Looking for the Story Beneath

Storytelling is one of the big re-discoveries in communication. Books like "Made to Stick" tell that if you want the world to know your message you have to tell it in an accessible story, not with statistics and facts. Brain research supports this: We are more likely to remember content that we learned as part of a story (preferrably an emotional story), rather than from a list of "things to remember". In "The Meme Machine", Susan Blackmore even goes so far to suggest that our brains are so big because we needed the brain power to be better story tellers. Good story tellers increased their chances of survival.

In this context, it is easy to understand that there can be no fundamental change unless we start changing our stories.

Identifying the underlying story in the news, in our own actions is the first step in that direction - the ability to see the cultural meme, the archetypes and symbols is also what, in my view, empowers anyone a) to become a good trend watcher and b) to recognize that we can choose which stories we tell, which memes we spread.


The short documentary by below shows personal stories of people who have been hit hard by the financial crisis. People who realized that they have the choice to either remain in shock and feel victimized, or give their personal life story a new positive turn. Very inspiring!



(see related post "How to Cook Up the Future)

Stop asking when the downturn will be over

On every other business website you are being polled today about when you think the downturn will be over. Consultancies and research institutions chase headlines with surveys of executives or other "downturn experts" (like financial analysts) on that same question. And everyone is looking for signs of an upturn. Of course, when you search for these signs, you will find some. But is all this waiting for the end of the downturn really helpful?

The assumption behind the worried question about the duration of the downturn is that after a while, things will go back to normal. A bit more patience, a period of hardship, and then, alas! it will be business as usual and this feeling of vulnerability and uncertainty will go away. However, going back to 2006, 2007 or 2008 is the least likely thing to happen.

I think that our brains are playing tricks on us in this matter. Adjusting to a different concept is always costly for the brain and before it rewires its little nodes it prefers to filter out information that does not fit into the concepts that it invested in before. In this case, the dominating concepts are concepts of growth. Information that says you will NOT own a new car soon, you will NOT get a promotion and a salary raise, profits of your company will NOT pick up again surely cannot be true. Or at least, they cannot permanently be true. Says your brain. Well, I don't know exactly about your brain, but many of the surveys seem to have been filled out be people with brains that project the future as a linear continuation of the past, with just this awkward gap in between.

However, sticking with the old concept of growth is disabling as it leads to passively waiting and to being worried. Being worried is a waste of energy, though, energy that should be spent on agility, flexibility, adaption. Once we can accept that a fundamental change is happening, the fearful waiting can stop.

The Brain and The Truth

At the beginning of the year, a pundit at Harvard Business Review predicted that lie detection would become a business application soon. It was not far fetched at all.

At TrendtoGo I have already written about how the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's is developing a sensor system that predicts "hostile thoughts" in people remotely. While these sensors at the moment "only" scan body functions like pulse, facial expressions and breathing patterns, the next step obviously will be to include brain scans.

Brain scans already were used as evidence in court in India: "In June, in a murder case in Pune, in Maharashtra State, that a judge explicitly cited a scan as proof that the suspect’s brain held “experiential knowledge” about the crime that only the killer could possess, sentencing her to life in prison," NYT wrote in this article.

Scanning brain activity may the pathway for better human - machine interaction. This is at least what the company Emotiv is betting at: "Emotiv has created technologies that allow machines to take both conscious and non-conscious inputs directly from your mind." - You can see their prototype in the picture - a wireless headset which detects brain waves, facial expressions, body language, and movement to have direct control over computer functions and processes. The idea is to use the headset for gaming, but obviously, applications can be manifold. The company is hoping to have the devices in the stores before chrismas.

There are many more examples that show how close we are at communicating directly from our brains. How sure we are that what happens in our brains tells more about the truth than our words could.

The interesting thing is that researchers who study learning and long term memory also found out that our brains actually are not the key to an objective truth. Each time we upload an old memory into our short term memory, we modify the story a bit. We don't distort our past consciously, it just happens. Researchers also found that every one of us perceives the same piece of reality - be it a football game or a book - differently, depending on the beliefs that we hold and how much we cling to those beliefs.

It will be interesting to see how the commercialization of brain scans especially in the "truth business" will handle the fact that truth is not objective as we are definitely bound to find out more about the quicksilver nature of "truth". Sure enough, there is something like a discernible lie. But sure enough, people who don't lie about an incident will still have slightly different perceptions of this very incident. They may differ even though no one was lying.

Actually, different perceptions or interpretations of reality are not a new finding. Nevertheless, people's everyday behavior (and I am also talking about myself) does not show that we have understood this phenomenon. The current commercial interest in the brain's inner workings may force a wider public to accept the reality of various realities. :-)

What will the common reaction be? Quarrels as well as wars arise over the issue of being right. Will mankind learn and accept that there is no such thing as "being right" as opposed to "being wrong"? To me, the consequence seems to be that all opinions, especially the opinion of "the others" should be welcomed as yet another expression of the truth/of reality.