{"id":467,"date":"2013-11-23T11:31:09","date_gmt":"2013-11-23T00:31:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.panicola.com\/?p=467"},"modified":"2013-11-23T11:43:45","modified_gmt":"2013-11-23T00:43:45","slug":"science-of-storytelling-3-fastcocreate-posts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.panicola.com\/?p=467","title":{"rendered":"Science of Storytelling – 3 FastCoCreate posts"},"content":{"rendered":"
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THE SCIENCE OF STORYTELLING: HOW NARRATIVE CUTS THROUGH DISTRACTION LIKE NOTHING ELSE (1 of 3)<\/h1>\n

http:\/\/www.fastcocreate.com\/3020044\/the-science-of-storytelling-how-narrative-cuts-through-distraction<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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BY\u00a0JONATHAN GOTTSCHALL<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

In the first of a three-part series, author Jonathan Gottschall discusses the science of storytelling–not just escapism, stories have real power to hold human attention and shape our thinking.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n

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Humans live in a storm of stories. We live in stories all day long, and dream in stories all night long. We communicate through stories and learn from them. We collapse gratefully into stories after a long day at work. Without personal life stories to organize our experience, our own lives would lack coherence and meaning. Homo sapiens (wise man) is a pretty good definition for our species. But Homo fictus (fiction man) would be about as accurate. Man is the storytelling animal.<\/p>\n

When it comes to marketing, a company like Coca-Cola gets this. They know that, deep down, they are much more a story factory than a beverage factory. No matter what they\u2019d like us to believe, Coke\u2019s success isn\u2019t due to some magic in their fizzy syrup water (at least not since they took the actual cocaine out). Coke excels because they\u2019ve been clobbering the opposition in the story wars for more than a century. People want to see themselves in the stories Coke tells. Coke understands that their customer is a member of the species Homo fictus, and that they will succeed or fail based largely on the power of their storytelling.<\/p>\n

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Image: Flickr user\u00a0Kevin Lawver<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As Scott Donaton argued in a\u00a0recent Co.Create post<\/a>, other brands should learn this lesson as well as Coke has. \u201cThe challenge is clear by now,\u201d Donaton writes, \u201cIntrusive, interruptive, self-centered marketing no longer works the way it once did, and its effectiveness will only continue to diminish in the social age. The question is what will replace the legacy model. There\u2019s a one-word answer: stories.\u201d Story is the answer for two reasons, both of them backed by compelling science. First, because people are naturally greedy for stories, they have a unique ability to seize and rivet our attention. Second, stories aren\u2019t just fun escapism–they have an almost spooky ability to mold our thinking and behavior. In this post, I\u2019ll describe the science behind the attention-seizing power of stories, leaving their molding power for a follow-up post.<\/p>\n

Brands play in an intensely competitive attention economy. The problem isn\u2019t just that attention is a woefully scarce resource relative to demand, it\u2019s that it\u2019s also shattered and scattered around. We can\u2019t blame our smart phones or other modern technologies for our short attention spans. The human mind is a wanderer by nature. The daydream is the mind\u2019s default state. Whenever the mind doesn\u2019t have something really important to do, it gets bored and wanders off into la-la land. Studies show that we spend about half of our waking hours–1\/3 of our lives on earth–spinning fantasies. We have about two-thousand of these a day (!), with an average duration of fourteen seconds. In other words, our minds are simply flitting all over the place all the time.<\/p>\n

So this is the most fundamental challenge we face in the attention economy: how do we pin down the wandering mind? How do we override the natural tendency for a mind to skip away from whatever we are showing it? By telling stories. In normal life, we spin about one-hundred daydreams per waking hour. But when absorbed in a good story–when we watch a show like\u00a0Breaking Bad<\/em>\u00a0or read a novel like\u00a0The Hunger Games<\/em>–we experience approximately zero daydreams per hour. Our hyper minds go still and they pay close attention, often for hours on end. This is really very impressive. What it means is that story acts like a drug that reliably lulls us into an altered state of consciousness.<\/p>\n

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Image: Flickr user\u00a0The New Institute<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

To illustrate why, let\u2019s run a thought experiment. Imagine you are living in Paris in 1896, and you\u2019ve been invited to see something that you\u2019ve heard about but never seen. You walk out of the bright hot streets into a cool, dark theater, and there\u2019s a white screen that opens up in a dazzling explosion of light–like a window thrown open on an alternative universe. You are watching one of the first films screenings in the world. And what you see through the magic window is terrifying. The film is by the Lumiere brothers and it is called\u00a0The Arrival of a Train<\/em>.\u00a0Go ahead, watch it now<\/a>–but brace yourself! Arguably, this is history\u2019s first horror film.<\/p>\n