Stories have acted as a mechanism of transferring learned experiences with other human beings within small tribes,since our hunter-gatherer years. Even before we had written communication mechanisms, such as books, ( or even paper for that matter ), all human tribes were communicating their ideas, through story-telling.
It would be a fair assumption to make, that all these stories were generally used by the senior members of a tribe, to educate the young and bright minds, who were just starting their journey as a tribe member.
Since, oral communication was the norm, oratory skills must have been the key differentiator, between charming leader, and the other senior members of the tribe. Good storytelling has been the key tool in a leaders toolkit, for as long as human tribes have existed. If you, as a leader, can convey your ideas effectively, and convince the other members to agree on your version of a story, you were a very successful tribe leader.
The converse is also true, which makes storytelling and communication skill, supremely important as a leadership tool.
We can also infer that, the better the stories were remembered, the better the chances of survival of were for everyone in the tribe. Hence listening to stories, imagining visually what had happened, living the experience as a reality, would be one of the abilities which could be the deciding factor between life and death.
Listening to, and remembering, emotionally driven experiences of other humans is a naturally selected trait. Hence even in the modern world, people tend to invest themselves so much into various forms of stories, which are available through many channels like books, movies, television shows etc. This naturally selected trait, which was a virtue once, has now been hijacked, through content explosion on our personal "black mirrors".
All major religions, stem from a need to share experiences and knowledge which is deemed necessary to live a good life. Each religion has their own definition of "good", which they portray through their best stories.
Following this line of thought, it becomes easy to see why emotionally charged content is so easy to remember for people, as compared to raw data and facts. As many public speaking teachers explain, it is all about "telling a story". It is also very important to understand, that whenever you communicate with other people, you are communicating with a group of people, who have natural ability and bias towards understanding and remembering emotionally charged experiences.
Any person trying to build a great narrative, should use this fact to their benefit, by adding a minimum amount of emotion to their stories, even when the content itself is not at all emotional. This small change, can make any story more engaging, and much more effective.
Credits : Photo by Tamer TATLICI from FreeImages
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