Story Telling Enhances Learning and Activates our Brains
For over 27,000 years stories people have been telling stories.. Stories have been used successfully to teach culture, traditions, life skills, morals and values. Some experts state story telling is still one of the fundamental ways we communicate. In fact, Jeremy Hsu found that nowadays 65% of our conversations are made of personal stories and gossip.
Spanish researches discovered that when we hear a boring power point presentation our language processing parts in the brain get activated. However, when we hear a story, several other regions of the brain get activated too. For example if I were to tell you a story about a 5 year old girl who loves walking into her Grandma?s farm house and smells the apple pie cooking inside the wood fired oven; your sensory cortex would lights up. Similarly, if I told you a story ?about my gruelling bike up a mountain, through the snow and freezing rain; your sensory and your motor cortex (which coordinates the body?s movements) would get activated.
People like to relate the stories to their own experiences. This activates another part of the brain called insula, which helps us relate to that same experience of nostalgia, joy, pain, etc..
Princeton?s Uri Hasson writes ?a story is the only way to activate parts in the brain so that a listener turns the story into their own idea and experience.? He also stated, ??storytelling is the only way to plant ideas into other people?s minds ?
The next time you are facilitating training, teaching or even selling something, enhance the participants learning by telling them a story, where the outcome is using the concepts or theories you are teaching.
Award winning speaker, Neil Dunsmore and I will be demonstrating and discussing how to ?Enhance Learning through Story Telling? on Tuesday, April 9th, 2013 to the Human Resource Professional Association (HRPA) Learning and Development group. We hope you can join us.
