Storytelling and its physical chemistry on the Brain.
Hooking users with the power of neurochemistry
Your brain chemistry
on storytelling
I read Giovanni René Rodriguez’s article; “This Is Your Brain On Storytelling: The Chemistry Of Modern Communication" on Forbes.com a few years ago and it particularly resonated with me because I finally grasped the powerful effects of storytelling on human behavior.
Read on to learn more about the role that storytelling plays in activating a small set of organic chemicals in your brain chemistry!
Article summarized and reworded for your reading pleasure by Moi
First, there’s cortisol, which gets produced when something warrants our attention like distress. When we hear about potential threats in our environment or hear something distressing in a story, cortisol helps us stay attentive. From a marketer’s perspective may be the compound most closely associated with “the top of the funnel” experience (the first contact with a customer) known as awareness. Or the hook.
Next comes a far more popular and controversial compound, dopamine. This gets produced to aid in an elaborate learning system that rewards us with pleasure when we follow emotionally charged events in a story. This takes us further down the funnel.
If cortisol helps with awareness, dopamine aids with arousal, or in other words, rewards us to stick with the journey.
And then comes the wonder drug of storytelling: oxytocin. This chemical has been identified as promoting prosocial, empathic behavior. And according to story scientists, it’s what enables us to identify with the hero/protagonist in a story.
So let’s pause for a moment, and summarize, we have a storytelling cocktail of chemicals: cortisol that helps with awareness; dopamine that helps with arousal (pleasure). With oxytocin, in combination with cortisol and perhaps with dopamine we have a drug that helps produce action.
This is intriguing and slightly dangerous to know that storytelling possesses the power to “hook” users into action by manipulating their neurochemistry. This knowledge should be used for the greater good but unfortunately people know the power of propaganda. The brain is so hungry for its pattern-making dopamine rewards, it overlooks contradictory or conflicting information whenever possible. Fewer people people may know just how biologically susceptible we are to telling stories and hearing storing stories that blind us to the truth, or other perspectives.
Storytellers have a choice and they are the most human when they exercise that choice with an understanding of the ethical implications of their craft.
