Stories are incredibly powerful tools. According to education and neuroscience studies, stories facilitate leaning and memory, and they help people organize their world. Check out this article featuring Michael Gazzaniga: Your Storytelling Brain.
Gazzaniga suspects that narrative coherence helps us to navigate the world – to know where we're coming from and where we're headed. It tells us where to place our trust and why. One reason we may love fiction, he says, is that it enables us to find our bearings in possible future realities, or to make better sense of our own past experiences.Not only does storytelling help us to navigate the world, hearing the stories of others build empathy and compassion in us. Researchers at Staffordshire University in England have been studying the Superpower of Storytelling.
Our findings suggest that arts and culture can convey stories that have a superpower to connect people by striking a chord, enabling us to identify with individuals and challenge stereotypical ideas of the ‘other’ – a truly remarkable thing in a world that sometimes seems overwhelmed by social and racial tensions.In fact, stories are so effective that they're used in marketing all the time, and businesses are capitalizing on the power of storytelling. Leadership Story Lab teaches business owners, managers, and entrepreneurs how to tell effective stories to run successful businesses and market their products:
Using only classical storytelling elements, we blend our creative coaching, training, and consulting with cutting edge social science insights. The results? You are able to translate your data, relate your ideas, and persuade your audience to act.What this tells us is that stories are possibly the most effective tools at our disposal for teaching and learning, for correcting, for changing attitudes/behaviors, and for building compassion. Have you ever heard of Humans of New York? It began as a photography project and morphed into a storytelling project...and, as a storytelling project, it has become wildly popular all over social media. And then there's Upworthy, whose byline is: Because we're all part of the same story. From their website:
We call it: storytelling with business impact.
We believe that stories about important issues can and should be great stories — stories for everyone, stories that connect us and sometimes even change the world."...even change the world." Nathan's story changed David's world. When we stop to listen to the stories of others, those stories change us. I look forward to hearing about the stories that have shaped your life, the stories you tell again and again.
Thanks for this wonderful post about the power of story!
ReplyDeleteWe've been trying to branch out and be sure that the children's books we are reading reflect the diversity of the world and have strong girl characters. I appreciate the Kids Can Press Citizen Kid Series, which includes "One Hen," a story about microlending and how it changed one boy's life and then his whole African village. Author Katie Smith Milway has several other books in the series. Then there's "One Plastic Bag: Isatou Ceesay and the Recycling Women of the Gambia" by Miranda Paul, who belongs to an organization called We Need Diverse Books. (http://weneeddiversebooks.org). I especially loved the story of "Mama Miti: Wangari Maathai and the Trees of Kenya," about a woman who changed the face of Kenya by giving away tree seeds. And then, of course, the best storyteller of them all is Patricia Polacco, who writes down the stories of her family, and what stories they are!
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