Why We Tell Stories

New videos DAILY

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive video lessons from top thinkers and doers

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"There’s actually a science to why stories matter. So when we hear a good story as human beings our brain lights up. It illuminates the city of our minds," says Contently's Editor-in-Chief Joe Lazauskas. "It makes us care. It builds relationships. And that’s why storytelling has been such a fundamental part of being human since early times." Lazauskas then defines the four key elements that all compelling stories share, from cave paintings to the Bible—even Star Wars. If you can incorporate them all into a single narrative, you may have mastered storytelling.

Joe Lazauskas and Shane Snow are the authors of The Storytelling Edge (February 13, 2018), available for pre-order now.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

JOE LAZAUSKAS

Joe Lazauskas is the editor-in-chief of Contently and its flagship publication The Content Strategist, which Digiday named a 2015 finalist for Best New Publisher and The Drum named the Best B2B Content Marketing of 2015. A technology and marketing journalist, Joe is a regular contributor to Fast Company and has written for Mashable, Digiday, The Huffington Post, and Forbes, among other publications. He is the former editor-in- chief of The New York Egotist and The Faster Times. He can be found on Twitter @JoeLazauskas.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

JOE LAZAUSKAS: There’s actually a science to why stories matter. So when we hear a good story as human beings our brain lights up. It illuminates the city of our minds. The neural activity in our brains increases fivefold and in addition we basically get given a drug. It’s called an empathy drug called oxytocin that gets released when we hear really good stories. And this combination of all of these neurons firing at five times the capacity otherwise when we hear a story, plus this really awesome drug seeping into our brain that makes us feel good makes us remember things.

It makes us care. It builds relationships. And that’s why storytelling has been such a fundamental part of being human since early times. When we were sitting around campfires and chasing wooly mammoths and trying to rub sticks together and like figure out how to make more fire and starting to build tribes we didn’t have written language. But the way that we passed down stories told our next of kin that, you know, "stay away from the tigers over there and don’t eat these berries," was through stories. Because we saw that it allowed us to store information and remember and be captivated in such a different way.

So the first element of great storytelling is relatability. And if you think back to Star Wars, right. What makes Star Wars so good? It isn’t necessarily the technology. It isn’t just the amazing graphics. The thing that makes Star Wars so good is that it was based on nostalgia for 1950s Americana. So if you look at the original Star Wars the spaceships kind of look like old hot rods from the 50s. A lot of the fashion evokes the 1950s. A lot of the shots evoke the great movies from 1950s Americana. And George Lucas was obsessed with 1950s Americana in this way. So it gave this sense of relatability that allowed viewers to be transported to this bizarre, crazy, alternate universe where these weird looking aliens were getting drunk and fighting in a space bar and there was a giant Wookie who’s a dude’s best friend. But they’re grounded in all of that nostalgia from their life that they had just had in an era where American in the 1970s was really nostalgic to that 1950s Americana and allowed it to click.

This actually ties in with the second key to great storytelling, the great element which is novelty. So relatability isn’t very good if it’s all boring, it’s generic, it’s the same thing that we’ve seen over and over again, right. Our brains also light up when we see something that’s new. It was a survival mechanism from prehistoric times when we saw something new. It was a potential threat to our lives. We had to be on high alert. We had to be wired to pay attention to it right away. And so when we see something new our brains light up, the city of our brain is illuminated. It’s going like crazy. But if something is too novel, it becomes confusing to our brains. If there’s too much novelty, we either get scared or disinterested and our brain starts to shut off and go into a survival mechanism. So in storytelling amongst those first two elements there’s this great Venn diagram between relatability and novelty and that sweet ...

For the full transcript, check out