Empathy, Neurochemistry, and the Dramatic Arc: Paul Zak at the Future of StoryTelling 2012

[Music] what to tell you story about a little boy named Ben Ben is two and a half years old and Ben has brain cancer and Ben's really happy he's happy because he's been through two rounds of chemo and radiation and he feels good for once he doesn't feel yucky and his father's enjoying seeing Ben's happiness as the father tells the story of Ben and his cancer the father's voice begins to break and he says you know it's very difficult to play with Ben because Ben thinks everything is wonderful but I know something that Ben doesn't that Ben's dying he talks about how difficult it is to play with Ben knowing that in three or six months Ben will be dead and yet Ben is so happy he's so beautiful and so the father tries as hard as he can to enjoy Ben to be joyful around Ben but then he says in the middle of this short story that it's an amazing thing to know how little time one has left and as he says that statement he has merged himself with his son is as if the father himself is dying so in my laboratory we've studied this story extensively and we found is that two primary emotions were listed one is distress and the other is empathy at the same time when we asked people what they felt after the story was over we really couldn't get very clear answers so began doing other Studies on this story so we took blood before and after and we found that the brain produced two interesting chemicals one is called cortisol which focuses our attention on something important so cortisol correlated with our sense of distress it's the more distress you felt the more cortisol you released and the more you paid attention to that stimulus the second chemical release is called oxytocin which is associated with care and connection and empathy and oxytocin was correlated with people's sense of empathy and the more oxytocin released the more empathic they felt towards Ben and his father and it was something different after this experiment we gave individuals a chance to share money with a stranger in the lab and indeed those who produced both cortisol and oxytocin are more likely to donate money generously to a stranger that couldn't see in a lab in another experiment we gave individuals a chance to donate money to a charity that works with children who are ill and indeed those who released oxytocin and cortisol donated money to this charity in fact the amount of oxytocin release predicted in both cases how much money people would share with a stranger or with charity what we're seeing is that this narrative is changing behavior by changing our brain chemistry so we decided to go a little further and ask could we actually predict before they watch the video who would donate money to charity so with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DARPA we reran the study in which we not only took blood but now we measured heart rate and skin conductance and respiration and using these additional measures we're able to identify this distress response in this empathic response and we could predict with 80% accuracy who would donate money to charity these individuals get paid about $20 to be an experiment and the people who donated money on average generated half their earnings so we begin to investigate this story further we use functional brain imaging to identify the regions of the brain that were most active while watching that video compared to a control video in which Ben and his father at the zoo and we found was that the most active areas for the emotional story we're areas in the brain associated with theory of mind or understanding of what others are doing and areas that are rich Knox dose receptors that make us feel empathy and guess what happens when you watch 100 seconds of a father and son at the zoo nothing happens and people just blank out there's no reason for them to attend to this information because nothing's happening there's nothing exciting it's important to understand that stories have to have this particular structure 150 years ago a German theorist named Freytag called this the dramatic arc so there are particular story aspects that go into making an effective story exposition rising action climax falling action and then it's dennou amount the story of Ben and his father talking about knowing his son is done Maine has those aspects it captures their attention there's a coming climax how can Ben's father actually engage with his son in this wonderful relaxed playful way yet knowing that his son will die soon it seems like there may be a universal kind of story structure so stories are powerful because they transport us into other people's worlds but in doing that they change the way our brains work and potentially change our brain chemistry and that's what it means to be a social creature is to connect to others to care about others even complete strangers and it's so interesting that dramatic stories cause us to do this in these experiments they do it in a very functional way people are donating money because they want to help Ben and his father and yet when we watch other stories or see movies listen to music the same thing that happened we feel uplifted we feel motivated or feel connected to others around us [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Future of StoryTelling

Views: 129,187

Keywords: future, storytelling, fost, empathy, neurochemistry, emotion, dramatic arc, freytag, cortisol, oxytocin, charity, paul zak

Id: q1a7tiA1Qzo

Length: 5min 58sec (358 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 03 2012