and significance to our lives, to form deep connections and bonds of familiarity within our communities, to understand the complexities and mysteries of the world around us, to know and be known. Perhaps most importantly, story was a tool for remembering. Myths, folktales, and legends were created and passed on to share knowledge and wisdom (some of it essential to survival), generation to generation.
Between 4000 and 3000 BC the first written system of communication was invented. Story was no longer needed to aid the memory process. And since our mental energy was no longer spent remembering the past, we could focus on discovery and building new ideas on top of prior knowledge.
It was the age of the philosopher. Plato, Aristotle, and the rest of our new philosopher-kings gave us modern ideas of logic and reason. In the process, they convinced us that our most innate and instinctive form of communication was trivial. Communication theorist Walter Fisher explains it this way in Human Communication as Narration:
"In the beginning was the word, or more accurately, the logos. And in the beginning, ‘logos’ meant story, reason, rationale, conception, discourse, thought. Thus all forms of human expression and communication—from epic to architecture, from biblical narrative to statuary—came within its purview. At least this was the case until the time of the pre-Socratic philosophers and Plato and Aristotle. As a result of their thinking, logos and mythos, which had been conjoined, were dissociated; logos was transformed from a generic term into a specific one, applying only to philosophical (later technical) discourse. Poetical and rhetorical discourse were relegated to a secondary or negative status respecting their connections with truth, knowledge, and reality." (p. 5)
Story was dismissed, demeaned, rounded up and beaten. The world of thought—covering everything from science to philosophy to politics—was dominated by logos, by technical discourse with logical argument governed by established and accepted rules. Story was relegated to mere entertainment, a trivial diversion, a plaything fit to amuse the masses but not appropriate for serious discussion of serious topics. This disregard for story was exacerbated by a growing distrust in all forms of creativity, which, according to Marty Neumeier in The Brand Gap, “goes back to the Enlightenment, when we discovered the awesome power of rational thinking. The movement became so successful that rational thinking became the only thinking—at least the only thinking you could trust” ( pp. 73-74).
The stigmatization continues to this day. Students around the globe are surely familiar with, and universally loathe, the conventions of “serious academic writing.” Teacher and education scholar Harold Rosen has identified the tendency by the education system to stunt the storytelling impulse: “Autobiographical stories often lie completely concealed beneath the genres which come to be defined precisely by their omission of personal stories. We are actually taught in the education system how to cover our narrative tracks and even to be ashamed of them.” Story Proof author Kendall Haven identifies the problem embedded in the highest echelons of global leadership:
"The outreach programs of many governmental agencies prefer to use rigorous academic and technical articles instead of stories as a way to share their research and to—literally—tell their stories to the public. Many then find that their messages are lost, unappreciated, and unheard in the clutter of assumptions, caveats, data, and the distant third-person writing academic articles provide. Many organization and corporate leaders shy away from leading through stories fearing that they will not be taken seriously." (p. 5)
It might seem strange to you, this dismissal of story when humans are innate storytellers, rely on story to understand the world, and have difficulty making sense of academic writing. But here we are.
The times they are a-changin’
At some point in the last decade or so, people remembered that we’re storytellers at heart. We might learn to think and write in logical forms, but these logical forms have very little impact on our daily lives or the decisions we make. It’s odd that this return to story took us so long. Roman philosopher Cicero knew it all the way back in 50 BC:
“For men decide far more problems by hate, or love, or lust, or rage, or sorrow, or joy, or hope, or fear, or illusion, or some other inward emotion, than by reality, or authority, or any legal standard, or judicial precedent, or statute.”
Those of us who make a living in marketing fields have surely been impacted by story’s return to favor. Try finding an agency website without some mention of “telling your story.”
What happened? Why are we all of a sudden clamoring for stories? What about those tried and true attribute-benefit maps?
Marketers discovered that stories have an incredible amount of power over consumers, they’re often the most effective way to gain and keep an audience’s attention, and they have the best chance of leading to both tangible actions and ongoing relationships. Many marketers have come to that conclusion instinctively or experientially. But all this talk of the significance of story is firmly rooted in science.
Over the last 50 years, researchers in the the fields of communication, psychology, neurobiology, the cognitive sciences, and the social sciences have been studying the ways that humans use story to learn, remember, and communicate, and the discoveries they’ve made offer profound explanations for human behavior.
Science & story
"Results from a dozen prominent cognitive scientists and developmental psychologists have confirmed that human minds do rely on stories and on story architecture as the primary roadmap for understanding, making sense of, remembering, and planning our lives—as well as the countless experiences and narratives we encounter along the way. Lives are like stories because we think in story terms, make sense out of experiences in story terms, and plan our lives in story terms." (Haven, p. vii)
The power of story is the result of over 100,000 years of evolutionary biology. With the rise of rationalism, we tried to convince ourselves that storytelling was a childish, unimportant form of communication. But logic’s reign has only lasted for 6,000 years, at most. Written communication is a relatively recent development in terms of human evolution. It’s an even younger discipline when one considers that the majority of people weren’t taught to read or write until the printing press was invented in 1450 AD and books became readily available for the masses.
We’ll need to overcome another 94,000 years of evolution for story to truly lose it’s power.
In the meantime, we’re stuck with storytelling minds. That has serious implications for how our brains work:
"Unconscious portions of our human brains process raw sensory input and pass it to intermediate processing areas of the brain. These areas (also in the unconscious portion of our brains) are the exact areas that are activated when humans create stories. The output of these regions is fed to the conscious mind for consideration. In other words, the brain converts raw experience into story form and then considers, ponders, remembers, and acts on the self-created story, not the actual input experience!" (Haven, p. 24)
Human brains are wired to convert sensory input into story form before it enters a conscious part of the brain. Thinking in story form is not even a choice. It’s a biological process. So it’s inevitable that humans form understanding and make meaning in story terms. Human beings are biologically, instinctually, and subconsciously storytellers.
That’s why we tell stories
French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said, “A man is always a teller of stories. He lives surrounded by his own stories and those of other people. He sees everything that happens to him in terms of stories, and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it.”
Storytelling is the most fundamentally human form of communication. It’s instinctual. It’s rooted in who we are and how we make sense of our world.
Marketers have just learned to quit fighting the storytelling impulse.