# Your Brain on Story  👤 [Stanford](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-EnprmCZ3OXyAoG7vjVNCA) 🔗 [Watch video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGrf0LGn6Y4) ## Summary Kendall Haven proposes his Story Influence Theory by discussing the science of [[storytelling]] and how our brains are hardwired to understand the world through stories. He explains the neural mechanisms that control *participation*, *engagement*, and *influence* in stories, linking them to specific [[Story Elements]]. ==The core argument is that humans are evolutionarily wired to make sense of information in story form, with the brain's "neural story net" (NSN) distorting incoming information to fit story structures.== He also introduces a formula for calculating the "influence potential" of a story based on elements like residual emotion, identity character, and foe character. ## Key points - Human brains are hardwired to understand the world in story terms due to reliance on stories for communication and archiving information before writing. - The "neural story net" (NSN) is a fixed network of brain sub-regions that distorts incoming information to make it fit story structures. - Engagement is emotionally-laden attention and a gateway to influence. - Key story elements that control engagement include characters, goals, motives, conflicts, struggles, and details. - [[Influence]] is determined by elements like the main character's goal, motive, the antagonist, the climax scene, and the emotional resolution. - Story is not just content, but a way to organize content and structure the framework. - Examples of using story principles to re-position companies or non-profits. ## Technical terms - **[[Neural Story Net (NSN)]]**: A fixed network of sub-regions in the lower back part of the brain that processes incoming information and distorts it to fit story structures. It acts as an intermediary between the outside world and conscious mind, ensuring information is interpreted in story form. - **[[Make Sense Mandate]]**: The brain's inherent drive to either make sense of incoming information or ignore it. This task is assigned to the NSN, which processes information in story form to fulfill this mandate. - **[[Engagement]]**: Emotionally laden attention dedicated and mentally focused over time - **[[Influence]]**: Changing attitudes beliefs knowledge and behavior ## Conclusion The video explains how stories profoundly impact human understanding and decision-making. By understanding the underlying neural mechanisms and key story elements, storytellers and communicators can craft more engaging and influential narratives. The speaker suggests that story is not just the content, but the structure through which content is understood, and by intentionally shaping that structure, one can better influence how the audience relates to the information being presented. --- Welcome to Digital Storytelling. In this course you will be introduced to the elements and structures of story, arguably one of the most important and fundamental forms of human understanding. We will explore different aspects of storytelling, including story structure, narration, and point of view, and then move on to how new media technologies are being used to explore new forms of storytelling in the 21st century. We will also explore storytelling as a practice through assignments. In a digital world increasingly filled with ever-accelerating volumes of visual, audio, and textual information, stories continue to have a central role in how we make sense of ourselves and the world around us and in how we make decisions and create the societies we live in. Narratives, according to French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, temporalize human experience; that is, they provide a structure within which we can make sense of things that happen to us and to others by organizing it in terms of a past, present, and future—or, to say it another way, by organizing experiences into beginnings, middles, and ends. Of course, stories are much more than their temporal architectures, and even these are undergoing significant transformations and challenges in the wake of postmodern sensibilities and digital technologies. To start, you should begin thinking about what makes a story a story—a form of communication that some argue is one of the foundations of human knowledge. “Homo narrates” is how Kendall Haven puts it in his short lecture “The Brain on Story,” the first of this unit’s materials for you to review. Haven talks about the importance of story to human evolution.  Cave painting created by the San people in the Cathedral Cave near Stadsaal. (Valroe, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.) Kendall Haven is a storyteller and a social scientist who has investigated the question of what makes a good story, such as why some stories are more memorable and influential than others. It is an important question for anyone who cares about making cultural texts that hold people’s attention and that can change how we think and behave. Haven and his team of researchers studied the responses of thousands of Americans to different kinds of stories. What they discovered were commonalities in the kinds of stories that captured audience imagination. Haven summarized the process as follows: (1) the story creates engagement for the audience; (2) the story completes transportation; and (3) the story creates identification. Essentially, we must ask the following questions: Is the story engaging? Do audiences willingly join the story? Do audiences identify with the story’s characters and events? ## Study Questions 1. Take a moment and describe to yourself what _engagement_, _transportation_, and _identification_ mean. 2. How does Haven explain the relevance of stories to the way the human brain works? What is a “neural story net”? 3. Take note of the seven elements that accord with the neural story net (as well as an eighth element that creates transportation). 4. Haven goes on to elaborate on four important experiences from the perspective of the reader, all of which involve caring about and identifying with the protagonist. As a story creator, ask yourself these questions: Who is your audience? How do you want your audience to position itself in the story? These are questions that authors should consider when creating stories in any medium: - Who is the story about for me (the reader)? Who do I care about? - How bad is the ending for that character? - Who do I blame for it? Or, who gets the credit? - Who had the power to change the outcome but failed to act? Or, who gets the credit for acting? Kendall Haven, like Jack Hart in his article “Story” and John Yorke in his article “What Is Story?” (the next two readings for this unit), points to the elements of a story as the key to understanding how stories organize information. Here is a chart comparing how each of these authors discusses story elements. ![[Screenshot 2025-05-29 at 10.31.16 PM.png]] Despite the small differences, the pattern is clear: characters, goals, obstacles, resolutions. Hart and Yorke introduce some of the basic ideas of story structure, and in the next unit’s readings, we will see how elements are arranged within structures and why this is an enduring and critical part of understanding the cultural significance of stories today. Knowing the elements and structures of traditional stories is essential for good storytelling in the 21st century. As Hart suggests, even when traditions are challenged, as in the case of postmodern inversions of traditional story structures, the traditions endure in what is being challenged. The writers’ ideas here are helpful to us as storytellers working to make things meaningful in different ways. The choices made in telling stories efficiently, and in the assumptions made about what audiences know, will influence how we construct the stories we tell. Stories are used throughout cultures to make sense of the world and to arrange elements of experience into something meaningful—how we interpret the past, understand the present, and predict the future. Stories are also used to communicate with others and, perhaps most importantly, as we have seen in this unit, to seek the agreement of audiences with the sensibilities put forward in the story that is being told. ## Study Questions 1. Find a story from your day-to-day cultural consumption—from a blog, a news website, a newspaper, or a magazine. Can you find the elements that Haven, Hart, and Yorke are describing? 2. Pick a favourite film, and answer the following questions: 1. Who is the story about? Who do you care about in the film? 2. What happens to that character in the end? 3. Who do you blame for the outcome? 4. Who had the power to change the outcome but failed to act? 3. What does Haven suggest is the best way to get an audience to care about a character? 4. Test Haven’s postulate about the elements involved in the neural story net by telling yourself a story in seven sentences, throwing in some detailing flourishes. Keep a copy of the story for future exercises.