Yellow Bird - storytelling and the brain

It’s pretty clear that storytelling is a very, very powerful, powerful way of communicating to folks and the listener, we were gifted, and we evolved to have creative minds that can imagine, this ability to imagine all kinds of scenarios. And this is what storytellers do. They give us this information. And as they tell it to us, all the listeners are having maybe very similar and very different responses in their brains. And as you hear those stories over and over again, you can hear the story, you can see the story, you can smell the story, you can feel the story, you can taste the story.
Because all of these things are happening within the context of the story that’s being told. You’re not always consciously aware that there’s a fire burning and you’re smelling the certain kind of smell from the wood. But that’s going to get locked into the brain. You’re not aware that you may be not only hearing, the storyteller’s voice, but you may be hearing something else in the room that’s going on that’s being locked in at the same time.
So, you have all these different kinds of pieces that are coming together. And as the individual and children get a chance to imagine, of course, that affects the plasticity of the brain, too, because they use all these different factors and all these different kinds of ways to kind of do the imagery in the imagery building.