[MUSIC]
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.
[MUSIC]