by Alan Alda
“You locked?”
“It was not pleasant.”
“So, I guess that’s perfect. You’ll never forget it.”
“Never. It doesn’t fit in the nice category, though. It goes in the traumatic category. But how amazing it is that a memory is more imprinted if the experience that surrounded the memory being formed was a very salient experience.”
“So, must you have emotion associated with something to be able to remember it?” I asked. “Or is it just that emotion makes a memory stronger?”
“I think it’s more a question of strength,” she said. “And it’s not a simple curve. More emotional context doesn’t necessarily mean better or stronger memory.”
And, apparently, some people find emotion in things that others don’t.
“What about people who are trying to learn stuff that doesn’t seem to most of us to have an emotional content?” I asked her. “What about you? Can you get emotional about something highly technical?”
“Well,” she said, “if I was going to list where I was ‘on the day of…,’ on my list would obviously be the day that Kennedy was shot—and 9/11—but one of them would be the first time I read the paper that described single-channel recording…a recording of a receptor opening and closing.”
Later, after our talk, I would go home and look up what a receptor was (roughly speaking, a little thing on the end of a brain cell that receives what another brain cell is squirting at it, which is how our billions of brain cells talk to one another, making us feel hungry or sad, or Republican). I didn’t want to interrupt her, though, so all I said at the time was, “You mean a receptor in the brain?”
“Yep. But it was the fact that you could record it. Neher and Sakmann got the Nobel Prize for it. I remember where I was standing. I remember what I was wearing when I opened Nature and saw those traces.”
It was fun to see her excitement. This must be the kind of hair-rising-on-the-neck experience that scientists have when they know they’re in the presence of something never known before. And the ability to describe the emotion they felt in that moment helps the rest of us understand why science is so exciting.
“What made you remember that so vividly?” I asked her.
“I got a rush of how it was a new world. A new era. It was a molecule opening and closing. It’s the elemental unit of neural communication—the ultimate molecular biology. They had figured out a way to record just that electrical activity. Just that open and close…It was a very emotional moment.”
“You felt it that strongly.”
“That was ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ stuff. And I tell people if they don’t hear the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ when they do this work, they shouldn’t be a biophysicist.”
FEAR
As helpful as the thrill of discovery can be for forming a memory, fear still has a powerful effect on us. Lorna told me how she had worked on manipulating memories—looking for changes she could introduce into the chemistry of a brain, for instance, to retain a memory, or to get rid of one. And memories formed in fear were her original focus.
“That was the first thing I started with,” she said, “because it’s such a potent thing. It’s so potent at imposing a memory that it only takes one trial: one pairing of a sound with a shock for the animal so that the next time they hear that sound they’re like, Oh, oh, shock. It makes sense, right? You’re going to learn if something’s bad. It’s not like you’re going to say, ‘Well, that lion was really unpleasant. I think maybe I’ll come back here and see if I like it the next time.’ You get it, right? It’s not like you’re going to get a lot of chances.”
“And that’s why people thought for so long that the one emotion that makes you remember something is fear?” I asked.
“Right, because it’s one of the easiest ones to demonstrate. But both positive experiences and negative experiences can affect memory.”
THE AMYGDALA
This activity was happening, she told me, in the little almond-shaped part of the brain called the amygdala, where both positive and negative experiences register. “Actually,” she said, “they both happen in the amygdala, and people didn’t appreciate that either; that the amygdala actually is really complicated and it involves not just fear learning but also positive-reward learning. It’s a really interesting, very antique structure; it’s really old. It’s really, really fundamental.”
I was feeling more than ever that emotion itself is an ancient, fundamental means of gaining and keeping knowledge. It may not be the only way we retain what’s communicated to us, but it would be careless to ignore such a powerful tool when we want people to understand and remember what we tell them.
“So, how can we excite emotions in people who have no training in what we’re talking about?” I asked her.
“Story,” she said. “Like when you were sick—the anastomosis story.”
She had participated in one of our workshops and heard me tell my story of nearly dying in a small town in Chile.
In an emergency operation in the middle of the night, a doctor had to cut out about a yard of my intestine to save my life. He was a brilliant surgeon and an extraordinary communicator. He realized he had to perform what’s called an “end-to-end anastomosis,” but he didn’t use that term when he told me what he had to do. Instead, he leaned in, made eye contact, and said, “Something has gone wrong with your intestine, and we have to cut out the bad part and sew the two good ends together.” I have never heard a clearer, more accurate description of something with such a frighteningly fancy name.
“Everybody remembers that story,” Lorna said. “It’s very empathetic.”
The story is memorable because a life is in the balance. It will stick longer in the minds of the doctors in the audience than if I say, “When you talk to a patient, try not to use jargon.”
If we’re looking for a way to bring emotion to someone, a story is the perfect vehicle. We can’t resist stories. We crave them.
CHAPTER 18
Story and the Brain
Don Hewitt, who invented the television show 60 Minutes, had a story he loved to tell me. I knew him for thirty years and he probably told me this same story four or five times a year. I think it never stopped amazing him. It went like this: When a producer would come into his office to pitch a segment, if they started telling him about an issue, or a law that needed to be changed, or a scam that was making the rounds, he would put up his hand to stop them, and he’d say, “Tell me a story.”
Don was certain that these four words were what kept 60 Minutes at the top of the ratings for decades. He was probably right. The reports the show produced were usually serious and informative, but they didn’t seem like lessons. A segment wasn’t a treatise on espionage, it was a story about the fortunes of one particular spy; it wasn’t an analysis of corporate malfeasance, it tracked the misfortunes of a whistle-blower. The show repeatedly won awards, and it won the allegiance of the audience.
When scientists are talking to the public, they’re trying to reach that very same audience, and so are corporations and government agencies, and they probably won’t reach them as well as they could without a good sense of story.
Our lives are filled with stories, and yet when we want to communicate something important to us, we often forget there’s a story behind it. This is even stranger when you remember how deeply embedded storytelling is in all of us.
I got insight into this when I was talking about story one day with my friend Graham Chedd. Graham and I have been friends for more than twenty years, and worked together to help scientists communicate clearly on the science programs we shot for television. As producer and director, Graham had me catch a shark in a rowboat off the coast of Hawaii, told me to climb to the top of what scientists said was an overdue-to-blow Mount Vesuvius, and generally exposed me to mortal danger in other fun ways. He also got me to the emergency room in Chile when I needed that life-saving operation, and I owe him my life. We had been through many stories together, b
ut in all that time, we had never talked about story itself. Now Graham was a professor at the Center, teaching science communication, so I was curious. How did he go about teaching story?
“First of all, I often show that little video that we did with the baby at Yale.”
The video was an experiment we shot for a miniseries called The Human Spark. The star of the experiment was Nora, a curious, alert, six-month-old girl.
Karen Wynn, the Yale researcher, had set up a puppet show in which each character was simply a geometric shape with a pair of buttons for eyes. The figure was simple and cartoonish, and yet Nora was riveted by this abstraction of a face. A red disc with eyes was struggling to move up the side of a mountain, but when it got near the top, a yellow triangle with eyes would push it back down the mountain. It wasn’t until a blue square with button eyes came in behind the red disc and helped by pushing it up the mountain that the red disc made it all the way to the top.
After the puppet show, when Nora was given the chance to choose which of the characters she liked, she immediately reached for the cooperative blue square. This was the choice of almost every child in the study. It was a fascinating look at how, even as infants, humans seem to have a preference for those who are cooperative, and to have a sense of right and wrong behavior.
But Graham came away from the shoot wondering if there wasn’t something else also happening in the child’s mind. He said, “I interpreted it, in addition, as meaning that the baby is able to put a story to it, is able to interpret what was going on as a story: ‘Oh, I see. That shape is trying to get up the hill, and this other shape is trying to push it down, and this one’s trying to push it up.’ There’s a little story that forms in the baby’s mind to interpret what she or he is seeing.”
This was an interesting idea, but we wondered if Graham was over-interpreting.
We got in touch with Karen Wynn, who did the study. “I don’t at all think you’re over-interpreting,” she said. “In order to sense a meaning—good or bad—to the actions, there has to be a narrative of the kind you describe: ‘This one’s attempting to do such and such, that one comes along and attempts to help, but this other one comes along and tries to hinder.’ It doesn’t make sense without this narrative.”
The important point, she feels, is that “babies are following events and understanding them in context.” Keeping track of the context can cause the baby to prefer the more aggressive behavior. “Sometimes,” she said, “babies prefer a hinderer to a helper—when, for instance, the recipient of the hindering is someone who was mean to another guy. The specific action of helping or hindering isn’t itself judged as ‘bad’ or ‘good,’ but judged in the context of what came before.”
“So, in a sense,” I said to Graham, “a feeling for story seems to go back all the way to infancy, doesn’t it? Those kids were really young.”
“Six months. They were barely able to do more than gurgle, but they were able to uniformly interpret what they saw and turn it into a little narrative in their heads. Then, all through childhood, that’s what you do: ‘Once upon a time…’ It’s all stories.”
When Graham said the babies were able to “interpret” what they saw and turn it into a narrative, something clicked for me. I remembered a leading brain scientist I had interviewed years earlier, Mike Gazzaniga. Mike had done breakthrough work with patients who had lost the connection between the right and left hemispheres of their brains. (In order to stop epileptic seizures, surgeons had severed the cable that connected the hemispheres [their corpus callosum], leaving them effectively with two brains, each of which functioned on its own.)
Sometimes it was hard for a person with two brains to make sense of what he saw, but Mike identified a sense-making function in the left brain that he called “the interpreter.”
Mike would show two pictures of objects to a patient in such a way that only his left brain could see one of them—say, a picture of a chicken claw. Mike would ask him to choose which of four other pictures the claw best went with and to point to it. With his right hand, the hand connected to his left brain, the patient would pick the picture of a chicken as the picture that went best with a claw.
The other picture, also shown at the same time but to the right side of the brain, was a picture of a snow scene along with pictures of four different objects, including a shovel. The patient would correctly point with his left hand (the one connected to his right brain) at the shovel as the object that best went with the snow scene.
With each half brain pointing to its own answer, the patient was then asked, “Why did you do that?” One side of his brain knew the shovel went with snow and the other side knew the chicken claw went with the chicken. But in fact one side didn’t know why the other had made its choice. This is when the left-brain “interpreter” got to work. When the patient was asked why he felt those pictures went together, his left brain had to make sense of his two choices. Again, the left-brain interpreter knew why the chicken was chosen, but in fact did not know why the left hand was choosing the shovel. Unconsciously turning it into a rational choice, the left brain deftly said, “Well, you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.”
Mike did this experiment thousands of times and saw repeatedly that when the right and left brains, operating independently, made strange choices, the interpreter would always come up with some plausible explanation. As Mike has written: “Though the left hemisphere had no clue, it would not be satisfied to state it did not know. It would guess, prevaricate, rationalize, and look for a cause and effect, but it would always come up with an answer that fit the circumstances.”
I wondered if there was some connection between this interpreter function and how we rely so much on story. I called Mike and asked him if he thought they were related in some way.
He did.
Mike said, “The vast majority of everything we do goes on outside of our consciousness, everything from touching the end of your nose to trying to think about the next sentence you’re going to say. What comes out of that is how we behave or what we say. We have this left-brain monitoring that’s constantly trying to make sense out of that. I’d say that this interpretation, the storytelling, is fundamental to how we express ourselves to others and how we integrate others to our space.”
“You mean this literally as story?” I asked him. “You’re not using the word story analogously?”
“No, no, no, it’s a story. It’s how we best understand and can retain the meaning of what our actions are in any given moment.”
The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio makes the same point when he calls stories “a fundamental way in which the brain organizes information in a practical and memorable manner.”
But after hearing from these scientists that storytelling is so much a part of our makeup, I was surprised by how hard it is for many people to understand they have a story to tell.
THE STORIES IN OUR LIVES
In his class, after Graham shows scientists the video of the infants watching the drama of the shapes, he tries to get them to see the stories in their own lives. “One of the things we try to do,” he said, “is remind them that their scientific lives are full of stories, which they don’t even appreciate as stories—even though every experiment is a story. In every experiment, there’s a question which is raised in the scientist’s mind; he or she thinks they can build on that knowledge, create something new. They come up with a plan. All sorts of things go wrong: The experiment fails, somebody quits, they drop the beaker. It’s a struggle. Then, finally, there’s a resolution. We’ve gone to a higher level. Or maybe not, maybe we haven’t gotten anywhere. But even if it’s failed, we’ve learned something.”
THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON STORY
Is story really that important in helping us communicate? And if it is, how does it do it?
The answer may lie in what story does to our brains. According to Uri Hasson, a neuroscientist at Princeton, when you tell me a story, our brains get coupled in a very real way.
Here’s the experiment he’s done that shows that: Someone watches a movie he’s never seen before, while lying in an fMRI machine. Then he’s asked to tell the story of the movie to someone else. His story is recorded, and so is his brain activity while he tells the story. Interestingly, the areas of the brain that are active while he’s watching the movie are also active while he tells the story of the movie. But the real surprise is that when the recording of his telling the story is played for other people, during their own fMRI sessions, the same areas are active in their brains. It’s as though they’re watching the movie, even though they’re only hearing the story. This activation takes place moment by moment in the story. As Uri told me, “What we see is that basically by speaking, you are activating the pattern of responses that are unique to the moments of watching the movie….It makes you look as if you really watched the movie.”
“So, it sounds like you’re saying that people are more in tune with one another if they trade information through story.”
“So far, we see that storytelling is amazing; it has the power to make people really aligned and more effective passing information between them.”
I know, in my own experience, people have a harder time understanding what I tell them if I don’t tell it as a story.
I’m at a large dinner party, sitting next to someone who, graciously fulfilling her obligation to make conversation, asks me what I’ve been doing lately. “Making any interesting movies?” How do I start? I love acting, but I can get really excited by the work I do with scientists, and I like to share it with people. But for some reason, I don’t tell her a story. I tell her facts. “I helped start the Center for Communicating Science and I spend most of my time helping scientists and doctors communicate better with the public and with policymakers, and in fact…” I don’t get to the end of the sentence before I see a neon sign in her eyes flashing a distress alert: Oy, she’s thinking. What’s all this about? How am I going to pretend to be interested in whatever this is?