Economist Paul Zak On "How Stories Change the Brain"

Click here to read it. When Zak refers to "recent analysis" that identifies the "hero's journey" he refers to a book titled Riding the Alligator: Strategies for a Career in Screenplay Writing (and not getting eaten) by Pen Densham. That book has a few references to Joseph Campbell (author of The Hero With a Thousand Faces, one of the inspirations for Star Wars). Zak mentions "there is a universal story structure." This sounds like Campbell, too.

I also like how Zak ties the way the brain is affected by stories to evolution. He mentions how some stories are better at eliciting a desire to donate money to charities. Economics also comes in with "attention is a scarce resource." If you are telling a story, you better make it emotional or else people will not want to focus on it because that is costly. As economist Robert Frank has said, emotions are costly to fake so they make a more believable kind of information.

Excerpts:

"A recent analysis identifies this “hero’s journey” story as the foundation for more than half of the movies that come out of Hollywood, and countless books of fiction and nonfiction. And, if you take a look, this structure is in the majority of the most-watched TED talks.

Why are we so attracted to stories? My lab has spent the last several years seeking to understand why stories can move us to tears, change our attitudes, opinions and behaviors, and even inspire us—and how stories change our brains, often for the better. Here’s what we’ve learned."

"The first part of the answer is that as social creatures who regularly affiliate with strangers, stories are an effective way to transmit important information and values from one individual or community to the next. Stories that are personal and emotionally compelling engage more of the brain, and thus are better remembered, than simply stating a set of facts."

"We discovered that there are two key aspects to an effective story. First, it must capture and hold our attention. The second thing an effective story does is “transport” us into the characters’ world.

Any Hollywood writer will tell you that attention is a scarce resource. Movies, TV shows, and books always include “hooks” that make you turn the page, stay on the channel through the commercial, or keep you in a theater seat.

Scientists liken attention to a spotlight. We are only able to shine it on a narrow area. If that area seems less interesting than some other area, our attention wanders.

In fact, using one’s attentional spotlight is metabolically costly so we use it sparingly. This is why you can drive on the freeway and talk on the phone or listen to music at the same time. Your attentional spotlight is dim so you can absorb multiple informational streams. You can do this until the car in front of you jams on its brakes and your attentional spotlight illuminates fully to help you avoid an accident.

From a story-telling perspective, the way to keep an audience’s attention is to continually increase the tension in the story"

"In the brain, maintaining attention produces signs of arousal: the heart and breathing speed up, stress hormones are released, and our focus is high.

Once a story has sustained our attention long enough, we may begin to emotionally resonate with story’s characters. Narratologists call this “transportation,” and you experience this when your palms sweat as James Bond trades blows with a villain on top of a speeding train.

Transportation is an amazing neural feat. We watch a flickering image that we know is fictional, but evolutionarily old parts of our brain simulate the emotions we intuit James Bond must be feeling. And we begin to feel those emotions, too.

Stories bring brains together

Emotional simulation is the foundation for empathy and is particularly powerful for social creatures like humans because it allows us to rapidly forecast if people around us are angry or kind, dangerous or safe, friend or foe.

Such a neural mechanism keeps us safe but also allows us to rapidly form relationships with a wider set of members of our species than any other animal does. The ability to quickly form relationships allows humans to engage in the kinds of large-scale cooperation that builds massive bridges and sends humans into space. By knowing someone’s story—where they came from, what they do, and who you might know in common—relationships with strangers are formed. 

We have identified oxytocin as the neurochemical responsible for empathy and narrative transportation. My lab pioneered the behavioral study of oxytocin and has proven that when the brain synthesizes oxytocin, people are more trustworthy, generous, charitable, and compassionate. I have dubbed oxytocin the “moral molecule,” and others call it the love hormone. What we know is that oxytocin makes us more sensitive to social cues around us. In many situations, social cues motivate us to engage to help others, particularly if the other person seems to need our help."

"But it turns out that not all stories keep our attention and not all stories transport us into the characters’ worlds."

"This evidence supports the view of some narrative theorists that there is a universal story structure. These scholars claim every engaging story has this structure, called the dramatic arc. It starts with something new and surprising, and increases tension with difficulties that the characters must overcome, often because of some failure or crisis in their past, and then leads to a climax where the characters must look deep inside themselves to overcome the looming crisis, and once this transformation occurs, the story resolves itself."

"The form in which a narrative is told also seems to matter. The narrative theorist Marshall McLuhan famously wrote in the 1960s that “the medium is the message,” and we’ve found this is true neurologically."

 

Growing Your Business Through Storytelling

Robert Lerose of Bank of America interviewed Jonathan Gottschall. Click here to go to it. The only thing I would add is that if stories convey emotions, as Gottschall says, they are economic because emotions are costly to fake. That is one of the big things I try to get across with this blog. See the link on the right for more info  What This Blog Is About.

Here is the interview:

"Growing Your Business Through Storytelling: Q&A with author Jonathan Gottschall
 Posted by Touchpoint in General Business on Dec 6, 2013 8:08:23 AM  

Everybody loves a good story. Stories can fill us with joy, bring us to tears, or stimulate any emotion in between. They have a magical ability to grab and hold our attention in a way that almost no other form of communication can, making them ideal for marketers who want to reach distracted consumers and grow their sales. Recently, business writer Robert Lerose spoke with Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Storytelling Animal, about the irresistible pull of storytelling and the role it plays in building brands.

RL: There seems to be a movement in business to have a good brand story to tell—something that resonates on an emotional level with consumers. What are some ways that a business can harness the power of stories to grow their brand or sell their products?

JG: Story is considered a potent tool in business communication because it's special in the way that it draws human attention. If you just tell me your business makes really great paper clips, I don't care. It's just data. But if you wrap your product up in a compelling narrative—an emotionally engrossing story—then you have me. A story not only gives me information that you guys make good paper clips, but it helps me feel an emotional connection with you and what you're doing that's really quite powerful. Coca-Cola is a perfect example. What sets them apart isn't the beverage so much, but the kinds of stories they tell about their products and the kind of bond they've been able to forge with consumers over roughly a century. 

RL: You've said that television commercials are half-minute short stories. What did you mean by that?

JG: A commercial rarely just says that a laundry detergent works well; it shows that it does through a story about an overworked mom, rascally kids, and a laundry room triumph. Jewelry stores get men to buy sparkly little rocks by screening stories in which besotted suitors pinpoint the exact price of a woman's love: two months' salary. Some ad campaigns are designed around recurring characters in multipart stories. Story touches nearly every aspect of our lives.

RL: Stories rely heavily on conflict to involve the reader. Even case studies in business follow a typical problem/solution structure. Why?

JG: Stories are almost always about people with problems. The people want something badly, but big obstacles [stand in the way]. It is a basic storytelling technique to establish and forge this really strong, personal connection between consumers and the brand. Stories tend to fixate on trouble. Without a knotty problem, you don't have a story.

RL: Stories can help brands distinguish themselves in a crowded marketplace. Do you have an example of a brand story that rises above the fray?

JG: This Chipotle ad is a very good example. You can tell people all day about the power of story. You can describe the psychological studies that prove it. But if you have them watch this story, they can see for themselves—feel for themselves—why story is such an incredibly powerful tool for riveting attention, rousing emotion, changing behavior, and driving home a business's message.

RL: You say that story binds society by reinforcing a set of common values and strengthening the ties of common culture. How can a business leverage this?

JG: Tell stories that tap into a common morality. Story is the grease and glue of society: by encouraging us to behave well, story reduces social friction while uniting people around common values.

RL: How can small business owners become better storytellers?

JG: I'd tell them to steer clear of business books and look up creative writing textbooks instead, like The Art of Fiction by John Gardner. There are a few basic principles to learn. One is to have a problem, to have trouble in your story. If there's no problem, people just aren't interested. The second thing I would stress is that by nature, story is a vehicle for a message. So it's not weird or artificial to graft your business message onto your business story. Stories are so much better at carrying a message and convincing people of things than just a straight informational presentation. There's a lot of research that shows how much better people remember things in story form—how much more convinced they are when people are given information in a story—rather than from a list of bullet points.

RL: Final thoughts?

JG: I was in Warsaw at this little place called the Radio Café that's popular with Western travelers. On the back page of the menu, there's a whole story in English about the Radio Café and the building it's in and the role it played transmitting radio signals during the Polish resistance of World War II. And suddenly—instead of just having Polish dumplings at this restaurant, I felt deeply, emotionally connected to this place. I had read up on Warsaw and I had all these associations in my mind. Their little story connected me to that big story and made me feel a little more connected to that place in a way that would have brought me back, in a way that would have me recommend it to my friends. Just by intuition, they knew it was important to tell their story."

Heaven can wait. How religion modulates temporal discounting

This is a journal abstract I came across

Paglieri, Fabio, Anna M. Borghi, Lorenza S Colzato, Bernhard Hommel & Claudia Scorolli. 2013. Heaven can wait. How religion modulates temporal discounting. Psychological Research 77(6). 738–747.

doi:10.1007/s00426-012-0473-5.

Evidence suggests that religious systems have specific effects on attentional and action control processes. The present study investigated whether religions also modulate choices that involve higher-order knowledge and the delay of gratification in particular. Researchers tested Dutch Calvinists, Italian Catholics, and Atheists from both countries/cultures using an intertemporal choice task where participants could choose between a small immediate and a larger delayed monetary reward. Based on the Calvinist theory of predestination and the Catholic concept of a cycle of sin-confession-expiation, the authors predicted a reduced delay tolerance, i.e., higher discount rate, for Italian Catholics than for Dutch Calvinists, and intermediate rates for the two atheist groups. Analyses of discount rates support the hypotheses. The authors also found a magnitude effect on temporal discounting and faster responses for large than for small rewards across religions and countries/cultures. They conclude that temporal discounting is specifically modulated by religious upbringing rather than by generic cultural differences.

Francisco D’Souza, C.E.O. of the information technology company Cognizant, says "we institutionalized a set of things to create rituals, heroes and legends."

See Francisco D’Souza of Cognizant, on Finding Company Heroes By ADAM BRYANT, from the 9-1-13 NY Times. Excerpts:

"Q. What’s unusual about your culture?

A. We’ve organized the company in a way to make sure that we continuously delegate and empower people on the front lines. As we got bigger, we would take larger units and break them down into smaller units and give individuals a sense of ownership, creating very clear success metrics around those individuals.

      

But when you decentralize and empower, you have to make sure you don’t wind up with lots of microcultures, because every leader, every manager, puts his or her stamp on the culture. Culture gets passed along not by writing it down, but through the rituals you have in the organization, the legends you refer to, and the heroes of the organization. So we institutionalized a set of things to create rituals, heroes and legends.

      

For example, we have a tradition of naming the associate of the year — we use a process in each region to find the single associate who contributed well above and beyond and, through his or her actions, exhibited the traits of the culture that we thought were important. We similarly institutionalized a ritual that we called the project of the year. And we rent stadiums around the world and bring all the employees and their families for a celebration, with entertainment and awards.

      

Q. How do you hire?

 

A. I’m looking for passion. The person I’m hiring needs to have passion for what they’re doing, and they need to understand where that passion comes from. They need to be in touch with that. You need to know what drives you.

      

And you need somebody who’s got just raw smarts and talent and an innate ability to learn. Because the thing about functional expertise is that unless you’re in some very specific area, almost everything that we need to do our job becomes obsolete quickly, and the half-life of knowledge is becoming shorter and shorter. So do you have the personal agility to continuously renew those skills, to reinvent yourself?"

 A person "needs to have passion?" Sounds like you following your bliss, as Joseph Campbell would say.

 

"You need to know what drives you?" Maybe you need to know what myth you are living by, as Carl Jung migh say.

An Entrepreneur's Most Important Tool: Self-Delusion

Click here to read this article by A.J. Jacobs. He is an Editor at Large at Esquire magazine. The article is at "Linked in" so you may have to be a member.

The idea that an entrepreneur would have to tell themselves a story (or myth) to get things done is interesting. I wonder how much of our economic activity results from or requires us to tell ourselves stories.

Excerpts:

"As an author, I rely on self-delusion as much as I rely on my laptop, Wi-Fi access and excessive caffeine. For authors nowadays, each book is the equivalent of a startup company. You have to figure out your consumer, your unique approach, your budget, your marketing strategy.

And as with every startup founder, I spent some mornings during my last project battling pessimism and despair. Well, actually, most mornings. I was writing about my quest to be as healthy as possible. I’d wake up feeling the project was too big, too unwieldy. I had too many squats to do, too many diets to test. I’d never finish the manuscript.

My solution? Deception. I tricked my brain. I’d force myself to act in an optimistic way."

"This is not pseudo-scientific blather spouted bunkum-filled books like The Secret. The idea that your actions alter your thoughts is one of the foundations of cognitive-behavioral psychology and has been studied since the 19th century (both William James and Charles Darwin wrote about it).

Force your face into a smile, you will be happier. Sounds creepy, but it works.

A raft of studies have backed this up, including a recent one in the Journal of Psychological Science that showed fake smiles (or even holding a chopstick in your mouth to mimic the shape of a smile) lowered your heart rate in stressful situations. The book The As If Principle by psychologist Richard Wiseman cites plenty of other research, including how your posture affects confidence and risk-taking (a powerful, chest-out stance boosts esteem)."

"For instance, during the year, I had a friend in the hospital, and I really didn’t want to visit him. I hate hospitals. But I said, what would a good person do? And then I acted AS IF I were a good person. And when I was at the hospital, some part of my mind said, ‘I’m at the hospital. I must be compassionate.” And I became a little more compassionate. I tricked my own mind."

So if you tell yourself a myth (that you are a good person), then it affects your behavior.

Can Following Your Bliss Have A Positive Effect On Your Genes?

See Positive Psychology Influences Gene Expression in Humans, Scientists Say from Science News. Having "a deep sense of purpose and meaning in life" sounds like following your bliss.
Looking to Genes for the Secret to Happiness By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS, in the NY Times magazine.

"According to a team of scientists from the University of North Carolina and the University of California, Los Angeles, different types of happiness have surprisingly different effects on the human genome.

People who have high levels of what is known as eudaimonic well-being — the kind of happiness that comes from having a deep sense of purpose and meaning in life (Mother Teresa) — showed very favorable gene-expression profiles in their immune cells. They had low levels of inflammatory gene expression and strong expression of antiviral and antibody genes.

However, people who had relatively high levels of hedonic well-being — the type of happiness that comes from consummatory self-gratification (celebrities) — actually showed just the opposite. They had an adverse expression profile involving high inflammation and low antiviral and antibody gene expression.

In the new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists asked how the human genome might respond to positive psychology. They examined the biological implications of both hedonic and eudaimonic well-being through the lens of the human genome, a system of some 21,000 genes that has evolved fundamentally to help humans survive and be well."

"The scientists drew blood samples from 80 healthy adults who were assessed for hedonic and eudaimonic well-being, as well as potentially confounding negative psychological and behavioral factors. They used the CTRA gene-expression profile to map the potentially distinct biological effects of hedonic and eudaimonic well-being.

“And while those with eudaimonic well-being showed favorable gene-expression profiles in their immune cells and those with hedonic well-being showed an adverse gene-expression profile, people with high levels of hedonic well-being didn’t feel any worse than those with high levels of eudaimonic well-being,” Prof Cole said."
 

Is There Economic And Political Meaning In "The Wizard of Oz?"

To get a handle on this, you can read Money and Politics in the Land of Oz By Quentin P. Taylor. Also, for my students, there is an article in chapter 15 of the micro book by Tucker and in chapter 18 in the macro book.Below is an excerpt:

"Dorothy, the protagonist of the story, represents an individualized ideal of the American people. She is each of us at our best-kind but self-respecting, guileless but levelheaded, wholesome but plucky. She is akin to Everyman, or, in modern parlance, “the girl next door.” Dorothy lives in Kansas, where virtually everything-the treeless prairie, the sun-beaten grass, the paint-stripped house, even Aunt Em and Uncle Henry-is a dull, drab, lifeless gray. This grim depiction reflects the forlorn condition of Kansas in the late 1880s and early 1890s, when a combination of scorching droughts, severe winters, and an invasion of grasshoppers reduced the prairie to an uninhabitable wasteland. The result for farmers and all who depended on agriculture for their livelihood was devastating. Many ascribed their misfortune to the natural elements, called it quits, and moved on. Others blamed the hard times on bankers, the railroads, and various middlemen who seemed to profit at the farmers’ expense. Angry victims of the Kansas calamity also took aim at the politicians, who often appeared indifferent to their plight. Around these economic and political grievances, the Populist movement coalesced.

In the late 1880s and early 1890s, Populism spread rapidly throughout the Midwest and into the South, but Kansas was always the site of its most popular and radical elements. In 1890, Populist candidates began winning seats in state legislatures and Congress, and two years later Populists in Kansas gained control of the lower house of the state assembly, elected a Populist governor, and sent a Populist to the U.S. Senate. The twister that carries Dorothy to Oz symbolizes the Populist cyclone that swept across Kansas in the early 1890s. Baum was not the first to use the metaphor. Mary E. Lease, a fire-breathing Populist orator, was often referred to as the “Kansas Cyclone,” and the free-silver movement was often likened to a political whirlwind that had taken the nation by storm. Although Dorothy does not stand for Lease, Baum did give her (in the stage version) the last name “Gale”-a further pun on the cyclone metaphor.

The name of Dorothy’s canine companion, Toto, is also a pun, a play on teetotaler. Prohibitionists were among the Populists’ most faithful allies, and the Populist hope William Jennings Bryan was himself a “dry.” As Dorothy embarks on the Yellow Brick Road, Toto trots “soberly” behind her, just as the Prohibitionists soberly followed the Populists.

When Dorothy’s twister-tossed house comes to rest in Oz, it lands squarely on the wicked Witch of the East, killing her instantly. The startled girl emerges from the abode to find herself in a strange land of remarkable beauty, whose inhabitants, the diminutive Munchkins, rejoice at the death of the Witch. The Witch represents eastern financial-industrial interests and their gold-standard political allies, the main targets of Populist venom. Midwestern farmers often blamed their woes on the nefarious practices of Wall Street bankers and the captains of industry, whom they believed were engaged in a conspiracy to “enslave” the “little people,” just as the Witch of the East had enslaved the Munchkins. Populists viewed establishment politicians, including presidents, as helpless pawns or willing accomplices. Had not President Cleveland bowed to eastern bankers by repealing the Silver Purchase Act in 1893, thus further restricting much-needed credit? Had not McKinley (prompted by the wealthy industrialist Mark Hanna) made the gold standard the centerpiece of his campaign against Bryan and free silver?"

But not everyone agrees with this. Economist Bradley Hansen wrote an article titled The Fable of the Allegory: The Wizard of Oz in Economics in the Journal of Economic Education in 2002. Here is his conclusion:

"Rockoff noted that the empirical evidence that Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as an allegory was slim, but he compared an allegorical interpretation to a model and suggested that “economists should not have any difficulty accepting, at least provisionally, an elegant but controversial model” (Rockoff 1990, 757). He was right—we did not have any difficulty accepting it. Despite Rockoff’s warning, we appear to have accepted the story wholeheartedly rather than provisionally, simply because of its elegance. It is as difficult to prove that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was not a monetary allegory as it is to prove that it was. In the end, we will never know for certain what Baum was thinking when he wrote the book. I suggest that the vast majority of the evidence weighs heavily against the allegorical interpretation. It should be remembered that no record exists that Baum ever acknowledged any political meanings in the story and that no one even suggested such an interpretation until the 1960s. There certainly does not seem to be sufficient evidence to overwhelm Baum’s explicit statement in the introduction of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz that his sole purpose was to entertain children and not to impress upon them some moral. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a great story. Telling students that the Populist movement was like The Wonderful Wizard of Oz does seem to catch their attention. It may be a useful pedagogical tool to illuminate the debate on bimetallism, but we should stop telling our students that it was written for that purpose."