Pawanraj Sadhwani

I have been reading The Story Bible by Pearl Buck. It is The Bible, but without (most of) the "religious stuff". What it does is recount the stories in the Bible in short 10-12 page chapters. And as I read, I realize that as a story, the Bible is quite interesting.

And in that, it is not alone. The Quran, at its heart, is a story. The Bhagawad Gita, is just a small part of an epic called the Mahabharata. And most religions are underpinned stories about key figures and their deeds.

And that says something about the power of stories. Most of what we remember has a good story behind it. A good movie, a good book, an incident you remember in vivid detail - there's a good story behind it. Want to preach - Tell a story. The best adverts - tell a story. A successful sales proposal - dig a little deeper, and you'll find that it chronicles a journey, draws a picture, tells a story. Customer satisfaction, brand recognition, are all about stories. Have you ever got tips on how to improve your memory? Chances are you've been told to connect disparate elements together with the wackiest story imaginable for the strongest recall.

Why? Maybe the human brain likes to fill in the blanks between disparate facts. Maybe connections between neurons are analogous to connections between facts. Maybe it's that and the fact that human brains are the best pattern-recognition machines. If a certain group of "connected pieces" in a story are similar to something that we've experienced before, the brain just groups them together and invokes similar feelings to what we've previously experienced, making the feeling stronger.

Plain simple facts are forgotten. A story endures.

And the best stories reinforce already existing emotional structures, enhance experiences. They need an "investment" from the consumer of the story, so they feel a part of it.

But as we move towards a world with limited attention spans and overload of stimuli, the window of this "investment" becomes shorter and shorter. What we end up with is a world of instant gratification - one that does not allow time to build "connections", the one that isn't built to endure. I wonder if the world seems a lot more ephemeral, the pace of change so fast, BECAUSE there is no time to stop and listen to stories. I wonder if life seems "incomplete" because we're not part of a story or narrative - living life instead, as a series of transactions. I wonder if the lack of stories is what has caused this to happen.

Perhaps, what the world needs, is more connections, in more ways than one.