They’re listening to their tune, not yours

Our inner monologue is the background music to our decisions

The first ever car I bought was an ageing Renault Five. Resplendent in metallic green with a black vinyl roof, it gave me a new taste of freedom and protected me from regular soakings by the British rain. And all for the princely sum of £495 (about $800 at the time). This was way back in the 1980s, but it was a bargain even then.

One of its more dubious features was a cassette player with an irregular but incurable habit of chewing and spewing out several metres of the tape I’d asked it to play. More than once, I found myself poking around in its innards with a ballpoint pen, in a vain attempt to rescue yet another of my favourite albums from its jaws. 

It only ever did this after weeks of working perfectly, as if it were deliberately trying to rebuild my trust after the last apparently spontaneous malfunction only to spring its trap again when I was least expecting it. My girlfriend at the time wisely refused to let any of her tapes near the damn thing. 

I was reminded of that cassette player this morning, when I was thinking about how we make decisions. If you pause and listen to your thoughts for a second, you’ll hear an inner monologue. It will change as soon as you focus on it – from thinking about my words to thinking about observing your own thoughts. But the monologue is still there, even if its form changes. (As the philosopher and early psychologist William James pointed out way back in 1918, thinking about our thinking is like trying to turn up the light quickly enough to see how the darkness looks.) 

Changing this monologue is the key to changing someone’s mind. In fact, it almost is their mind. The monologue is very much like a tape playing in their head. (Or, to bring the analogy a bit more up-to-date, like our own personal playlist or audiobook.) It’s the background music to our moods, generating emotions that, whether we realise it or not, drive our choices most of the time. So you haven’t a hope of influencing someone’s decision without first changing what they’re saying to themselves.

Decision machine

Most of us try to achieve this through logical argument, which seems to make perfect sense. After all, logic is how we make decisions, isn’t it? We read, we listen, we assess, we decide. So surely the best way to influence a decision is to select and present the right information – and preferably in as short and efficient a way as possible? That’s what everyone else does too, in emails, in reports, in presentations.

We present Powerpoint slides. Even that word – present – implies simply delivering information. Here it is, take it or leave it. Often, we pepper our slides or documents with bullet points, in an effort to make information easy to digest. The result is that we often serve up this information in its most naked, barest form. 

Or, at the other extreme, we data dump. We stuff documents with dense paragraphs of complex sentences and cram in as much information as possible. If we break it up at all, it’s with equally crowded tables or – at best – charts that still leave the information to do the talking. (And the readers or audience scratching their heads.)

We may do this with the best of intentions, erring on the side of caution by providing all the information we think someone might need rather than risk leaving anything out. But in doing so, we’re fundamentally misunderstanding how the human brain works. We’re putting ourselves at a huge disadvantage, simply because we’re working against millions of years of evolution. And the reason is that our decision-making machine doesn’t run on logic, but on story. The choices we make – and that other people make – all depend on the stories our inner monologue is telling us. 

There is a second, even bigger problem with simply presenting information, too: we risk losing control of the decision-making process altogether. (By that I mean the real one – the one going on in the heads of decision-makers. That may be different from the one that seems to be taking place in the room at the time.) That’s because, whether we like it or not, the decision-maker’s inner voice will be telling them a story, one that their brain has constructed from the information you’ve just given them. And if all you’ve done is given them a ton of information – especially if it’s in the form of a list of bullet points – then you have no control over what that story is. As a result, you have no control over the decision either.

I confess that, when I first heard about storytelling in a professional context, I almost dismissed it as a fad. The last time I’d seen a storyteller, he was standing in the atrium of a museum, dressed in the clothes of an Anglo Saxon peasant. He had a grey beard down to his chest and was sporting a bead necklace. The dozens of primary school children who all sat crossed legged in a semi-circle around him seemed captivated by his tales from the early middle ages, but it was all a far cry from the modern workplace. I certainly struggled to see how it all had any relevance to work.

Huge mistake

Yet it would be a huge mistake to relegate storytelling to the preserve of once-upon-a-time fairy tales (or even to high-end, literary fiction). We actually think in story much of the time, constructing a narrative of our own life, both past and present, and using that to project and predict our future. So it should come as no surprise to learn that our brains are wired to think in stories.

Neuroscience researchers have discovered that a story literally synchronises the thought process of the teller or writer and the listener or reader. It yanks out the tape or presses the stop button on the tune in the decision-maker’s head and replaces it with yours. At the forefront of this research is Professor Uri Hasson, who leads a team at Princeton University who specialise in studying our brain responses to real-world activities. 

This is a relatively new area: most brain research has tended to rely on studying our responses to entirely made-up tasks. It’s also no mean feat. There’s a reason most neuroscientists and psychologists don’t study how our brains react ‘in the wild’: it’s hard. It’s far easier to set up an artificial stimulus (like, say, reading a series of random words on a screen) than to try to pin down responses to the chaos of events that is real life.

Nevertheless, Hasson and his team are making real headway. In one particularly interesting experiment, they used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to look at activity in the brains of volunteers as they listened to stories. To start with, volunteers were monitored while they watched an episode of the BBC drama series, Sherlock. (If you’ve ever watched it, you’ll know that each story is highly sophisticated, full of plot twists and surprises as well as intriguing concepts.) The volunteers then had to describe all this while still in the brain scanner. Researchers then played a recording of their retelling to another volunteer while they monitored their brain.

Before the listeners had heard the recording, their brain scans looked totally different from that of the person who’d watched the episode and retold it. This makes sense. The scans merely confirmed that we’re all different individuals, each living in our own world and thinking our own thoughts. But when a second volunteer listened to the recording of someone telling a story, something remarkable happened. The activity in their brain moved from wherever it was before to match the active areas in the storyteller’s brain. The brain scans aligned between story teller and story listener. The two brains literally synchronised.

Hasson’s lab tested this again and again, in 17 people in total. And each time, they got the same result. The activity in the listener’s brain moved from wherever it was before to match the active areas in the storyteller’s brain. Hasson calls this neural coupling. Area by area, the two sets of brain activity lined up.

But that still leaves the question of what we actually mean by a story in a professional context. I’m still left thinking of that more than slightly hippified storyteller in the museum. How do we weave stories into our writing, our presentations and our conversations? And how do you do it without triggering a colleague to ask what on Earth you’re doing? 

One answer is what I call microstories. Microstories are mini-narratives, which we can either combine into a bigger story or use to make simple, informational content much more engaging. 

So rather than writing, ‘Here are the sales figures for June’ you would write ‘I’ve been looking at the sales figures for June.’

It might seem like a trivial change, but there’s a world of difference as far as the brain is concerned. The first version is a simple statement. It will trigger a narrative in the reader’s brain for sure, but you’ve no idea or control over what that narrative might be. It could be, ‘Those figures are impressive.’ Or it could be, ‘Are those similar to the ones she showed us last month?’ Perhaps it’s, ‘I’m hungry – I wonder how many more of these slides there are?’ You just don’t know. It could be anything. But what we can say is that you have no power over what that narrative is.

But the second immediately takes control of the thought process. If you hear or read, ‘I’ve been looking at the sales figures for June,’ not only are you more engaged but you’re hooked. You now have a picture in your head of a person doing something and – crucially – you want to know what happened next. You’re reading or listening to a story – their story. It’s no exaggeration to say that they’ve already started to take control of your brain. 

Here’s how you might incorporate that microstory into the start of a longer narrative: 

I’ve been looking at the sales figures for June, trying to work out why sales were down last month, even though leads were up. It just didn’t make sense that our lead numbers were the highest they’d been all year [you could insert or display a graph here] and yet the sales team have not been hitting their targets. And then I discovered something … 

You see? Same information, totally different level of engagement! Didn’t you find yourself just a little bit curious about what the discovery was? You want to know what happens next. 

The psychologist Jonathan Haidt said that the human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor. So if you really want to change someone’s mind, to find a way to change the track that’s playing in their head, you need to incorporate narrative into whatever you’re writing.

That’s why I started this piece with a story, about my old car and its temperamental cassette tape player. The fact that you then read on is proof that it worked. But you don’t have to be so obvious and I’m definitely not advocating such an approach for all your writing. Just adopting a story structure for your sentences can be enough to take total control of the narrative and the decision-making process. 

So ask yourself, what track is playing in the mind of the decision maker, and how can I change it? The answer may well be to change the story they’re telling themselves, by telling them a better one. 

Sources

Haidt, J (2013). The righteous mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion. Penguin

James, W (1918). The principles of psychology, 1: 244. Henry Holt & Co. 

Pinker, S (1997). How the mind works. W W Norton

Zadbood, A et al (2017). How we transmit Memories to other brains: constructing shared neural representations via communication. Cerebral Cortex [PDF] 27: 4988-5000