The target of all business strategy is the human mind, that biological engine built by evolution to constantly create and consume stories. Storified communication is not just another selling technique, but the key to capturing, engaging, and rewarding customer attention. As research has repeatedly shown, when marketing storifies its messages, consumers listen. In the age of distraction, attention caught and held is the marketer’s single most valuable asset.1
To bring home story’s unique ability to capture and hold audience attention, this chapter traces the evolution of story from day one. What follows is a speculative saga that spans hundreds of thousands of years and blends multiple scientific interpretations of human fossils2 into a three-act adventure that begins with the birth of consciousness. It builds as the mind battles for survival, and climaxes with the triumph of storified thought.
The nervous systems of billions upon billions of creatures evolved into greater and greater complexity over hundreds upon hundreds of millions of years. Then beginning two to three million years ago, severe planetary changes forced the central nervous systems of anthropoid bipeds to add brain matter, gray and white, at an average rate of one milliliter every three thousand years.3
The front-most portion of the prefrontal cortex known as Brodmann area 10 sits just behind the forehead. During human evolution, its six cortical layers expanded enormously in both size and reticulation, forcing the skull to grow wide and high. Over time, mutation by mutation, the hominid cerebrum gained one full liter of mass and became so tumescent, so structurally complex, its hundred billion cells so interconnected, that the brain, straining to the breaking point, erupted with the first human thought: I am.
The silent awareness of “Me” suddenly transformed a brain into a mind and turned an animal human. Animals react to the objects around them, but the human brain turned itself into an object. Consciousness, in effect, split itself in two.4
Self-awareness is like a mild schizophrenia. When you look at yourself inside yourself and think the thought You idiot!—who is angry with whom? When you’re pleased with yourself, who pats whose back? When you talk to yourself, who listens? How do these inner transactions work?
It goes something like this: Behind your active mind, at the irreducible crux of your humanity, an awareness observes your every thought and deed. This core self is the “proprietor,” so to speak, of your mind. As if looking through an inner prism, this subjective self splits off a version of itself, and then watches this doppelgänger think, choose, and act in the world. The core self then judges its outer self, positively or negatively, seeking to change its thoughts and behavior.
The core self’s observation of itself, strange though it may seem, is both natural and persistent. Tonight, as you dream, you will become a self-aware audience of one, watching yourself perform in your dreams as if you were an actor in an oddly unrealistic film.
Awake, you’re doing it now. If you were to ask yourself Who am I?, a sense of “Me” would rise up from the bedrock of your being. This awareness of “me-as-owner-of-myself” hovers behind your foreground consciousness, observing your waking thoughts, watching you read this, and noting how you’re doing. Don’t bother to turn and look. You cannot face yourself within yourself, but you know that “Me” is always there, always mindful, always watching.5
When self-awareness invaded the first human mind, it brought with it a sudden, sharp sense of isolation. The cost of self-consciousness is a life spent essentially alone, at a distance from all other living things, even your fellow human creatures. With that first, primordial I am moment, the mind felt not only alone but also in terror. For self-awareness brought another, even more frightening discovery, unique to humanity: time. The first human being suddenly found herself alone and adrift on the river of time.
In the wake of I am came the second human thought:… and someday my time in time will end. Not long after the birth of self-awareness, time-awareness flooded the mind, bringing with it dread. Fear is an emotion we feel when we don’t know what’s going to happen; dread is the emotion that grips us when we know what’s going to happen and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. And one dread is certain: Our days will stop like an unwound watch.
Prior to self-awareness, our Pliocene ancestors, like all animals, lived in the corporeal comfort of a perpetual present. But when the sense of I am separated self-awareness from its primal instincts, visions of a painful future streaked through the newly minted human mind.6 What’s more, the mind discovered that not only is the future in doubt, but the surfaces of people and things cannot be trusted; that nothing is what it seems.
What seems is the sensory veneer of what we see, what we hear, what people say, what people do. What is hides beneath what seems. For truth is not what happens, but how and why what happens happens. With neither science nor religion to explain life’s unseen causalities, the suddenly self-aware mind must have roiled in confusion as chaos, enigma, meaninglessness, and brevity made life unlivable. The mind had to find a way to make sense out of existence.7
That’s when story rode to the rescue. Gene by gene, natural selection implanted the mental mechanisms of story-making into our DNA. As David Buss puts it, story-making is “. . . an evolved psychological mechanism, a set of procedures within the organism designed to take a particular slice of information and transform it via decision rules into output that historically has helped with the solution to an adaptive problem. A psychological mechanism exists in current organisms because it led, on average, to the successful solution for that organism’s ancestors of a specific adaptive problem.”8 In the case of human beings, the problem was chaos and the dread of death.
The storifying mechanisms of the mind work in this way: Throughout the day, the body absorbs millions of bits of raw, sensory stimuli. Somewhere below the level of consciousness, the mind sorts through this mass and imposes decision rules that sort the relevant from the irrelevant. It ignores 99 percent of all data and concentrates on the 1 percent that grabs attention.
And what grabs attention? Change. As long as conditions remain secure and constant, we pursue the business of life, but come change, and we’re suddenly under threat or surprised by good luck. In either case, we react. Subconscious survival systems kick into gear—chief among them story-making. Instantly, the core self triggers the mind to storify this event.
The brain flexes its storifying muscles in Brodmann area 10. Here, the past flows into the future as the mind recalls previous events and projects possible outcomes. The mind compares prior happenings of a similar kind with its current experience, so it knows what to do now and what to do in the future should this ever happen again.9
The mind, of course, does not convert every trivial change to story. Instead evolution has taught us to focus on meaningful, dynamic change.
Storified thought interprets every event in terms of its core value. In story creation, however, the word value does not refer to mono-concepts such as success, truth, loyalty, love, or freedom. Those words name only half a value. Dynamic events affect our lives not as singularities but as binaries of positive/negative value charge. They pivot our lives around experiences of success/failure, truth/lie, loyalty/betrayal, love/hate, right/wrong, rich/poor, life/death, winning/losing, courage/cowardice, power/weakness, freedom/slavery, excitement/boredom, and many more. Values pump the lifeblood of story.
For an event to be meaningful, the mind must sense that the charge of at least one value has undergone change. The reason is obvious: If the charge of a value at stake in a situation does not change, what happens is a trivial activity of no significance. But when a value’s charge changes from positive to negative or negative to positive (for instance, from love to hate or hate to love; from winning to losing or losing to winning), the event becomes meaningful and emotions flow. Because a well-told story wraps its telling around emotionally charged values, its meaning becomes marked in our memory.10
This is why a fictional event can be more memorable than an actual happening. Well-told stories implant patterns of possible behaviors as if they were the memories of actual experiences. These become matrices for future actions. The confused values in real life often make events forgettable, while the clarity and power of a fictional emotional charge cement it in memory as a powerful future reference point.11
To make sense out of life, the story-making mind strings meaning-charged events through time, connecting and unifying them by cause and effect. At story’s end, meaning is not only understood rationally but also felt emotionally.
The form of story, at its simplest, goes like this: As the telling opens, the central character’s life, as expressed in its core value (happiness/sadness, for example), is in relative balance. But then something happens that upsets this balance and decisively changes the core value’s charge one way or the other. He could, for example, fall in love (positive) or out of love (negative). The character then acts to restore life’s balance, and from that moment on a sequence of events, linked by cause and effect, moves through time, progressively and dynamically swinging the core value back and forth from positive to negative, negative to positive. At climax, the story’s final event changes the core value’s charge absolutely and the character’s life returns to balance.
The evolving mind’s mastery of storied perception gave it the means to streamline the overwhelming deluge of actuality into a manageable, efficient, human-size reality. Its story-structured processes imposed order, unity, and meaning on a chaotic, discordant, meaningless existence. Thanks to storied thought, humanity learned how to survive with purpose and balance. As Kenneth Burke put it, story equips us to live.12
In order to storify thought, the mind evolved and perfected eight powerful faculties. When used in concert, they interconnect our impressions of people, places, and things scattered through our past, present, and future into the coherent assemblage we call reality.
1. Self-Awareness: The power to distinguish the mind’s subjective, core self from its objective, public self and observe the outer self as if it were a separate personality.
Self-awareness, as we noted above, came with the first human thought. Although time changes the objective self, the core self feels that it lives unchanged and outside of time. Nonetheless, “Me” also realizes that it cannot exist without its objective self, and therefore dreads its loss.
Over time, storied thinking reshaped perception; the mind found meaning in existence and belief in life after death. With purpose in one hand and immortality in the other, humanity finally took its place in time.
2. Other-Awareness: The power to look behind the eyes of another person and sense within him a consciousness very much like your own.
With other-perception, your mind infers that whatever happens inside itself also happens inside the minds of others. Strong other-awareness becomes empathy—a combination of identification and insight such that when something happens to another person, it feels as if it happens to you.13
For the storyteller, other-awareness guides the creation of the characters that make the choices and take the actions that carry out the story.
3. Memory: The power to store and recall experience.
The past makes the future in this way: Memory builds an understanding of people and the world by recording patterns of experience, stacking them one on top of another by what they have in common, and then telling itself, “This is how the world works.”
The mind then uses these patterns from the past in an effort to control the future by taking actions designed to make history repeat itself.14 But often, at critical moments, our memory-based sense of probability explodes when a tried-and-true action triggers a wholly unexpected effect, leaving us feeling that when it really matters, memory betrays us.
As we will see in upcoming chapters, these violations of probability become the turning points that propel all stories.
4. Intelligence: The power to extract knowledge from both formal learning and everyday experience, and then apply deductive, inductive, and causal logics to reason to factual, truthful conclusions.
The finest intelligence also spots fallacies and refutes them. In storytelling, knowledge generates content—the setting and its cast of characters.
5. Imagination: The power to reshape reality into undreamed-of possibilities.
When knowledge becomes time-worn, the mind loses energy. But even the most calcified knowledge, stirred with imagination, can renew itself, becoming flexible and life giving.
In like fashion, the same old story, told over and over, risks emptiness and boredom. So story-makers call upon imagination to give their tellings limitless variations.
6. Insight: The power to see through appearances and perceive inner causalities.
An insightful mind reads surface signs and then senses the hidden forces that move within and cause things to happen. Data, for example, only measures the outer results of what has changed; insight discovers how and why what has changed has changed.
The storyteller, as we will see, uses this keen perspective to show us a world we think we understand, but then cracks open reality to first surprise us, then deliver a rush of insight into the hows and whys of that world and its characters. A lifetime of story-driven insights civilizes human beings, builds institutions, and makes culture viable.
7. Correlation: The power to create.
The correlating mind takes two things it already knows, and then seeks a hidden connection, a third thing that joins the two in a way no one else has ever seen before. This analogical logic is the essence of creativity. The discovery of the third thing fuses two known things into something utterly new—not just an innovation or refinement, but something unexpected and unprecedented.
Throughout history, master storytellers have constantly correlated new content with new forms in previously unimagined ways. But no matter how creative and revolutionary their tellings, the best stories always make a human sense, always shine a new light into human needs and human desires.
8. Self-Expression: The power to perform.
The self-aware mind harmonizes these distinct powers to thread its way through multidimensional, multileveled, ongoing realities, piecing causes to their effects, weaving people and events into story form. Telling begins in one mind, but it ends in another. None of the mind’s gifts would matter if the stories it creates could not be performed for other minds to experience.
From the earliest, talented storytellers performed three kinds of stories around the fire: action epics of hunting, combat, and survival against the elements; tales of the supernatural powers that control nature; and myths of immortality in an afterlife realm. The first became the foundation legends of civilizations, the second made sense out of time and space, and the third founded the world’s religions. Together these stories taught the tribe how to live in this world and prepare for the next.
The mind builds stories to bridge the gap between itself and the universe, between itself and the past, present, and future. Story form imposes order on chaos; it penetrates the enigma of the seems to express the cause and effect of the is; it unifies events to bring meaning out of meaninglessness. Knowledge expressed in story form gathers other human beings around its themes, uniting communities and building cultures.
So, in the marketing context, the takeaway is this: Storified communication is the most powerful form of messaging because story fits the mind; story fits the mind because the mind converts actuality into story in the first place. It’s a tautology. As Hamlet says, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
This is why story alone represents a way out of today’s marketing crisis—once you master story’s structure and how telling works.