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And I'm really happy to
introduce Brian Knutson who's
Associate Professor of Psychology in
Neuroscience at Stanford University.
He studies the way the brain works and
how that translates into emotion,
including perhaps, suspense, and
is going to bring what's inside your and
my heads now, and
when we're listening to stories alive
by talking about some of his research. Brian?
>> I have to
admit at the outset when Martha asked
me to speak today, I misunderstood her.
And I thought she asked me to speak
about the science of storytelling,
when in fact she asked me to speak
about the storytelling of science.
However, having listened to Davis and
having seen the last video clip,
I do think that if we have a science
of storytelling, it could in theory,
inform how we tell the stories
of our science, and
perhaps make us more
effective storytellers.
I'm not going to make any claims to be
an effective storyteller at this point.
so, How many
people felt something, just then?
Three, four, five.
Well, maybe more.
Maybe 33% of you, right?
So, I'd like to argue that if I had you
in my scanner at that point in time and
I looked at what was going on
in your brain, that many of you
were actually feeling something at that
moment, when we switched the black slide.
And that I could actually
see it in your brain.
And then some of you may
not even be aware of it,
that you were feeling
something at that moment.
And I'd also like to argue that
what you felt is important.
It's important that we see that.
It's important that we have the technology
that will allow us to capture what is
going on in your brain in those few
seconds before the next thing happens.
In those few seconds before you
actually decide to do the next thing.
I don't study the science of storytelling,
but ultimately,
I hope that what we find in our science
will lead to a science of storytelling.
And I'm going to try to
convince you of that today.
And so just to contextualize
what we are doing now and
where the field is right now, in
the last ten years new technologies like
functional magnetic resonance
imaging have allowed scientists to
look not only at cortical activity
activity deep below the cortex,
at a second to second resolution,
at a millimeter resolution.
And this allows us to see for
the first time, before that technology was
available, what is happening in living and
breathing human brains as they're
anticipating good and bad events, and
even before they start to make
a decision to do something?
This class of questions falls under
sort of two broad categories,
which has occupied my lab and
other labs over the last ten years.
One set of questions has to do with,
which brain mechanisms anticipate good and
bad events?
I, I call this affective neuroscience.
You can call it whatever you want.
But many people are studying this now.
This is a field that's
growing with every year.
The second set of questions,
which I think is even more interesting
from an applications standpoint is,
does the activity of those circuits
actually influence choice?
That is, if we could capture
anticipatory activity in your brain,
could we use it then to predict very
basic choices that you might make?
Like, you might approach something,
or you might avoid something.
And keep in mind that the answer to,
whoops, I'm losing my microphone sorry.
The answer to the first question is not
necessarily the same as the answer to
the second question.
So, many things might have
happened in your brain when
you were looking at that bank,
blank screen.
Only some of those things may actually
influence then what you might do next.
Whether you walk out of the room or
stay in your seat, for instance.
So these are two very important but
separate questions,
potentially overlapping.
And just to cut to the chase, so I'm
going to cut through a lot of research,
and you're going to have to just take it
on faith that what I'm saying at least has
some science in, in, behind it.
We now have targets using, FMRI for
putting people in states of
anticipation and trying to identify when
they anticipate when something good might
happen, something bad might happen,
how they're integrating those signals.
And the reason that's important is
because it can then allow us to predict,
are they more likely to
approach something, or
to avoid something based on
the balance of those signals.
Again, this is a new area of research,
so there is much more that is going to
be found out in the next few years.
And what that allows us to do in that is,
in many different situations.
So these could include shopping.
These could include making
financially risky choices.
These even could include social choices,
like, will I trust this person or not?
We can then use our brain activity to
actually try to predict what people will
do next.
I'm going to show you a really simple
example right now that we use in our lab.
So for instance, here's a gamble.
Imagine that I offered you this gamble,
on the screen.
How many people,
versus a sure chance of making nothing,
how many people would take this gamble?
No one would take it.
Oh, good, thank you.
Got some risk takers in the audience, two.
Good [LAUGH].
Excellent, okay, good.
There is diversity in risk preferences.
How about this gamble, right here?
How many people would take this gamble?
Good, you guys are consistent,
that's good.
We have a few more.
We have, maybe 20 to 10% really,
of the people in the audience.
How about this gamble?
How many people would take this?
Oh, I see more hands going up.
I see almost 50% of the hands
going up in this room.
This is, this is very interesting,
for a couple of reasons.
One is because I think it speaks
to this paradox of suspense.
Now I don't know actually what Martha
meant [LAUGH] by the paradox of suspense.
But this is a paradox of suspense.
And the paradox is this.
If people are choosing according to
the best option, the thing they think will
the best, will be the best, why would they
then systematically choose something that
is not the best for
them mathematically, okay?
How can we calculate the expected
value of these gambles?
Well, it's pretty easy.
You just take this amount, multiply
it by the probability of that, and
take this amount, multiply it by
that probability, add it up, okay.
So it turns out,
the expected value of all of these
gambles is actually not as you chose.
It's equal.
It's zero for each of these gambles.
And yet in every audience I've spoken to,
all around the world,
people prefer this gamble.
This is very attractive to them.
Now you might say, that's quirky,
nice science project that you've done and
go back to your lab.
But, I think what's interesting about
this is that we can actually look at
your brain as you are choosing whether
to accept these gambles or not.
And we can actually predict,
not only that you're more likely to
accept that gamble or not, but why people
are inordinately drawn to this gamble.
This positive skew gamble,
or this lottery gamble.
It's because this area right here,
is systematically more excited in people
by this gamble than the other gambles.
What this also means from
an applied standpoint is,
I can make money off of you, right?
>> [LAUGH].
>> Because, [LAUGH],
if you're willing to take that gamble,
then I can charge you to take that gamble,
right?
And I can make that money because
the expected value is zero.
This is a paradox.
This is violating expected value.
Okay, but people systematically show this.
We can see things that are happening
in the brain during anticipation.
We can predict that you're more
likely to take that gamble.
And because I like to look at
brain images, here's just a,
you can use big data techniques
to classify the brain states that
happen before people take that gamble and
get a whole solution of everything.
So this is not just a theoretically guided
solution based on my preconceptions, but
we can actually use sophisticated
ways of looking at the data to
get optimal predictions
from your brain data.
That's not why we're doing this.
We actually are interested in what
is going on during anticipation.
What is the affective process?
What is the emotional feeling that
generates this kind of behavior?
And the reason that we're interested in
this is not just because
we're interested in gambles.
I don't work in Las Vegas,
I work at Stanford.
But we're also interested in,
what draws people in?
What engages people?
What kinds of other decisions powerfully
activate and recruit this circuitry?
We think social types of decisions really
engage this circuitry, and indeed,
I think that it's, probably effective
storytelling engages these circuits.
And I'm making this a short presentation
because of my lack of expertise.
But I think actually, just even based
on this very minimal early data,
I hope it will someday lead to sort
of a science of storytelling and, and
I hope to use it in
communicating to people.
But I think even based on just these early
results, we can infer that if you want
to engage people, obviously you should
have a positive premise in there.
I mean, this seems obvious to people, and
it's probably telling you something
you already knew, that there should be
a positive gain outcome that
should be significant to people.
But the counterintuitive part
is that it should be uncertain.
You shouldn't, so basically everything I
was told in graduate school about how to
deliver a science story is wrong.
I was told to tell people, here's my
hypothesis, here's what I found, and
look, everything is consistent
with my hypothesis.
That's not right.
I should see doubt in people.
I should dynamically string
them along with uncertainty,
if I really want to engage them.
I don't know how to do that.
I'm a scientist.
I'm happy to learn.
We have other people here who
are experts at this, right?
But I think scientists can
definitely learn from the media,
and from what is effective and
what is not.
And I hope there can be sort of a marriage
of the science and the storytelling.
So I think, the implication for
storytelling for
me as a scientist is that you
shouldn't state your conclusion first.
You should actually cultivate
a hopeful uncertainty,
no matter how improbable that is.
In fact, it could be quite improbable,
and you can engage people.
And maybe you will your
message will stick longer and
motivate action more effectively.
Thanks.
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