The Science of Storytelling | Will Storr | TEDxManchester

okay so if there's anybody out there in the audience today that has any interest whatsoever in becoming a great storyteller I have amazing news you already are one you're a fantastic storyteller now I know what you're thinking you're probably thinking something like oh wow [ __ ] out this guy's seen way too many TED Talks but I really mean it it's absolutely true assuming that you're in possession of a basically functional human brain you have at your disposal a device there's been shaped by millions of years of evolution to tell and to understand the world through stories and but understanding exactly how it does this not only can we make ourselves better storytellers but we can even glimpse answers to some of humanity's most profound questions such as how should I live my life well and happily and even what is the meaning of life so as herb said I've spent my life telling stories I'm a journalist and I'm a novelist and I write all these kind of science II non-fiction books and but also a teacher and for the last few years I've been kind of traveling the world teaching writers how to use science to make themselves better storytellers and my interest in the science of storytelling began around a decade ago and I was researching a book on the psychology of belief and at the time I was also kind of struggling with my first novel and because I was struggling I bought all these books on storytelling and so I started reading all these books and I noticed something weird and that is that the thing is that the storytellers were saying about how to tell stories were the same as the things that the psychologists I've been interviewing have been telling me about how we experience our everyday lives so the scientists and the storytellers had started off in completely different places but I'd ended up discovering the same things so that was weird within I realized it actually makes perfect sense because story is what brain does story isn't something that was designed by clever people of years ago writing with quills it's more like a product of biological evolution so story emerges from human brains as naturally as breath emerges from between human lips and assuming that you're in possession of a basically healthy one you're going to be spending a lot of your time experiencing your lives as if you're the plucky hero at the center of an unfolding plot struggling against great odds to make a better life so by interrogating how the brain does this we can get to these clues and hacks on storytelling and I'm going to share just six of those tips with you over the next sort of 10 or so minutes the first one so all story is changed that's what it is whether it's a 60 word news piece in the tabloid about Kim Kardashian's shoe falling off or it's a 1200 page work of high literature like Anna Karenina all story is change now why is that it's because brains are obsessed with change they have to be and for lots of interesting reasons but one of them is because of a peculiar 'ti about how our senses work so we think our senses are amazing but actually with the exception of the skin our senses give very limited and partial information to the brain so if you hold out your arm and look at your thumbnail that tiny dot in the center is all you can see in high-definition and full color at once color ends around 20 to 30 degrees out of that high-definition core and it's all fuzzy outside of that core so how is it then that we feel that we can see so perfectly well it's because the brain is obsessed with change that big fuzzy area outside the high-definition core is sensitive to changes in your environment and when your brain detects those changes it sends that high-definition core out to investigate it and your eyes constantly doing that it's the fastest movement in the human body it's called a sac aid and you do four to five saccades every single second and so now imagine your face not as a face but as an amazing machine for detecting change there's barely a millimeter on it isn't dedicated to it somehow so you're walking down the street you're not really aware of what's going to and you're thinking about some argument you just have with some idiot on Twitter or something this change in your environment is like a a bang or someone calls your name what happens will you stop your internal monologue ceases and you turn this amazing change detecting machine out in the direction of the change to answer the question what was that now psychologists call that an orienting response and that's what storytellers are doing they're creating moments of unexpected change which are generating orienting responses in the brains of their kind of readers and viewers of their TV shows and this is such an important principle that really good writers lots of them put these moments of unexpected change in their very first sentences of their story so I'm gonna show just a few quick examples here you guys need a new clicker right so here we go first sentence of where spot very famous children's book that spot he hasn't eaten his supper where can he be so unexpected change spots gone missing but there's also something else in there there's the threat of change where can he be where is he we don't know he could be under a bus oh you know so there you go so that's changing the threat of change in the in the first sort of three short sentences here's another one JK Rowling of course we all know who JK Rowling is first sentence of Harry Potter mr. and mrs. Dursley of number four privet drive were proud to say that they were perfectly normal thank you very much that's a great first sentence because it's absolutely pregnant with a threat of change as storytellers we know that something's going to happen to puncture that perfect life of mr.

and mrs. Dursley so that's you know that's great and here's another really good one Charles Dickens Marley was dead to begin with I mean that's amazing change and the threat of change in just six words so that's really good writing but I know you might be thinking by now you might be thinking yeah yeah but these are all kids stories right surely the big literary gods aren't doing the same thing as we're spa well how about Jonathan Franzen is he literary enough for you so this is the first sentence two sentences of Jonathan Franzen's literary masterpiece the corrections the madness of an autumn Prairie cold front coming you could feel it something terrible is going to happen so Jonathan Franzen doing the same thing as where spot there and here's another one hanif khureshi another literary god first sentence of his classic intimacy it is the saddest night for I am leaving and I'm not coming back change that's what it is and that's how your story should continue to a really well-constructed story is a sequence of causes and effects one change leading to the next change leading to the next unexpected effect and that's because that's how brains understand the world so your what your brains are doing is they're looking for these moments of change and they're automatically building little stories about how one change led to the nap that led to the next so we've got our moments of change how do we make people care about our moments of change well for the answers of that question we have to go back tens of thousands of years to the IRRI in which these brains were still doing much of their evolution and for the last forty of our time on this earth we've not been living in sophisticated towns and cities we've been roaming around in large hunter-gatherer tribes and we still have these tribal brains so life was very dangerous back then and it was precarious and we all had to work together to survive and we all know what people are like we're not so good at working together a lot of the time so how do we manage that how do we police a tribe of people without a police force well we do it with gossip we'd swap stories about people and gossip is universal it still is because we still have these struggle brains and it contains valuable information and it's information that back in the day would have kept us alive now it's for this reason that many psychologists now argue that the reason we evolved humans evolved language in the first place is to swap gossip and if this is true its ramifications for storytellers could barely be more immense because it means that all human storytelling emerges from gossip so how does gossiped work how does gossip a police a tribe well how do you feel when you hear a gossipy story about someone doing something terrible to somebody else will you feel a very specific and sometimes dangerous and ancient human emotion you feel moral outrage so moral outrage is really interesting cuz Murrow narration motivates us to act so when you hear that more that that gossipy story you're motivated to step in and rescue that vulnerable victim and you're motivated to kind of want to see the transgressor you know dealt with in some way and in the modern reader who still has this trouble brain that moral outrage transient translates as a motivation to keep turning the page and keep watching the movie because we still crave primary the experience of seeing that victim rise up and that villain dealt with but what is it hero and what is a villain what are these kind of nebulous terms would the answer to that also lies in these ancient tribes it's thought that they core kind of quality that we humans consider as being heroic a morally good is selflessness whilst the core quality of what human see is morally bad villainous is selfishness and that's why in gossip and in story very often you see here as behaving selflessly somehow and villains being selfish because stories are kind of tribal propaganda for us tribal species what it tells us over and over and over again is if we want to be safe we need to be selfless see beyond our pressure cells and into the wider tribe whereas in a villains people who can't do that well it's very dangerous for them so moral outrage it's the ancient lifeblood of humans storytelling selfish and powerful versus selfless and vulnerable is what makes us care and storytellers can trigger these effects in all kinds of different ways so it could be very subtle and delicate as in a story like mrs.