When people have to justify the importance of stories to an audience, they frequently rely on a familiar story to convince people that humans were born to appreciate stories. It usually begins with a nod to how as kids we listened to stories our parents read to us, I call this the appeal to personal nostalgia.

Then the presenter will often remind us that humans have been sharing stories for generations, usually around fires. This scene always has a fire, although I am not sure how historically accurate that is from an anthropological standpoint. I call this the appeal to collective nostalgia.

In both cases, rather than lay out any research or data to make the case, an advocate for storytelling almost always convinces the majority of folks that storytelling just makes sense. While I tend to agree with nodding crowd in such presentations, I think it’s important to give right brain thinkers a few solid reasons to believe in stories too. So here are two research based reasons to help convince you or your skeptical colleagues.

Give your brain a break

As a former college professor I did a lot of research when I set up my classes on ways to make learning easy for students. Let me assure you that did not mean making the content or writing assignments easy, but if there was a core concept I wanted students to learn, it is vitally important to understand what distracts people from learning.

Instructional designers call the strain on our brains “cognitive load”, and people who have sat through bad Powerpoint presentations experience it everyday when a slide appears with 12 pt font and a speaker talking while you are trying to read. Simply put, the more you rely on complex and needlessly artificial means of conveying information, the less likely people are to remember what you said and what they read.

From an evolutionary perspective, our brains developed an ability to read long after they developed their ability to visualize scenes. When we hear stories, those visual centers and olfactory centers of our brains light up, and the cognitive load on our brain is lower than if we were reading expository text with dry unemotional, visually dead language.

That means if you use stories, you are giving your audience a chance to work less hard to process new information, and even better you are probably making them happier. (More on that fact in another blog post)

Our aim is to help people retain

In addition to growing research using fMRIs to measure brain activity by neuroscientists, we are also seeing a lot of educational studies examining learning and memory. Depending on which study you cite, stories are at least twice as effective and up to twenty times as effective at helping people retain information.

There’s a lot of nuance in how the memory works in these situations and the type of information that is retained, so I will go into more depth on this in future blog posts, but if you need to sell your rational friends on the power of stories with simple reasons, give them these:

• Stories are easier on our brains
• We remember more information for longer in story form

And if they need more convincing, it never hurts to conjure up an image of people huddle around a fire exchanging stories to get them emotionally hooked. It’s a pretty compelling scene.

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