This is part of a series covering a book by a master storyteller, Paul Furiga. This episode covers chapter two. It is a deep dive centered on an experiment that I found fascinating done by a researcher named Uri Hasson and his team at Princeton University. And this is the critical thing to know about stories and why they work. It’s not fufu marketing, it is biology and what Dr. Hasson and his team did is they found a young woman who told a very relatable story. It was essentially her worst prom story. They had her get inside of a functional MRI machine, which is one of the many tools modern medicine has to see what’s going on inside our craniums while we’re experiencing certain events. Right? Great diagnostic tool for multiple purposes.
Paul tell us, “Dr. Hasson and his team have this young woman lie down inside this tube and share her story and they recorded her brainwaves as she related this story. And in the book, I actually have a link to some of the audio of the actual story, which is kind of fun if your listeners want to check that out. So she shares the story about her worst prom date ever, and then what Dr. Hasson and his team did is they got some test subjects and they put them back in the same tube. If any of your listeners have ever had an MRI, they’ll put you in this tube and you got to be in there for a while. You can play music or look at pictures or whatever because you’re in there for a while. You can’t move.
What they did is they put people inside the tube and they played them this woman’s story. And once again, they recorded the brainwaves of these test subjects who knew nothing about the story, didn’t know the woman who was telling it, or anything. And they look to see what happened. As you mentioned in the book, I have one of the screenshotts, the researchers published in their paper that shows that the speaker’s brain looks like this while it’s telling the story. And as the listeners taking in the story, the two brains sync up in unison.”
Listen to this episode to hear more and rethink how you are telling stories.
