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Curiosity and Storytelling, Mike Alpert
The power of storytelling cannot be overstated, both on an individual and group basis. Indeed, the legendary American author and Sarah Lawrence professor Joseph Campbell believed that myths - or culturally-important, symbolic narratives - are integral to both psychological and societal health.[1]
Most seasoned teachers have learned that narrative is a sure-fire way to grab the attention of a classroom. We are evolutionarily hard-wired to tune-in to stories. Researchers have speculated that it’s how our ancestors communicated about important knowledge that preserved survival. And it’s no surprise that teachers can have a similar impact.
There’s an old saying, “If you want me to understand something, put it in a story.” This is most certainly true. Anytime I’d look across the small sea of faces and see a hint of boredom, I’d subtly transition to the beginning of a story. “I remember this time when I was in sixth grade,” and, like magic, I’d see ears perk up and eyes gravitate directly to me. The interesting thing was, I could hook any piece of information to my story and students would remember it. Without that narrative hook, however, my factoids on the continental divide would be forgotten almost immediately. It turns out that embedding it into a story about seeing a grizzly bear in Glacier National Park created the right frame to hang on geographic facts like little ornaments.
This happens in part because we create curiosity when we tell an incomplete story. A 2020 study[2] used computer modeling to analyze about 40,000 conventional stories, including novels and storylines from movies. The analysis revealed a common underlying structure across this massive variety of narratives that included an initial staging phase, a plot progression phase, and a tension/conflict phase. This is similar to the concept of a narrative’s “arc” as originally outlined by well-known German novelist and scholar Gustav Freytag. Applied to the classroom, it’s not a significant leap to assume students can sense the beginning of a story and will anticipate the subsequent phases, creating engagement through heightened curiosity.
As storytellers, this curiosity creates a connection with our audience that can be quite strong. Indeed, there’s recent research that shows just how powerful this connection can be. Princeton Neuroscientist Uri Hassan has spent years focusing on brain-to-brain coupling during narrative storytelling. Hassan used brain scan imaging to prove something fascinating.
Imagine that you went to the movies and saw the latest action-adventure saga. Researchers can image your brain and see which areas light up while watching. Next, suppose you go home and tell your kids about the movie. As it turns out, the same parts of their brain will light up as if they were watching the movie themselves. What’s more, in a short amount of time, their stimulated brain areas will be activated prior to your own, as they anticipate the next event in the story.[3] They subconsciously begin to guess what will happen next, and this anticipation increases their comprehension.
Through the use of this brain-to-brain coupling, teachers can use narrative to link neural processes with their students and build anticipation. This anticipation also increases comprehension, which has a direct impact on learning in the classroom, creating the engagement necessary to retain information.
In considering how to use stories strategically in the classroom, it’s important to remember the lesson from our earlier discussion of dopamine. In Chapter One, we noted that rising dopamine creates a feeling of anticipation and high levels of dopamine produce a feeling of satisfaction. Similarly, we can hook students' attention and create that feeling of anticipation - or curiosity - through the use of story by means of adjusting what researcher Marina Bianchi refers to as “collative variables.”[4] While we can always make stories more compelling by adding elements of love, hate, danger, or fear, the audience can definitely be turned off by too much of any of these individual elements. Instead, Bianchi describes the more subtle way in which what she refers to as “collative variables” like “complexity, variety, novelty, or ambiguity” impact an audience. These variables are much more nuanced, but can be very potent, and they can build anticipation.
Adjusting these variables works because we’re often either bored by a topic that seems too familiar or overwhelmed by a topic that seems too foreign. Dialing up the complexity on ordinary subjects or reducing complexity on unfamiliar ideas can increase curiosity and make us feel either more interested or more comfortable. Either way, we become more curious.
Revisiting our previous example, let’s imagine that the first words out of my mouth regarding the continental divide consist of words like “watershed” and “hydrological.” It’s probable that the majority of eleven-year-olds before me begin to think about the video game they were playing last night or the text message that’s waiting for them in their backpack.
As I insert the phrase, “I remember one time …” and continue the story about my childhood trip to Montana, their attention snaps back into place. And, before long, I explain, “I saw the shape of Triple Divide Peak and began to understand how water on either side could flow to different oceans and, all of a sudden, the idea of the continental divide made a lot of sense.”
If I’m going about it correctly, I’m doing two things here. First, I’m relying on one of the basic narrative arcs that have been well established throughout history, much like the ones that were identified by both Freytag and the computer-aided study of tens of thousands of stories. Students are familiar with these and, as I start a story, they’re naturally pulled in by a desire to know what’s next. Second, I adjust the complexity, variety, or novelty in my story to convey my content.
In the end, these more technical aspects point toward a truth that so many of us know intuitively - as do our students. Good stories are intrinsically engaging. It’s no nefarious sleight of hand to smuggle our important content into those inherently interesting sagas. Indeed, if it’s incumbent upon us to teach in the most relevant method possible, we’d be fools to pass up such an opportunity
[1] “Joseph
Campbell.” Encyclopædia Britannica,
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 26 Oct. 2020,
www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph-Campbell-American-author.
[2] R. L. Boyd, K. G. Blackburn, J. W. Pennebaker, The narrative arc:
Revealing core narrative structures through text analysis. Sci. Adv. 6, eaba2196
(2020).
[3] Intersubject Synchronization of Cortical Activity During Natural
Vision
Uri Hasson, et al.
Science 303, 1634 (2004);
DOI: 10.1126/science.1089506
[4]
Bianchi, Marina (2014) : The magic of storytelling: How curiosity and aesthetic
preferences work, Economics: The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal, ISSN
1864-6042, Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW), Kiel, Vol. 8, Iss.
2014-44, pp. 1-30, http://dx.doi.org/10.5018/economics-ejournal.ja.2014-44
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