Stories are a massive part of your life.
Consider for a moment just how much of the day you spend consuming stories.
You wake up and check the news to see what new stories there are. You might listen to songs on your way to work, where singers tell the stories of their emotional experiences and what they mean to them. Then you may listen to a quick podcast as you walk to work to hear an interview with some famous person who tells you their stories.
Then you get to work and you catch up on the latest gossip with your coworkers, or ask them what they did this weekend. Then it’s meeting time, where one coworker starts listing a bunch of boring facts and statistics about where things are. It makes no sense to you so you ask them questions to find out what it all means. So they tell you using analogies and examples, and explain how they or other people feel about this, and how we should feel about this and so on, which all helps you understand.
Then you go home and might read a book on the bus on your way back. Once you get home you catch up with your family and ask to hear their stories about what their day was like. Then laying in bed you’ll read a story to help you get off to sleep. And it doesn’t even end there! Yes, as you sleep, your brain is still telling stories!
But if you look at any other species on the planet, you will discover that we are the only one that indulges in any form of storytelling whatsoever.
There is of course a minor exception to this, in the form of dreaming. We are probably not the only species that dreams. In some studies, rats have been shown during sleep to be activating the same parts of the brain that were activated when they ran through a maze earlier in the day. Scientists could even identify what parts of the maze they were in during their dreams! (Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27788-rats-dream-about-the-places-they-wish-to-go/)
Dreams help us process our memories of things we have experienced during our waking hours. But they are contained within our own minds, and within the minds of any other species that dreams.
The difference though between humans and any other species is in the fact that we are capable of transferring our memories to other people through language.
The Miracle of Language
Language is actually quite remarkable.
Up until about 70,000 years ago, the only means through which information was transferred was through DNA. Any living being was basically born into the world with a finite amount of information that stayed pretty much the same throughout their entire lifetime. Many mammals developed a fear of snakes and spiders, and this information was passed down in their genes. Some more advanced mammals, such as monkeys, developed the ability to use stones in their environment to manipulate other objects. Again, this was instinctive, it was simply passed down in their genes.
But around about 70,000 years ago, human beings evolved an advanced form of language. From this point on, any extra information they gained during their lifetime, they were able to pass on to other human beings through speech, writing and drawing. Suddenly, new generations of human beings were no longer limited to the instinctive information that was passed onto them through their genes. They were now capable of literally transcending time.
But we are also not the first species that evolved language. We are just the only species that has evolved a form of language advanced enough to transcend time and unlock our storytelling capacity.
A Monkey, a Neanderthal and a Homo Sapien walk into a bar…
As they sit at the bar, the homo sapien looks out the window and sees a leopard walk past and then hide in some bushes.
“Hey guys, I just saw a leopard!” says the Homo Sapien to his Monkey and Neanderthal friends. They both stare at Mr. Homo Sapien blankly.
“A leopard. It’s a big cat, with a golden coat with black specks smudged all over. It walks with grace and runs at the speed of light. With one pounce it can fly through the air and sink its teeth into its prey like a dagger.” Mr. Neanderthal stares blankly and then drinks some bone marrow from the big bone he has in his hand, whilst Mr. Monkey picks a bug from his hair and eats it.
Impatiently, Mr. Homo Sapien moves to the window and motions for his friends to come and join him. Reluctantly they do.
After several minutes of waiting at the window, the leopard emerges from the bushes and walks towards the bar.
Mr. Vervet Monkey lets out a short tonal call and jumps up to the ceiling where he hides behind a lampshade.
Mr. Neanderthal shouts “Big cat sharp!” and hides beneath the window.
Mr. Homo Sapien locks the bar door and returns to get a drink. A few minutes later the neanderthal and monkey calm down and come to join him.
Mr. Homo Sapien looks out the window and says “He’s gone now. That’s good. That leopard was scary!”.
Mr. Neanderthal and Mr. Vervet Monkey look at him blankly again.
“I said that leopard was scary. I mean…Big cat sharp wooo!” he says finishing with a short tonal call.
The Neanderthal ducks beneath the bar whilst the monkey jumps up to the ceiling. Mr. Homo Sapien lets out a big sigh and proceeds to finish his drink.
What this bad joke serves to demonstrate is the difference in language abilities of different species. In fact, these 3 species pretty much represent the 3 different levels of the evolution of language.
The Vervet Monkey is the most basic form. In the wild, Vervet Monkeys have been observed to let out different vocalisations whenever a different predator emerges. A short tonal call means “Leopard”, to which other monkeys respond by climbing up trees. A low pitched grunt means “Eagle” to which other monkeys respond by looking up or running into a dense bush. And a high pitched “chutter” sound means “Snake”, which has them look down at the ground all around them.
Unfortunately for Vervet Monkeys, as can be seen in the bad joke, these calls can’t really be taken out of context. Their application of language is limited to simple, one-call warning sounds.
The Neanderthals on the other hand had a slightly more advanced form of language. They could string together individual words to combine meanings. Big + Cat + Sharp means a big cat that has sharp claws, which means a little more than simply “Cat”. They could take a word from one context (e.g. “Sharp” when used to describe a stone spear they just made) and use it in another context (e.g. to describe the claws of a cat).
But unfortunately for the Neanderthals, they weren’t very good conversation partners, and the amount of information they could exchange at any time was nothing like what we homo sapiens are capable of.
The thing that separates our language capability from all other species is syntax.
Syntax – A Magical Weave
In that bad joke, the Neanderthal and Monkey could not comprehend the Homo Sapien’s description of a leopard:
“A leopard. It’s a big cat, with a golden coat with black specks smudged all over. It walks with grace and runs at the speed of light. With one pounce it can fly through the air and sink its teeth into its prey like a dagger.”
The monkey cannot understand words being combined to create separate meanings. When the Neanderthal says “Big cat sharp”, even if the monkey could understand English it would not be able to understand what those words combined meant.
To a monkey, “Big” might mean tree, “Cat” might mean the only kind of cat it encounters (e.g. a leopard), and “sharp” might just refer to a pointy stone.
So to the monkey that understands English, when it hears “Big cat sharp” what it understands is “Tree and Leopard and Stone”, and it only knows to react in a certain way when it hears certain words (e.g. “Leopard” results in climbing up somewhere high”).
To a Neanderthal, “Big” might originally mean a stone that is bigger than another stone. Eventually the Neanderthal might have come across a slice of meat that was bigger than another slice of meat, and out of convenience used “Big” to describe that and so on.
“Cat” might have originally referred to a cute little cat that hung around their camp fires (assuming cute little cats hung out with Neanderthals…I don’t really know if they did, I’m kinda making this up, but bare with me…).
“Sharp” might have originally meant a sharp stone used on a spear. Then one day they might have seen an animal with claws that tore up its prey much like a spear would, and again, out of convenience, used “Sharp” to describe that.
Out of convenience, all 3 of these words can be used to describe a Leopard, which to the Neanderthal means “A cat that is bigger than normal cats and has sharp claws like a spear”.
The Neanderthal is clearly leaps and bounds ahead of the monkey. But human beings are even more advanced.
A monkey might have just discovered that stones can be used to chip away at things, whereas a Neanderthal might have discovered how to make fire with sticks and stones and use that to cook food, whereas a human has just used a rocket to send a man to the moon and bring them back. The differences are vast.
To the human, in that one poetic paragraph, there is an awful lot happening.
The Homo Sapien uses a powerful tool to conjure up ideas that don’t yet exist to the others. Metaphors.
For example “black specks smudged all over”. Is that really the case? Has someone literally taken some black ink and smudged specks all over this leopard? Clearly not. But the word “smudged” brings to mind images of times when we may have used inks or other liquids to create a certain texture on a surface.
For a homo sapien who had never before seen a leopard, or any other cat that looked like it, they would now be able to bring to their mind an image of a big cat with a golden coat that had black dots over it that looked like black ink that had been smudged.
Metaphors are also being used when the homo sapien says the cat; “walks with grace”, “runs at the speed of light”, “can fly through the air” and “sink its teeth into its prey like a dagger”
That last one is even using two metaphors. Are its teeth really sinking? No, they’re biting. And are its teeth really like a dagger? Only in the sense that they’re sharp. They are definitely not made out of metal, they definitely don’t have handles, and they look nothing like a dagger.
But there’s even more going on that the Neanderthal and Monkey can’t compute.
Simple words such as “It’s”, “a”, “with”, “the”, “through” and “into”. Alone these words mean very little. They must be used in combination with other words. They are simply markers that indicate how we should interpret other words that are used in combination with them. In other words, they indicate what rules we should follow to interpret the sentence.
I don’t want to go into too much depth about syntax here as I am not an expert, and it is a vast subject. My focus for this book is on enabling you to use storytelling principles to bring more meaning to your communication. This section here is simply meant to build context for why and how we humans utilise storytelling principles. So I’ll let someone else conclude this part about syntax…
Jeremy Lent, author of ‘The Patterning Instinct’ (a book which has been of great help to me when writing this section) says: “If language is like a net of symbols, we can think of syntax as a magical weave that can link each section of the net to any other section at a moment’s notice.”
It is this magical weave that separates us from all other species, allows us to create infinite meanings from a finite set of words, and acts as the foundation upon which our storytelling ability evolved.
