In late 2019, I was sitting at my favorite Dallas coffee and wine bar with a friend who was in town to help me prepare a witness for one of my cases. It was late afternoon, and we both had empty coffee mugs in front of us. She was telling me about her recent trip to Napa Valley and said, “My favorite part of the trip was this café by our hotel that we stopped at one night for a glass of red wine. What an amazing place.” I glanced over at the wall of wine in the back of the coffee shop and thought about what my psychology professor once told me about the power of stories: “for as long as human language has existed, oral storytelling has fulfilled a human need to cast different and unique experiences in an understandable form and persuade us to behave in certain ways.”
Narrative stories allowed our ancestors to express their emotions and beliefs in a way that both entertained and offered explanations to life’s great mysteries. Despite rapid advances in our modern world that seem to increasingly isolate us, we are still social creatures that want to form connections, share our emotions, and feel a sense of belonging. In a world dominated by impersonal e-mails and messages, people underestimate the communicative power that a clear and well-developed story holds.
Although it is abundantly clear that people like stories, what is directly happening in our brains while sharing and listening to stories has never been well understood. In 2010, researchers at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute tried to find out. One of the researchers told an unrehearsed real-life story about her crazy prom experience inside an fMRI machine that then produced an image of her brain activity while telling that story.
Afterwards, she put several students into the fMRI machine and had them listen to a recording of her telling the story, so an image of their brains was produced of them listening. And later, when the students recounted as much of the story as they could remember, they were scored on their comprehension.
When the fMRI images of the speaker’s and students’ brains were compared, the students’ brains mirrored the speaker’s brain. Meaning, the active parts of the students’ brains listening to the story were the same as the active parts of the speaker’s brain, but with a delay of 1 to 3 seconds.
The researchers suggest this short delay is consistent with the time it takes for information to flow from the speaker’s brain and be comprehended in the listener’s brain. Overall, the brain mirroring with delay implies a process by which a speaker’s story can “induce and shape the neural responses in the listener’s brain.” But for storytellers it means, “slow down so the listener can keep up!”
Amazingly though, some parts of the listeners’ brains actually became active before the speaker’s brain, as the listener tried to anticipate and predict the story. The extent of the listener’s ability to anticipate what was going to come next in the story was closely related to their level of understanding and comprehension, suggesting that two key requirements of telling an effective story are (1) make the direction of the story easier to predict and (2) actively engage the listener.
Finally, there was a strong positive correlation between the comprehension level of the listener and how well the listener’s brain activity mirrored the brain activity of the speaker. The more closely the listener’s brain mirrored the storyteller’s, the better the listener’s comprehension. Nick Morgan, a communication theorist and a speaker on storytelling, would likely say this research supports his belief that a clear story that conveys the depth and focus of the speaker’s emotion “can bridge the undeniable difference among humans.”
Oftentimes, people tell stories haphazardly, just for the fun of it. But as trial lawyers, we have to purposefully tell our clients’ stories to the jury so they can understand the truth about what happened. We have to think about what we want to say, how to say it, and what effect we want it to have on the listener. The meaning of communication is the response that you get.
So after my friend told me about her trip and that café, I got up, walked across the coffee shop, and picked a bottle of Napa Valley red wine off the wall. Regardless of why she told me that story, the wine was great.
For more information, please listen to the following podcasts:
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/segments/122564-soul-mates-and-brain-doubles
http://clocktower.org/show/memory-networks-helene-nymann-lauren-silbert