How your brain maps stories
What you take in and how you map it
Take an object. Any object and look at it for a moment.
What do you see?
What do you think about when you see it?
Let’s take my watch as an example.
It is ticking… In a Stop2go motion that Mondaine, the official Swiss Railway timekeeper, is known for.
There it is! A connection.
A moment when you stop thinking of the watch as a tool for time but as a connection to a memory.
Watch → Second Hand → Railway → Station → Train → European Travels → Amsterdam → Beautiful woman who I should have kissed while leaving that train station in Schiphol to get on an airplane for Greece years ago…
This can be done with any object we see, feel and hear both in real life or in a story we read.
If we stopped and actively mapped out every connection we made in one day we would never leave our house. Mostly because subconsciously we do this constantly all day — and understanding that it is essential to laying the foundation to how an audience can engage with a story.
Our Brain is one big map of intersections
We can’t control the “mapping” inside our brains, but we can work to understand how the connections may be made through fMRI.
In 2012, Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley studied how our brains map out certain categories of everything we see by using movie trailers and fMRI.
Their goal was the build an interactive map of how our brains store and categorize information. They chose sight because we process images much faster than we do any other sense.
In our brain, neurons devoted to visual processing number in the hundreds of millions and make up about 30 percent of the cortex, as compared with 8 percent for touch and just 3 percent for hearing.
The scientists at UC Berkely successfully mapped out the human brain in terms most of us can understand. They used 1,700 categories of living and non-living objects from the movie trailers and used regularized linear regression analysis to measure the amount of activity in each of the roughly 30,000 sections of the brain.
Interact with the full data set from UC Berkeley’s study here
Their study found the categories in which our brain recognizes and stores information, but by using statistical methods they were able to find the “semantic space” to create links — much like a networked web — between their categories.
Why do we need a map?
This map can help us understand how humans process stories, what steps they take to connect two objects and what we need to stimulate to trigger engagement.
For example: if we use the UC Berkeley model to map out a story like an examination of marijauna law in Colorado, we might have large clusters such as “plant,” “human,” “greenhouse,” and “hospital.” From these larger clusters, we can break out smaller groups that an audience may connect, such as types of plants grown, the different types of people who may use the drug, or even the different growing techniques.
As we examine the story, and the clusters form through research and initial interviews, we can begin to use these frameworks to form an angle for a story.
This method can create a purer form of story that may not default to the traditional models of inverted pyramid, or a defined beginning, middle and end. Instead we can frame a story using scientifically proven web of connections about how humans process information, and use that to inform us to the key components of the story we should be addressing.
This mapping process in our brains has been essential to our survival as a species. Similar to last week’s discussion on the prefrontal cortex, our brains learn from previous experiences to make decisions. That is how we know lions are dangerous and we need large spears to protect ourselves from them.
These subconscious mappings allow us to make efficient connections. They ensure that we can quickly identify threat and opportunity — or in our case, a story that may interest us.
These subconscious mappings allow us to make efficient connections. They ensure that we can quickly identify threat and opportunity — or in our case, a story that may interest us.
Why good stories strengthen these maps
So now that you are an “expert” in neuroscience think about a great story that was once told to you.
Why was it so great? Why can you remember every single detail in that story? From the color of the boat and the size of the waves to just how huge that fish was that your grandfather caught before you were born…
These details stay ingrained in our memories for a lifetime, yet we can barely remember what color the sign outside the courthouse is on our morning commute that we see every day.
So what about these details that are told in stories make them so special?
Let’s think about that for a second and go back to the watch story:
What if I told you about the time I was sitting on a platform in Utrecht, Netherlands waiting for a girl to bike across the city on her lemon yellow city bike to catch the train so she could say goodbye on my way to Amsterdam to catch a flight.
The bright yellow train with ocean blue horizontal stripes waits on platform №8 at the station until exactly 8:05 a.m.
I know this because of my ticket and because of the Mondaine clock at the station ticking for 58 seconds, then holding for two on the 12 and back 58 again.
With less than a minute to spare I see a dark blonde haired girl with long bangs and azure colored eyes running across the platform…
All of the details are lighting up the grey matter inside of my brain that stores each detail and the context in which I define them. Science has told us that we don’t actually form memories, but just a collection of details that we put into our own context — our own map.
Stories directly cause us to remember more detail by stimulating the brain, alter our behavioral decisions made in our prefrontal cortex and cause the respective sections of our (smell, taste, feel) brain to respond to stories as if we were experiencing them ourselves.
Build a story with maps in mind
As you plan your next story take a few extra steps to ensure you are connecting with a larger audience:
- Reference your past and your audiences past knowledge on a subject to draw connections in subject matter, related topics and higher/lower levels in the map
- Categorize your story into completely abstract subjects (think of your story as a color or taste and how it would make an audience feel or think about a similar topic)
- Outline the angles of your story in map form and draw connections to sub categories
- When researching, ask sources specific questions on these links between categories to better understand them
- Remember the barriers of categories from week one when you choose the tools to tell a story.
Final Thoughts
And you thought creative storytelling was just about brainstorming and drawing with pretty colors on whiteboards…
There is a lot of science behind stories and their impact on the brain, and we have only struck the surface.
What is lost in today’s storytelling process as we react to events instead of planning out how to document them is the way in which audiences will retain information — how “sticky” a story can be.
A story needs to be “made to stick” not just “entertain.” We can read an eccentric NSFW story on VICE about a pleasure palace called the “Sausage Castle,” but this probably won’t light up our brains and make us think, relate or retain valuable information.
Our goal is to build stories that “stick.” They make a reader think about their experiences and how they might make a decision if they were a part of that story. Then you begin to light up those semantic spaces between categories that our brains have built over thousands of years of evolution.
In other words, create a story that will let your brain do the “talking.”
Treat storytelling as a mixture of art and science. There is no one solution to the perfect story, but through the proper amount of emotion and logic we can construct a message that makes our audiences feel like they were standing platform №8 waiting for her to arrive.
Post by Steve Johnson, Founder of Boundless
