Storyteller

Stories

You are already the most powerful storyteller walking on the planet, the only problem is you don’t realise it yet. As you are reading this text, your mind is more than likely starting to wander in different directions, you may be reading these words for sure, but what happens to those words when they integrate with your brain is something totally unique.

The words you are reading will only make sense when they match up with the stories you have created inside the depths of your neurons, which of course reside in your brain.

All of us have the ability to make sense of things that are happening around us and we do this through capturing short stories about the times, places, people and things that we observe, including the words that you are reading right now.

You have to create visual cues in your brain for many things and when you add some emotion and feeling to those visuals it will have a better chance of hard-wiring there. When our neurons hard-wire they stay inside our long-term memory for longer.

Stories when told well, will engender some emotion and feeling inside of you and when it does, that’s THE most powerful way for it to lay down new memory neurons. Therefore when you share stories make them relatable, memorable, different, unusual and stand out.

I love the following quote, it’s the one I always recall when creating stories.

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
~ Maya Angelou

Happy storytelling!

Michael de Groot

Story

Movies are still the best stories ever told, because it activates pretty much all the important regions in your brain. When viewing even a fictional story on the screen, you can’t help being transported into the story and feel like you are the main protagonist.

Couple this with our human sense of fairness, winning and surviving and we will generally always be on the side of the main heroin, literally willing her to succeed in her quest.

Physically we will have similar feelings of fear, anticipation, worry, doubt and our motor cortex in our brain the part that’s governing the firing of our muscles are also engaged. Wonder why you may feel breathless or exhausted after watching a gripping, high action movie? You just starred in it. And because all of those factors you will want to experience more of it next time. We are addicted to the thrill of movies.

I often witness my wife Clair filling her eye ducts with water when there is a sad scene in a movie. None of the action is actually happening to her but because of one of our other major emotions ‘empathy’, we are now feeling what the starring character is feeling. So if they are sad because they lose their partner or their fellow warrior in a fighting scene and they show sadness, we feel that sadness too. Us guys can often hold on and keep a stiff upper lip but the ladies have a better empathy button and will feel their hurt at a deeper level.

Happy watching!

Michael de Groot