I’ll admit it; I’m a fan of Rachel Maddow. I feel distress for her every time she shares that she spent the whole day working on other stories, and then, what do you know, a new story has become more important by airtime.
And, yarg, all that work must be throw out.
I had another blog post for you today, but then yesterday the L.A. times published an Op-Ed, Second Opinion by Emily Falk that I think is more timely. Oh, well, I’ll do my other post another time.
Sigh.
(By revealing this personal story, I’m practicing what the article revealed.)
Here’s the more timely piece:
WHY IN THE WORLD WOULD YOU BOTHER TO READ STORIES?
What would you answer to the Why Bother to read stories question?
Are you in the camp that thinks taking time to read stories is a frivolous, shallow, self-indulgent, even a lazy, waste of time and attention? This would be the camp that thinks that reading a fiction story is a much less powerful way to learn than reading a something with “just the facts”.
I confess that during a strenuous doctoral training I sometimes thought of fiction reading as a “guilty pleasure.”
Uh-oh. To both you and myself.
If you are in the “It’s frivolous” camp, you’d be in the not-so-right camp. New neurological research shows the opposite is true.
In a recent experiment subjects were given a similar message in two ways, 1) a personal story, and 2) a teaching, didactic statement.
Here are examples of each type of message:
A personal story such as, “Joe his never smoked a cigarette in his life. He has heart disease because he was exposed to secondhand smoke from his father.”
A teaching principle: “Smokers can harm other people. Every year a lot of non smokers die from heart disease caused by secondhand smoke.”
What they discovered was that when people’s reasoning was disrupted with neurological stimulation and then they were asked to come up with arguments for or against the statements, they could come up with much better arguments for or against the personal stories than arguments for just the facts.
The Takeaway? The two types of messages were processed differently and the personal story had a more powerful effect.
These findings inspire me. Let me know what YOU think about the new findings.
Emily Falk, “How storytelling can promote social change: Stories processed in the brain differently from other kinds of information, more, deeply affect people’s belief” Los Angeles Times, June 27, 2021. Op-Ed, Los Angeles Times, research provides some answers
