The Line Cutter
How do we tell our stories? How do we react? And a round-up
I was in line for the Rainbow Farm at our local’s farmer market that’s held in the parking lot of the YMCA, and it was a little crowded, and I wasn’t quite sure if I cut the woman in the jeans overalls right behind me, so I turned around and asked.
“No! No, you’re fine. We all converged at the same time really.” She tilted her head, eyes wide open, almost smiling.
“I think I really might have,” I said, “and I’ll feel obsessively guilty if I did even though you’re being so incredibly nice about it.”
“It’s hard when it’s crowded,” she said.
“It is!”
She smiled back at me because I’d been smiling for awhile, and she added, “Are you local?”
“I am.”
Nodding, she said, “It’ll be better next weekend after Labor Day. I bet we’ll get to see each other then.”
“That would be cool.”
“It would be.”
She moved into the small area a tiny bit more to grab some gorgeous carrots worthy of Bugs Bunny and another lady squished in, elbows out like she was about to take flight, but she was just pushing her way through and making space for herself. She picked up some ginger and said, “What is this?”
“Ginger,” said the cool, mellow lady who might be my friend someday.
“It doesn’t look like ginger,” Elbow Lady said.
“That’s because it’s fresh,” Cool-and-mellow Lady explained in a completely chill way.
Elbow Lady in front of me grabbed some kale and cut me in line. Just like the lady behind me, I didn’t say anything because it was sort of funny and ironic. Elbow Lady then demanded a plastic bag even though her husband had a canvas one and then she forgot to pay so I had to grab her and bring her back to the ever patient, Lorelei, farmer, and wait a little more.
Did it matter?
Not at all.
Will Elbow Lady ever know she cut me?
Absolutely not.
Does she need to?
Nope.
How We Shape Our Stories
Here’s the thing. We don’t have to get annoyed at people when they are clueless. And we don’t have to be annoyed at ourselves when we are clueless, too. We all mess up in big and little ways all the time.
We can choose to take these opportunities to make a friend rather than an enemy or convert a potential enemy into a potential friend. Think about how big that could be if we could understand the science behind those humane choices and how to shift our own conscious reactions to people and events to try to create better, kinder outcomes and influences our unconscious responses.
Seriously. In a big picture way, imagine a world where soldiers convinced people to cooperate with their words instead of their weapons?
It’s actually a discipline that exists and it’s called narratology, which is basically the study of story and story structure and how it impacts human perception. What if you could scientifically understand that? What if you could understand the why and how of your reactions to different kinds of narratives?
Pretty cool, right?
Lt. Col William Casebeer, a US Department of Defense program officer at DARPA (the research division) was a neurophilosopher and all about potentially training special forces to use storytelling. One of the people he funded with a seed grant was Paul Zak. Zak measured neural activity when people listened or witnessed narratives or stories. He then looked to “relate this to people’s actions,” he writes in his upcoming book Immersion.
Zak’s lab had discovered that when a person trusts you, your brain releases oxytocin. That oxytocin makes you cooperate.
“Oxytocin receptors,” he writes, “are found in the brain or central nervous system and also outside the brain in the peripheral nervous system.” They are also on your heart and vagus nerve.
He writes in Immersion,
Zak’s lab’s research did more than that though. It also showed “why humans crave extraordinary experiences.” His research was eventually turned into software used by special forces soldiers that would help “motivate cooperation with US forces.”
It’s more than that though.
WHAT MAKES US HAPPY?
Zak writes that he has been on a 20-year quest to understand “human social behaviors. What makes us happy? Why do some teams work together more efficiently than others? Why are some experiences transformative? This research has taken me from the Pentagon to Fortune 40 boardrooms to the rainforest of Papua New Giunea in order to measure brain activity as people do what people do, all to understand and predict how people will behave. And what causes these behaviors.”
Basically, his life’s work is something I’m trying to figure out from my only little home on an island in Maine. He’s had “extraordinary experiences” over and over again in his work, life, and research.
And his new book? It’s all about how to create that experience that is indeed extraordinary.
THE EXTRAORDINARY
Think about it for a second. Let’s say every day you go to work or go to the grocery store or pick up your kid at school. Those experiences start to blend, right? But the extraordinary experience—the time your boss sang Springsteen in the middle of the newsroom or the time you gave someone CPR by the produce section, or when you picked up your kid and the principal started arguing with the secretary—those are the experiences that you remember, that you tell about to other people. And sometimes they are the experiences that change your life.
This line of thinking also helps me understand why this trip to the farmer’s market will stand out in my memory a bit more. It’s because it was different thanks to the cutting-in-line sequence of events and my potential making of a new friend. It might not have been extraordinary, but it was a notch above run-of-the-mill.
It's all about our brains. And you can use Zak’s research to make your business or your life better. Pretty cool, right?
“Extraordinary experiences,” he says, “have the following qualities: they are unexpected, emotionally charged, narrow one’s focus to the experience itself, are easy to remember and provoke actions. The components of the extraordinary come as a package not in isolation from each other.”
FIFTEEN SECONDS
Fifteen seconds is all we have to make our brain start paying attention. If it doesn’t happen in that first 15 seconds, it doesn’t happen at all.
Zak summarizes it as this, “First get my attention, then give me a reason to care about what I’m experiences.”
He also goes all into the neurological reasons for that occurrence and also explains that when you have a special memory, an emotional memory, they get stored in your brain in a way that’s unlike the storage of other memories. The brain puts them in a folder called IMPORTANT.
His book is fascinating and I’ll be delving and sharing bits of it for a while, and it helps me understand why this trip to the farmer’s market will stand out in my memory a bit more. It’s because it was different thanks to the cutting-in-line sequence of events and my potential making of a new friend.
STORIES AND LINKS FROM THIS LAST WEEK.
REFERENCES AND ROUND-UP, YOU CAN LEARN MORE ABOUT THINGS.
Paul Zak’s Paul’s book and links
LinkedIn | Facebook | Twitter | Website
Link to a Psychology Today article discussed last week.