I hope you enjoyed my post last Friday called Direct Marketers Go Where Branders Fear to Tread- My Interview With “the World’s Greatest Copywriting Coach” (Video).
If you haven’t seen it yet, then make sure to check it out after you read this one.
The following post is from my website RecessionSolution.com. It originally appeared on October 25, 2016, but I feel it’s important to share it again here on my new site.
WHY? Because whether you’re a content marketer or a direct response marketer, you need to understand the power of stories to amplify any/all of our marketing efforts.
This post reveals the behind-the-scenes, neurological secret that reveals just why stories are so powerful.
This Is Your Brain on Stories
“The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning, and does not stop until you get into the office.”
– Robert Frost
(The image above shows activity in the brain when hearing stories http://gallantlab.org/huth2016/)
I’ve talked before about the reason why stories are so needed and so powerful when they are used in content marketing.
So I KNEW, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that stories were powerful. I’ve seen the effect that they have on people!
But it wasn’t until I was listening to an episode of the “Freakonomics” the other day, that I knew the reason why this is true based on Neuroscience.
In other words, I suddenly understood what stories do inside our brains which, in turn, gave me the neurological reason why stories are so powerful.
Let me explain…
I was listening to a “Freakonomics” episode called This Is Your Brain on Podcasts yesterday and Stephen J. Dubner was interviewing a guy named Jack Gallant.
I found out that Jack Gallant is a professor at UC Berkeley who does research focused on Cognitive Neuroscience and Behavioral and Systems Neuroscience.
And it was during one of his research projects that he discovered what stories actually cause to happen within our brains.
The Study They Didn’t Have to Pay People to Be a Part Of
Gallantand his team decided to test people while they listened to The Moth Radio Hour. They chose this because normally laying in an MRI scanner is very boring because they just flash words at the person inside the machine.
This is not the way to get brain activity going! 🙂
But the stories they share on The Moth are much different than flashcards. The stories are very engaging and compelling. In other words, people can’t NOT pay attention to these stories!
In fact, people loved the stories so much that Gallant said that they didn’t even have to pay the test subjects like they usually do. It was the perfect way to test how the brain responds to stories.
The people in the MRI scanners listened to a couple hours of stories. As they did, Gallant and his team measured their brain activity by measuring the changes in blood flow and blood oxygen in different locations across the brain.
As they measured these things, Gallant and his team tried to figure out what information in the stories was creating the activity at the different locations in the brain.
And that’s when Gallant and his team found something they weren’t expecting.
Stories Light Up the Brain
Gallant said that stories didn’t really activate the normal auditory part of the cortex like they expected them to. Instead, stories activated a larger constellation of areas in the brain – areas that represent different aspects of meaning.
Listen to what Gallant says about it in his own words…
“…the one very surprising thing from this study is that semantic information, the meaning of the stories, is represented broadly across much of the brain. All of those various areas of the brain represent different aspects of semantic information, in these really complicated maps that are very, very rich but fairly consistent across different individuals.”
– Jack Gallant, Interviewed on Freakonomics episode This Is Your Brain on Podcasts
Why do stories do this? Read on and I’ll explain…
My Take on Why the Brain “Light Ups” on Stories
My “take” on what Gallant said about why our brains light up is this….
When we are hearing or listening to a story, our brain isn’t just listening to dry information:
- It’s engaging with the stories.
- It’s trying to comprehend what’s happening in the story.
- It’s analyzing and calculating any numerical details in the story.
- It’s connecting the details of the story with its past experience and knowledge.
- It’s trying to anticipate what will happen next.
- It’s seeing what you’re describing.
- It’s feeling the emotions involved in the story
I’d say it simply like this: Your brain enters and experiences stories!
I’d say it simply like this: Your brain enters and experiences stories! Click To TweetYour brain can ignore dry facts. It passively takes in data and stats. But when you tell a story (if you tell it well), then the brain wakes up and plays along!
This is why stories are so powerful.
This is why you MUST use them in your content marketing.
How to Tell More Engaging Stories
If you want to learn more about how to tell stories that light up the mind, then check out my previous posts below:
3 Ways to Tap Into the Most Powerful Content Tool Ever Created – ContentMarketingInstitute.com
Have You Been Using the Most Powerful Content Marketing Tool Incorrectly? – MarketingInsiderGroup.com)
2 Days Left to Get a Free Copy of My Book
For a limited time, those who join in the month of April will get a FREE COPY of my book 51 Content Marketing Hacks.
(It’s a book FILLED with stories. You will not only discovered powerful examples of content marketing from throughout history, you’ll also see how I use stories to draw people in.)
Have You Read “The Direct Response Content Marketing Manifesto” Yet?
If you would like to know more about this site and the new form of marketing that I’ve come up with, then check out my “Direct Response Content Marketing Manifesto.”
Click the image below to read it now. (If it resonates with you, then become a free member today.)
