If you wanted to learn to cook a new dish, it would be great to have a chef in your kitchen to teach you. The chef could walk you through each step of the process. As you made mistakes or had questions, the chef could answer them and correct you.
The direct experience would involve all of your senses. You could smell and taste the raw ingredients as they transformed into something new. It would involve you physically as you chopped and stirred, mentally as you worked to understand the method, and emotionally as you interacted with the chef.
You would naturally create a story about this experience that you could use the next time you wanted to make the dish. It would also be a story that you could tell others, one where you could re-create the experience – the smells and tastes, the motions of the work, the feelings you experienced.
And it turns out that your listeners could learn how to make the dish from your story almost as well as if they had been there with the chef.
Why are stories which simulate an experience almost as good at teaching as experiencing the event yourself?
In Chip Heath and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick they explain that we are not simply passive recipients of a story. We become involved with the story as we identify with the characters and the storyteller’s world.
The Heath brothers describe research which indicates that we create a kind of geographic simulation of the stories we hear. We organize objects in their proper spatial location.
They also describe an experiment where participants were asked to mentally simulate the events related to a problem they were trying to solve. These subjects did better at coping with their problem. Better than the subjects who did nothing and better than those who visualized what it would feel like to have solved the problem.
Why does mental simulation work? It works because we can’t imagine events or sequences without evoking the same modules of the brain that are evoked in real physical activity. Brain scans show that when people imagine a flashing light, they activate the visual area of the brain; when they imagine someone tapping on their skin, they activate tactile areas of the brain. The activity of mental simulation is not limited to the insides of our heads. People who imagine words that start b or p can’t resist subtle lip movements, and people who imagine looking at the Eiffel Tower can’t resist moving their eyes upward. Mental simulation even alter visceral physical responses. When people drink water but imagine that it’s lemon juice, they salivate more. Even more surprisingly, when people drink lemon juice but imagine that it’s water, they salivate less.
The Heaths go on say that mental simulations help us to manage emotions. They help us to solve problems. And they can even help us to build skills.
The takeaway is simple. Mental simulation is not as good as actually doing something, but it’s the next best thing. And, to circle back to the world of sticky ideas, what we’re suggesting is that the right kind of story is, effectively, a simulation.
This is the role that stories play – putting knowledge into a framework that is more lifelike, more true to our day-to-day existence. More like a flight simulator. Being the audience for a story isn’t so passive, after all. Inside, we’re getting ready to act.
In the next post we’ll look at how you can use stories to create a simulation for your potential buyers, a simulation of what it would be like to work with you.
Some other related posts you might find useful:
About David Crankshaw
[...] the last post we looked at why mental simulations are almost as good as direct experience if you want to learn [...]