We read a lot about how telling stories is important in business, but it’s also important in just building rapport in a room of people (especially a dinner). My favorite Eide Neurolearnaing Blog has an interesting post on recognizing great storytellers:
There are great storytellers all around us, and yet we don’t always recognize them. As children, these are children who can tire out their parents with all their talking. They have a knack for vivid sensory detail, and may have almost ‘photographic memory’ for events and details that they personally experienced. Richness of sensory detail or colorful point of view is not a problem for them, although simplification or summarization may be. They may have problems prioritizing or generalizing what they know, but they can play the film loop back in living, breathing detail.
These children, and adults are temporal lobe story tellers, experiencing and remembering personally and with all their senses. These children are natural writers and poets, but they may present paradoxically as poor students because they may forget impersonal information like math facts or spelling conventions, and be lost with bland memorization of factual lists. Exasperated parents may throw up their hands – why can’t they remember when they have such a fantastic memories? The answer is – is that personal and impersonal memory stores use very different parts of the brain.
Another lesson on why cognitive science is A Big Deal.