Category
Oral - Creative and Artistic
Description
This paper will examine the art of storytelling and how humanity is psychologically wired to crave stories. While humans used to tell stories to point to a food supply, ward off danger, or preserve family history, today, people gather in front of movie screens, theater stages, and concert halls. This paper will explore that evolutionary process and how stories remain prevalent in the modern era. It will explore the question “What compels our brain to capture its waning attention span and listen to a story?” This paper looks deeper into what psychologists call “narrative transportation” and how the brain engages in seven different regions to help immerse itself. Not only will it analyze what happens in the brain when a story begins, transpires and ends, but also how a storyteller and listener connect on a cerebral level. This paper will also contribute the Theory of Mind and how it is displayed in storytelling. This paper will prove that it is because of the existence of stories that humanity tries to explain how the world works and provides order. It will conclude that it is through the power of storytelling that people connect with each other through shared experiences as it provides a narrative structure that is familiar, engages emotions, and satisfies. Stories have the ability to pass along emotions of happiness, anger, remorse, or sadness through countless generations and open a window into the lives of hardship, joy, passion, and love. Humanity is psychologically wired to receive such stories which is what makes them delectable and necessary in a fast-paced modern world.
The Psychology Behind Storytelling
Oral - Creative and Artistic
This paper will examine the art of storytelling and how humanity is psychologically wired to crave stories. While humans used to tell stories to point to a food supply, ward off danger, or preserve family history, today, people gather in front of movie screens, theater stages, and concert halls. This paper will explore that evolutionary process and how stories remain prevalent in the modern era. It will explore the question “What compels our brain to capture its waning attention span and listen to a story?” This paper looks deeper into what psychologists call “narrative transportation” and how the brain engages in seven different regions to help immerse itself. Not only will it analyze what happens in the brain when a story begins, transpires and ends, but also how a storyteller and listener connect on a cerebral level. This paper will also contribute the Theory of Mind and how it is displayed in storytelling. This paper will prove that it is because of the existence of stories that humanity tries to explain how the world works and provides order. It will conclude that it is through the power of storytelling that people connect with each other through shared experiences as it provides a narrative structure that is familiar, engages emotions, and satisfies. Stories have the ability to pass along emotions of happiness, anger, remorse, or sadness through countless generations and open a window into the lives of hardship, joy, passion, and love. Humanity is psychologically wired to receive such stories which is what makes them delectable and necessary in a fast-paced modern world.
Comments
Undergraduate