The New Science of Great Stories

The narrative techniques that activate our 'give a s*** measure', according to the world's leading storytelling neuroscientist.

There's a science to storytelling, and it can tell us which specific techniques are most likely to capture attention, build trust, and literally change people’s minds.

This week on The Art of the Zag, Shane Snow and I spoke with one of our all-time favorite scientists: Dr. Paul Zak, the man behind the most fascinating research into the neuroscience of storytelling over the past two decades. If you’ve read my best-selling first book with Shane, The Storytelling Edge, or my new brand-new book, Super Skill: Why Storytelling Is the Superpower of the AI Age, you know that I’m obsessed with the science of storytelling.

Dr. Zak revealed how oxytocin and dopamine combine to create the brain’s “give a sh*t” measure, the 15-second rule for storytelling, and his new research into the six things you need to do each day to become happier. He also addressed what critics get wrong about his research.

And in this week’s newsletter, I’m offering a double-whammy.

1) You can listen to the full interview below. Dr. Zak is truly gifted at explaining the science of storytelling, and if you only listen to one episode of our podcast, this is it.

2) Second, read my in-depth profile of Dr. Zak and his research into the neuroscience of storytelling, based on several interviews we’ve had over the past decade. ***Scroll below the YouTube embed to read that.***

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST WITH DR. ZAK ON APPLE PODCASTS (Substack embed isn’t working)

The new science of storytelling

In early 2005, a 6’5” man with broad shoulders and a chiseled jaw boarded a cross-country flight. If you were on that plane, you might’ve mistaken Dr. Paul Zak for an NFL quarterback. He was actually a neuroscientist.

Dr. Zak had been away all week at a conference. He had two young daughters at home, and he hated being away from them. So as he squeezed into his economy seat, he pulled out his laptop, eager to finish his work so he could focus on his family once he landed.

Dr. Zak scrunched over, typing like a pterodactyl from Jurassic World 7: IT Department. Suddenly, violent turbulence hit. He needed to distract himself, so he turned on a movie—Million Dollar Baby, which had just won the Oscar for Best Picture.

If you haven’t seen Million Dollar Baby, it tells the devastating story of Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), a waitress from Missouri’s Ozarks who dreams of becoming a professional boxer. She wanders into a rundown boxing gym and convinces the grizzled head trainer, Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood), to train her.

Maggie defies everyone’s expectations. She’s nimble and fierce. As she wins fight after fight, Maggie and Frankie bond. He fills the void of Maggie’s dead father, while Maggie fills the void of Frankie’s estranged daughter. Before long, Maggie earns a shot at $1 million and the welterweight championship belt in Las Vegas, but then, tragedy strikes. In the title match, Maggie’s arch-rival sucker-punches her from behind. Maggie crashes on her corner stool, breaking her neck. She wakes up as a ventilator-dependent quadriplegic. In the hospital, Maggie is left with one last mission: to convince her found-father Frankie to kill her out of mercy.

As Dr. Zak watched this tragic father-daughter tale, the world around him melted away. Before he knew it, the movie was over, and he felt someone shaking him on the shoulder, asking, “Are you okay? Are you okay?”

Dr. Zack turned. It was his seatmate. What was this weirdo talking about? Why the hell was he shaking him? And that’s when Dr. Zak realized he’d been sobbing uncontrollably. “Gobs of goop were coming out of every orifice in my face,” he told me.

When Dr. Zak returned to his lab the next day, he told a psychologist in his lab about his strange reaction. That’s no surprise, she told him. Psychologists use video to change people’s moods all the time.

The trust molecule

For as long as he could remember, Dr. Zak had been obsessed with morality. As a kid, he noticed that both religious and non-religious people were equally fixated on morality—doing the right thing and caring for others—and wondered whether there was a biological basis for it. As he became an established researcher at Claremont Graduate University, Dr. Zak decided to pursue a wild hunch: What if a mysterious neurochemical he’d been studying called oxytocin was secretly the morality molecule?

At the time, researchers didn’t know much about oxytocin. They’d discovered that it caused rodents to care for their offspring and tolerate burrowmates. In human beings, it spiked among mothers during childbirth and breastfeeding, and in both men and women during sex. Beyond that, oxytocin was a minor scientific mystery.

But how do you measure morality? It’s a question that’s perplexed philosophers since Plato. So Dr. Zak and his team decided to focus on a single virtue: trust. Research had just come out showing that the proportion of trustworthy people in a nation was correlated to its economic performance. Countries and businesses that operated with a greater degree of trust tended to thrive.

Dr. Zak’s initial research indicated his hunch was right; oxytocin is directly related to trust. When we perform a “trustworthy” action, like giving up resources or helping another person, the oxytocin levels spike in the brains of the giver and receiver, indicating that oxytocin plays a crucial role in human cooperation and connection. If you want to build stronger relationships and teams, raising oxytocin levels is key.

The big question for Dr. Zak was how you boost oxytocin levels. Dr. Zak’s experience on the plane gave him an idea: What if the production of oxytocin wasn’t just triggered through physical interaction but also through stories?

Lucky for Dr. Zak, a secretive U.S. military agency was also interested in this question.

Narrative networks

The war in Afghanistan was a disaster, and DARPA—the semi-secret agency inside the Department of Defense—needed help. Critically, the U.S. was losing the recruiting battle for informants. The Taliban and Al-Qaeda were more savvy at recruiting civilians to their side; the leaflets the U.S. military distributed just weren’t cutting it. So DARPA wanted to know if there was a way they could peek inside people’s brains and figure out which stories and messages built trust and influenced people.

DARPA reached out to America’s neuroscientists. Did any of them have a way to do this? Could they develop a device to analyze people’s neurological responses in the field and help the military figure out the most effective messages for countering terrorist propaganda and recruiting Afghan villagers to their side? DARPA called the initiative the Narrative Networks Project.

Does this sound like something out of an episode of Black Mirror? Absolutely. But for Dr. Zak, it also presented an opportunity. DARPA’s funding would allow his team to study whether emotionally resonant stories were the key to building trust.

“The idea was to give warfighters this new superpower called language,” Dr. Zak explained. “Let’s try to use words rather than weapons to encourage our allies or maybe our enemies to cooperate with US goals.”

To test his theory, Dr. Zak and his team edited two videos from St. Jude’s Research Hospital and showed them to participants. As Dr. Zak writes in a 2015 paper, the first video was “high in tension and emotional resonance.” It tells the story of a father whose two-year-old son, Ben, is stricken with terminal brain cancer. The father wants to connect and play with his son, but it’s devastating. He knows Ben only has a few months to live. After a struggle, the father finds the strength to stay close to his son “until he takes his last breath.”

As a control, subjects watched a second video featuring the same father and son but deliberately lacking any real story. It showed the two spending a day together at the zoo. The boy is bald from chemotherapy and is called “miracle boy,” but there’s no narrative.

Since oxytocin is released in both the brain and the blood, Dr. Zak’s team was able to study oxytocin levels by analyzing blood samples of research subjects. Participants who watched the video with a strong narrative arc had higher oxytocin levels. Afterward, they were also more empathetic and willing to donate money to a stranger in the study.

In experiment after experiment, this phenomenon held true. When people in the United Kingdom watched public service announcements with a strong narrative arc, their oxytocin and attention levels spiked, and they were 261% more likely to give to charity than if they watched a video with a weak narrative.

The elements of great stories

With this research, Dr. Zak gave evidence to what politicians, artists, and business moguls had intuitively known for centuries—that great stories build trust and empathy, transforming people’s behavior. If you want people to trust you and rally around you, you need to tell a great story.

Dr. Zak had also done something revolutionary: He’d found a way to identify which stories change people’s minds. Not all stories are created equal; the weak narratives he tested fell flat. Only stories high in tension and emotional resonance changed people’s minds.

But Dr. Zak’s work wasn’t finished. “We had to get away from blood draws,” Dr. Zak told me. It was expensive and impractical, especially if it were ever to be used in the field in Afghanistan. Dr. Zak’s team developed a brilliant innovation: software that worked with activity tracker devices—like Fitbits and Apple Watches—to measure attention via various signals, such as heart rate, and oxytocin release via the vagus nerve. They also built a machine-learning algorithm based on data from past experiments to interpret the results, creating an “immersion score” that quantified how engaged people’s brains were with a story.

Dr. Zak and his research partner, Dr. Jorge Barraza, spun their technology into a new company, Immersion Neuroscience, and applied it to advertising. They quickly proved that Don Draper was right: Great stories—not a list of features or “proof points”—make people’s brains want to buy. In a study with BBDO, they could predict which commercials would lead to sales with 83% accuracy based on how immersed subjects became in the commercial's story.

The best ad they ever tested, for instance, was a spot called “Empty Chair” for Guinness. A bartender at a pub sets aside an empty chair with a pint, over and over, during football match celebrations, a bachelorette party, and the holiday season. A patron tries to take the chair, and the bartender rebukes him with a stern shake of the head. Finally, we get the payoff. A soldier returns home, and the pint of Guinness and chair are there waiting for him. The entire bar raises their pints in tribute. It exemplified all of the best-performing branded content that Dr. Zak’s team had tested.

“You’ve got to build tension,” explained Dr. Zak. “First thing — you’ve got to capture my attention with a ‘hot open’—something that’s mysterious or unusual or odd. Once you have my attention, you need to make me care about it by having some human conflict or drama.”

There are two big reasons for this. The first is trust. Great stories trigger the production of oxytocin, which makes people trust you or your brand more. The second reason is the strong link between stories and memory; if you want people to buy something from you, they need to remember you.

Neuroscientists have a saying: “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” When we hear a great story, the neural activity in our brain spikes. It’s like someone flipped on a switchboard, illuminating the city of our mind. This is why we’re much more likely to remember something when it’s told to us through a story versus a memo or fact sheet. As all those neurons fire together, they wire together into neural pathways and “become much more easily activated,” Dr. Zak explained.

As human beings, we’re literally wired for stories.

Stories at work

As Dr. Zak’s work shows, the power of storytelling pervades every aspect of our work lives. It’s the meta super skill that powers all of the soft skills that matter most at work.

Want to build trust with your colleagues and direct reports? Start by telling a compelling story of who you are and what you care about. Want your team to work better together? Share stories about your lives. Want to sell a new idea to your boss, colleagues, or potential investors? Lead with a story, not facts and figures. Want to persuade someone to buy something from you? Don’t lead with data. Tell the story of how your product changed a customer’s life.

“Give me that story. Tell me why it matters,” said Dr. Zak. “Tell me a customer story. Tell me a story about an employee who’s worked at this company for the last 50 years and what she’s done to make our company successful, right? Lead with that, and then I can build in all the other factors because our brains are primed for storytelling. I’m going to get that emotional buy-in—that kind of ‘give a shit’ measure, and there’s a halo effect that carries over to the more factual kind of data-based approach that you may want to use.”

Stories make people remember. They make people care. And most crucially for those of you who are founders, marketers, and salespeople, stories make our brains want to buy.

If you want someone to collaborate, help, or do business with you, the formula is simple: You need to start by telling a great story.

Want to learn more about the elements of storytelling that earn trust, build connection, and move people to action? Then subscribe to this newsletter and check out my best-selling new book, Super Skill: Why Storytelling Is the Superpower of the AI Age.