I Was Told There’d Be Neurons

In what I can only describe as cruel irony, Fritz Breithaupt mentions the sunk cost fallacy on page eight of his book, The Narrative Brain: The Story Our Neurons Tell. The reason you can’t let go of the deal you know isn’t closing isn’t only that you’ve given it so much time. The fact that you already bought an expensive ticket for the big game isn’t the only thing compelling you to go, even though you have a horrible cold. Part of the pain of the sunk cost fallacy, according to Breithaupt, is that you’ve already played out the story in your head of what it will feel like when you close the deal and how much fun you’ll have at the stadium.

Similarly, I had already played out the story in my head of how fun it would be to write this book review and share all of the fascinating studies and facts I had learned about how our brains react to stories. And so, as I passed the 100-page mark with nary a neuron mentioned, did I stop reading? No, of course I didn’t.

OBJECTS IN TITLE ARE FARTHER THAN THEY APPEAR

The sunk cost fallacy propelled me to the end of this book, which is how I can confidently tell you that there is no mention of neurons anywhere. I have the not-entirely-healthy habit of assuming that blame always lies with me, so I thought, maybe I read the description incorrectly. Maybe I just presumed there would be more brain research because that’s what I hoped for. But I’ve given it some thought, and even with my highly over-developed guilt complex (it’s a skill—I have it on my resume), even I won’t accept the fault for this “misunderstanding.”

First of all, the title is The Narrative Brain. Not The Narrative Mind. Not The Narrative Psyche. I took that to mean we would be talking about the actual brain. But titles can be tricky. The Life of Pi has nothing to do with math. Jaws, while a great book, did not teach me much about fish mandibles. Maybe he’s not talking about the actual brain.

Which brings us to the subheading—The Stories Our Neurons Tell. When I read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird (another tricky title, hardly any birds in there), the subtitle of Some Instructions on Writing and Life had me expecting some writing tips. It did not disappoint! A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There, told me I’d get to see some drawings by Aldo Leopold (and I did!). Taken as a whole,  I was not out of line expecting some EKGs or MRIs.

Didn’t I read the description? Yes! “An investigation of the emotional power of narrative that illuminates the relationship between the human brain and the stories we tell.” To study a relationship between two things, don’t you need to explore both of those things? The rating could have been a clue (3.5 out of 5), but there were only three reviews. Oh, wait, was that the red flag that I missed?

HAVE YOU LEARNED NOTHING?

Breithaupt does share results from an impressive study he conducted that is basically a scientific version of the game of “telephone.” What happens when one person reads a story and then has to retell it to the next person who retells it to someone else?

The study revealed that, while the stories’ language, and even some of the facts, changed, what remained constant was the overall emotional feeling the stories elicited. For us as sales professionals, that tells us that the most important part of the stories we share are the emotions they evoke. Fact sharing and storytelling are different things. People remember stories because of the emotion.

It was a cool study, but it isn’t telling us something we don’t already know. Did I learn anything else? Yes! A fun evolutionary fact. It is thought that the whites of our eyes (the sclera) evolved adaptively in humans to promote tracking of others’ gaze direction. Human sclera have much more white than any other primates’, and this helps us look exactly where someone else is looking, which is a huge part of communication. If you’ve ever tried to make your dog look at something, you understand the importance of gaze tracking.

SIGMUND, MEET RAINBOW DASH

So, what does this book contain? Here’s a sample for you.

“In the back and forth, the audience members experience themselves as recognizers and recognized at the same time. Nevertheless, the audience never quite feels directly at one with either; it recognizes and feels how the recognized is recognized by its counterpart and in turn recognizes itself in this perspective. The audience thus experiences how it recognizes being recognized as recognized…” p. 128–129

I was already more than halfway through at that point and, I’m embarrassed to admit, still holding out hope that neurons were only a chapter away.

“Perhaps Freud was a tulpamancer too. This makes me wonder what drove him to summon a punishing tulpa that he called the Super-Ego in himself and a mysterious, dark tulpa he called the Id. If he had opted for other tulpas, perhaps by taking clues from watching My Little Pony, the history of psychoanalysis might have taken different and maybe more happiness-focused forms.” p. 173

In case you’re not familiar, “tulpamancy” is the practice of creating and interacting with autonomous beings, or tulpas, in your head. While said to have come from Tibetan Buddhism, the concept was developed and popularized by a 20^th-century Belgian-French explorer and is now a fully Westernized imaginary friend.

So, was it the mention of tulpamancy that made me give up on the neurons? Or was it the reference to My Little Pony? We may never know, but it is proof that I did read the entire book. What a ridiculous thing to have to write in a book review, but I have to believe that other synopses of the book did not come from people who did read it. The book isn’t bad, per se—it’s just not what it purports to be. In fact, if the book had been titled, Stories: Understanding Narrative Thinking, Multiversionality, and My Tibetan Imaginary Friend Pinky Pie, I may have given it a good review.

Don’t try to sell something by calling it what it isn’t. There are people out there who are good matches for whatever you’re selling, so be honest about what that is. Maybe that’s the lesson we can all take from this book. That and never tell me there will be neurons and show up without neurons. I will come for you.

Are you looking to improve your own sales stories? We’ve got a workshop for that. You can reach us at mastery@maestrogroup.co.