Translator: Lauren Hornsey Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
Thank you.
When I was a little boy,
I loved the stories of Robert Louis Stevenson:
"Kidnapped," "Treasure Island."
I loved the idea of adventure;
my little introverted self could live vicariously through these stories,
and the idea of these pirates who would plunder treasure -
they would steal gold -
and then they'd go and bury it on a tropical island.
And what's interesting about this is if you think about piracy today,
the biggest problem we have with piracy is that they're stealing movies,
right?
(Laughter)
Pirates used to plunder gold, and now pirates steal stories.
And the reason for this is because stories are actually more valuable than gold.
And I bring this up because I am a student of the liberal arts.
And what this means
is that I have no useful skills and I am completely unemployable.
(Laughter) (Applause)
And this is generally believed.
It is why liberal arts programs are being cut;
it is why liberal arts colleges are having a hard time out there.
As a liberal arts student,
my bread and butter is the reading of stories;
it's the understanding of multiple narratives.
What I can do, as a good liberal arts student,
is I can ask a really good question.
And yet we live in the age of answers.
Whether it's finding an algorithm
that's going to find patterns inside big data,
or if it's building an economic model to predict the future of markets
or a climate model to predict the future of global warming.
What we live in is an age that wants and an age that expects answers.
A philosopher once said,
"Truth is a roving army of metaphor."
You can not get much further from answers than that statement.
And I would like to bring that statement a little more modern
and say that truth is in our network of narratives.
And so as we begin this exploration of narrative,
I would like to ask you a question.
Who do you see before you?
Who do you see up on the stage?
You had an introduction; you can look in your program;
you can Google me very quickly, if you'd like,
but you won't have that much to go on.
So everyone, now that I've asked it, will start to fill in the blanks;
you're going to use your memory files, your ability to find patterns;
you're going to assume certain things, and you're going to fill it in.
And the reason you're going to fill it in is because we like answers.
And so I want to tell you the story of two crosses.
Now, I just have to say, I'm a nice Jewish boy from New York,
and yes, I just began by making the sign of the cross.
I really feel for my parents right now.
These are the joys of assimilation.
So, the first cross is in 410 AD, and we have the fall of Rome.
And Rome falls to the best-named barbarians ever, the Visigoths.
The Visigoths come in; this is frightening.
Rome has been Rome for 500 years.
Families have been patrician families for 25 generations.
Just to give you an idea of it,
just imagine the Taliban barreling down 5th Avenue in New York City
in their Toyota pick-up trucks,
20 soldiers in the back with their Kalashnikovs,
and no one to stop them,
and you get a feel for what the fall of Rome was like.
And a lot of people start to point the finger at Christianity.
They say Christianity became the religion of the Empire about 100 years ago,
and that's why this has happened.
And so a bishop -
in modern-day Algeria, the city of Hippo -
named Augustine,
decides to counter this with a grand rationalization.
And what he says is this:
"Do not mind the fall of Rome,
for the fall of Rome is the city of man.
It is material. It is full of sin.
It is temporal.
It is not why we are here.
The goal of our being here is to create the city of God.
And the way we do that is through the Church,
but also through looking inside ourselves to find our souls
because our souls are that which are nearest to God.
It's the search for our own connection to divinity."
And this becomes the paradigm
for the next 1,000 years in Western Europe.
If you've ever asked yourself,
"Where are the Einsteins and Newtons in the Middle Ages?"
And if you're not a liberal arts student, you've probably never asked that question,
but I have asked myself that,
and the answer is they're in the Church.
They were looking inside themselves, seeking their connection to God.
And this happens for a thousand years,
and it reaches its artistic zenith with Dante's "Divine Comedy."
And in that story,
which is the story of one man's search for his connection to God,
it begins, "Midway through my life, I found myself in a dark wood,
the right path lost."
And how many of us have experienced that moment in our lives?
And then at the end, Dante is literally standing in the presence of God.
And he talks about feeling oneness.
And with this, the Middle Ages, for all intents and purposes,
is coming to a close.
We get Petrarch, another Italian poet.
He gives us the Humanists.
The Humanists give us the Rationalists; the Rationalists give us Descartes.
We just ran through about 200 years, but trust me, it's all good.
And Descartes brings us to our second cross.
How many of you remember high school geometry?
How many remember the Cartesian plane with the x-axis and the y-axis?
Now, I apologize if any of you are getting nightmares right about now.
And what he did was he threw numbers all over this.
And numbers were believed, by the Pythagoreans,
to be the language of divinity, the language of the universe.
So even though we've entered the age of reason and science,
there's still a divine sense to it - that we are seeking out God.
In fact, what Descartes said was that God gave us reason so that we may know him.
And we took this Cartesian plane,
and we began to map and measure everything in the world.
We mapped abstract objects on it;
we mapped the speed of light;
we figured out how big and old the universe is.
We are now taking that plane and putting it onto our own brains
and trying to find the seat of our souls.
And yet something is missing; something is missing for us as humans.
Walk into any bookstore, look at the self-help section,
you'll see how much is missing.
And what is missing is the question that liberal arts is engaged with,
which is what does it mean to be human?
Because on the one hand,
these two crosses appear to be very different.
You've got Dante, at the end of his story,
saying that he could feel himself revolving with the universe,
turning with the sun and the stars,
and all of it was moved by God's love.
And 450 years later,
you get Isaac Newton who says, "Well, actually, it's gravity."
That's what's moving the universe.
And so they appear very different, but what they share in common
is both of these crosses represent systems that are in search of certainty.
They represent systems that are in search of answers.
And the liberal arts is not.
Truth is a roving army of metaphor.
And so how do you engage the question, what does it mean to be human?
How do we engage the nuance of our humanity?
And the tool is narrative.
Narratives are so powerful for us, and primal.
40,000 years ago, our ancestors wandered deep into caves
and painted their life's experience on the walls just to share it.
And today, my three-year-old niece
will not go to sleep without hearing a story,
preferably four or five, which is when the negotiation begins.
(Laughter)
We need these.
And what's more amazing is we have discovered
that our brain architecture has actually evolved to engage narrative.
There's a part of your brain called the default mode network.
It lights up, it turns on, when you're off-task, when you space out,
when you think you're doing nothing.
If you've ever had an aha moment in the shower
or suddenly realized something
when you were just taking a bike ride, kayaking, whatever it may be,
that's your default mode network.
And one part of it has the highest metabolic rate
of any part of your brain at rest.
That means that this part of your brain asks for more energy than any other part.
It's called the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex,
and what it is doing with all of that energy
is it is building a narrative of your life with a past, a present and a future,
constantly integrating the new information.
Here's another study, out of Princeton:
They put a woman in an fMRI, and they had her tell a story,
and they mapped her brain function.
They recorded her telling the story
because then they took 12 other people,
placed them into the fMRIs
and had them listen to this woman's story
and mapped their brain functioning.
And what they discovered was the more people listened,
the more they comprehended,
the more neural coupling happened.
Neural coupling is a really nice phrase that means brain synchronization.
The people listening to the story,
their brains synchronized with the storyteller.
They lit up in unison.
In fact, people who were really listening to the story and really comprehending it
would have parts of their brain
light up in anticipation of the storyteller's brain.
You would actually be ahead of it.
And the part of the brain that lit up was the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex.
Another part of your brain lights up when you're really focusing on someone's story,
the part with huge numbers of receptors for the neuropeptide oxytocin.
Paul Zak out of Claremont College is doing this.
Oxytocin is the neuropeptide that allows us to feel empathy.
When we listen to somebody's story, we are able to feel empathy for them.
Think about this in terms of wanting more empathic leaders.
Think about this in terms of wanting something as grand as world peace.
It is in the telling and listening of our stories
that we actually gain empathy for one another.
Stories, in fact, are so important
they can determine what we literally see in the world.
So right now there are 10 billion bits of information
hitting your retina every second.
Of that, 6 million make it onto your optic nerve;
of that, 100,000 make it into your visual cortex.
And of that, a whopping 100 bits make it into your conscious brain.
To make matters worse,
those 100,000 bits of information that make it to your visual cortex,
only 10% of the neurons there actually process that outside information.
The other 90% aren't even looking at them.
So the question comes, how do we see anything?
How do I not fall off this stage?
How do you not fall down those stairs
if we're seeing so little of the outside world?
The theory is that we are actually filling in the gaps.
Those other 90%, those neurons in our visual cortex,
they're keeping memory files, keeping a pattern, a map of the world,
that allows us to see.
It is literally our narrative of the world that allows us to see it.
You may have seen this YouTube video, called an awareness test.
They have two teams - white and black - that have to make basketball passes.
They say, "Count the passes of the white team."
So you watch for 20 seconds and get very proud: "Eight passes."
"Yes, the team in white made eight passes,
but did you see the person in the bear suit dance by?"
And you're like "What?"
So they replay it and all of a sudden, right in the middle,
someone in a bear suit [dances],
waves at you and walks off the screen.
I did not see it - 60% of people who watch this video do not see it.
And the reason is not that the visual information doesn't come into their eyes;
it's that they don't process it because it wasn't in their narrative.
Now expand this out for a second.
How can you see somebody if you don't know their story?
How can we see each other if we don't know their story?
We literally will not process the information.
And this is the problem with crosses: they have only two dimensions.
And what makes us human exists in that third dimension,
it exists in depth.
Too many organizations ask us to leave our humanity at the door.
Too many leaders create some sort of facade of their humanity
without truly telling us who they are.
And it does not evoke empathy,
and, therefore, we do not understand each other.
I want to give you an example of how this works in storytelling.
So I'm going to talk about myself, using the first dimension to begin with.
And so, my name is Judah.
I was born in New York City. I then moved to the Bay Area.
And I'm a writer and a consultant.
I know, thrilling. You're just feeling me, aren't you?
Okay, that's the first dimension.
We do that everyday, all the time.
Okay, now here's the second dimension.
This you might find in a bio, or you might find it on OkCupid.
(Laughter)
Not that anyone ever lies on OkCupid.
So,
after first saving the world, Judah entered elementary school.
He then graduated simultaneously from Stanford, Harvard and Oxford
with degrees in neuroscience, electrical engineering and general awesomeness.
(Laughter)
He now has become a social entrepreneur,
creating local, sustainable, organic gardens of Eden
that you can install on your roof deck.
In his spare time, he invented money.
(Laughter)
Right? We all know these types of bios; we do them all the time.
I half-did one for my introduction here.
We do them all the time to make ourselves feel better.
What happens with this type of story is it actually serves to separate us.
It actually serves to set me apart,
sort of create a reason, an answer to why I'm on this stage.
And then the horrible shadow side of that
is that it actually makes the person listening feel lesser.
We move through our heads going, "Well, I haven't done that."
Stories are not about separating us; they're about bringing us together.
I do a lot of work with returning soldiers from the U.S. Army,
returning from combat.
And one of the stories I tell them is about Ulysses.
And so Ulysses returns home, and he's been gone for 20 years.
One of the things that happens when he gets home is he's not recognized.
Think about that for returning soldiers:
they return from war, and nobody recognizes them.
But one person does; his old nursemaid recognizes Ulysses.
She recognizes him because he has a scar on his thigh that he got as a young boy.
And the beauty of this is this concept that we are known by our scars.
So, I want to now give you my story with that third dimension,
with that depth.
I was born in New York City, and I was very well off.
My father was a criminal defense attorney; my siblings and I were young princelings.
We were very entitled; the world was coming to us.
Why wouldn't it? We were wonderful.
We were going to grow up and do wonderful things.
And then one day, my father got indicted,
and in this kind of slow-motion family disaster,
we began to lose everything.
We were kicked out of the castle, so to speak.
So my siblings and I did what any young, entitled kids would do.
We made camp right next to the castle walls.
Every day we put on our best clothes,
which day after day got a little more tattered,
and we banged on the door saying, "There's been a mistake, let us back in."
But that door was never opening again.
And the reason we camped like that was because there was nowhere to go
except into a dark wood.
Dante, at least, discovered his dark wood in the middle of his life.
I was 19.
I was frustrated. I was angry.
But underneath that, I was immensely sad for everything that had been lost.
I was also incredibly frightened because I did not want to go into that dark wood.
But one day, we realized that there was no choice,
and I put my parents on my back and into the wood I went.
And I tripped a lot; I hurt myself a lot.
I wandered through deserts.
I faced dragons.
And through it all,
I remember having this distinct sense
that there was something fundamentally broken with me now,
that I would never quite be right,
that I would never actually heal.
And one day, I started to find my way, just a little more.
Things got a little bit better.
And I set my parents up, set them down.
My brother had moved to California to start something new.
In America, when you screw up the first act of your life,
you go to Northern California.
If you screw up and stay in the East Coast, you're just a loser,
but in Northern California,
they're very supportive: "Good for you, keep going!"
So that's how I ended up in Northern California.
(Laughter)
My brother had discovered a dance community,
and he took me to this campout called Frolic,
which is fascinating to me
because frolic was not something I had been able to do for 10 years.
What you do is go out into the woods in the foothills of the Sierras,
and you dance.
And you dance all night.
You have to imagine me dancing in the middle of this dark wood.
And I'm dancing in spite of the darkness.
I am dancing in the belief that the sun will rise again.
And I am dancing with the rational knowledge
that the sun is going to rise again.
And I am dancing my heart out.
Then I look up at the horizon, at the ridgeline,
and the sky is turning a pearl gray,
and the sun is coming back up.
I distinctly remember feeling this weight lifting from my shoulders,
literally a yoke that I had worn for so long
I didn't realize it was there anymore.
And I felt something so odd rising in me, which was joy.
I realized that this wasn't just dawn;
this was my dawn.
This was the creation of myself anew.
Stories are the swords we use to slay our dragons.
Narrative is the tool we use to understand ourselves in the world.
If you don't share your story with someone,
you can never truly be seen.
If you don't share your scars with someone,
you can never truly be known.
And so I ask you again,
now who do you see?
Thank you.
(Applause)