Why you need Storytelling?

I had told traditional Afghan stories to English audience and Western fables to Afghans and I had a surprising finding which I turned into an experiment. I divide the audience into groups and give them different translations of the same story which is recounted to them by a team leader. Then members of each team present the story to the whole workshop. Then I ask them to compare their story with the other team and at their astonishment reveal that it’s the same story. Participants remove components of the story which are jerky, vague, overexplanatory and inconsequential; they also add other bits and reorder it. When anything appeared incomprehensible, it was either omitted or explained away. Turning the confusing and random into a comprehensible story is an essential function of the storyteller yet none of these people identified as a storyteller. Our brain is wired for storytelling but its fired up when our curiosity is tickled, when we see art that draws us in or become in contact with foreign stories that’s human but not quite like us.

We're surrounded by chaotic information. Our brain sorts through an abundance of information and decides what salience information to include in its stream of consciousness. Narrative is used to simplify and alter the world. There's a chance that you've been made aware of these processes when in a crowded room, you've suddenly heard someone in a distant corner, speaking your name. This experience suggests the brain's been monitoring myriad conversations and has decided to alert you to the one that might prove salience to your well-being. It's constructing your story for you sifting through the confusion of information that surrounds you and showing you only what counts. This use of narrative to simplify the complex is also true of memory. Human memory is episodic. We tend to experience our messy past as highly simplified sequences of causes and effects. It's also autobiographical those connected episodes are imbued with personal and moral meaning.

The cosmic hunt myth, a version of which can be found in many cultures, is so interesting. A version of it exists in many culture from African to Native American and Greek to Indian. Perhaps it originated in a dream or shamanistic vision but just as likely it started with someone at some point asked someone else “hey what are those stars that look like a bear?” and that person while leaning on a branch had said “well, it's funny you should ask” and here we are 20000 years later, still telling it. When posed with even the deepest questions about reality, human brains tend towards story. What is a modern religion if not an elaborate neocortical theory and explanation about what's happening in the world and why religion doesn't merely seek to explain the origins of life. It's our answer to the most profound questions of all: “what is good? What is evil? What do I do about all my love, guilts, hate, lust, envy, fear, mourning and rage. Does anybody love me? What happens when I die?” The answers don't naturally emerge as data or an equation rather they typically have a beginning, a middle and an end and feature characters with wills, some of them heroic some villainous. All co-starring in a dramatic changeful plot built from unexpected events that seems to me like storytelling.

We understand stories within a narrow cultural framework that’s shaped by our education, job, friends, family and community. That’s why the same religion varies from one group of people to another even within the same country. As a matter of fact they will be each other’s worst nemesis.  Our upbringing determines how we connect with characters, cause and effect, or the dramatic question. For instance, Afghans who grasp most of the Western fables or the Westerners who were deeply interested in the Afghan tales tend to be higher than average in the personality trait of openness, which strongly predicts an interest in cultural forms such as travel, poetry, and the arts and sometimes contact with psychiatric services.

Through storytelling we share experiences that took place thousands of miles away and many thousands of days ago. It’s a gift in the shape or form of mental puzzle that stays with the audience for days if not months ultimately becoming the source of meditation, debate and exchange. They will tell it to their friends and the art of storytelling is to create a new storyteller through the story. The art of a good story is to explain but not too much so we leave gaps where the audience can insert their own feelings and interpretations into why that just happened and what it all means. These gaps in explanation are the places in story in which the audience insert themselves, their memories, their connections, their emotions, all become an active part of the story. When the audience insinuate into a story we can create a resonance that has the power to shake them as only art can.