224. Make Your Messages Epic: The Evolution of Words and the Stories They Carry

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: Language sits at the very heart of our ability to connect, to innovate, and to collaborate. If we are to get better at our communication, we first have to start by understanding language and its origins. My name is Matt Abrahams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. Today I look forward to speaking with Laura Spinney. Laura's an author and journalist. Her writing appears in many locations including The Atlantic, National Geographic, Nature, and New Scientist. Laura is the author of Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World, and her latest book is entitled, Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global. Welcome, Laura. I'm really excited for our conversation. 

[00:00:53] Laura Spinney: I'm delighted to be here. Thank you for the invitation. 

[00:00:55] Matt Abrahams: Excellent. Shall we get started? 

[00:00:57] Laura Spinney: Yes.

[00:00:57] Matt Abrahams: Alright. You have written on a wide range of topics, many which center around communication. I'm curious what motivates your interest in communication?

[00:01:06] Laura Spinney: I suppose that language is both something incredibly powerful, you can change the way that other people behave, almost telepathically with language. You don't have to operate to implant an idea in their head, you can just speak to them. And at the same time, it's a blunt instrument. So I suppose I'm fascinated by that kind of tension between the power of language and the sort of bluntness of it.

[00:01:28] Matt Abrahams: It's fascinating to me how there is so much we can accomplish with communication, and yet there are so many things that we struggle with in our communication, and I really appreciate that you take the time to reflect on it and write about it. I first came to know your work in an article you wrote about deception detection. Humans aren't really good at detecting when other people are lying. Referring back to that article in your research for it, what are some things that we can do to become better lie detectors? 

[00:01:54] Laura Spinney: Yeah, indeed, people think that they're good at detecting other people's lies, but, but actually they're not. The point about lying is that it imposes a greater cognitive burden than telling the truth. Because you have to make sure that your story is straight and all the bits of it fit together. And if you've invented it, that's quite hard to do. So if you wanna catch someone out in a lie, some of the tips or recommendations are to try and sort of get 'em to tell the story backwards, or say that you've maybe got a witness who saw this part of the story, and could you just maybe check that the facts are aligned, and make them a little nervous, disrupt them a bit and try and catch them out that way. Or perhaps something like draw the scene they're describing because they've gotta make all the ingredients cohere. And if it's invented, that's tougher. Or something like if they're expressing a powerful point of view, maybe get them to play devil's advocate and pretend to support the other one, because that becomes harder if they're lying about it. So yeah, some of the tricks to leverage that extra cognitive burden that a lie poses. 

[00:02:52] Matt Abrahams: So when we're being deceptive, it takes a lot of cognitive effort to do so, and anything that puts a little added burden, like telling the story backwards or having somebody draw things out, really forces them to overload themselves. And often the detection can become more visible. And the big takeaway from that work, and your reporting of it, is we're just not very good at detecting lies. 

[00:03:18] Laura Spinney: And that we think we are. 

[00:03:19] Matt Abrahams: That's right. And we think we are. And that can get us into lots of trouble. So I think the big point there is remember that you might not be as good at detecting the lies as you think. I found your article on the history of storytelling just fascinating. Where stories come from, why we tell those stories. Would you mind summarizing your central thesis of that article and then explain why storytelling is so important and essential to being human? 

[00:03:43] Laura Spinney: Central thesis is a little difficult to address except for there's this new mindset about how to approach it. There's still quite a lot of theories about why we tell stories. If I was to summarize a few of them, there would be like, what one main school of thought is that it's about passing on really important ecological information that's essential to survival. Another would be that storytelling has a very social function. When people are sitting around being told a story, they're listening closely to this story, their neurons are firing in a sort of synchronized way with each other, and that inspires kind of feelings of groupiness and there's a sort of social cohesion effect of that. So there are lots of theories, and I don't think we were yet at the point of choosing between them. And any way they might all be valid. But the thing also that I think is fascinating about this new approach is that it's showing how very stable some stories can be over time.

[00:04:30] And so there's the evidence that some stories are as old as the first migrations out of Africa, sixty thousand years. Some stories that we still tell today were brought in by the first speakers of the Indo-European language, the subject of my most recent book, when they came into Europe, about five thousand years ago. Pretty old anyway. And by the way, pre-writing, importantly. Some stories in Australia, date to the end of the last ice age, because they talk about the rising of the seas and they describe land that is now covered by water. So some of these things that are coming out of this comparative approach, this possibility of storing stories and comparing them across space and time are truly mind boggling, I think. And so the point of the article again was just to talk about some of the ideas that are coming out. Not to say that we've got a fully front loaded theory of storytelling yet, we're working on it.

[00:05:19] Matt Abrahams: I think as we both agreed, this is really fascinating, that there are stories that have been told with relatively high fidelity. That is, they have maintained their essential ideas for a long, long time, millennia, and at the same time that there are some differences around how stories are told across cultures. But fundamentally, everybody tells stories and there's some theories about it. As you said, one is biological and evolutionary. Where is the food, where do we go? And then there's the cohesive nature where we actually connect better, share empathy through story. And as you mentioned, this all happened way before we had written word. And it's fundamental. 

[00:06:01] Laura Spinney: You're absolutely right. And so some of the findings about how very stable certain types of stories are, are feeding into this other idea about what stories do for us. So like why are those particular stories stable over so long? Whereas these ones change faster. 

[00:06:15] Matt Abrahams: Given that you've spent some time studying stories and you do very well writing your own stories, what do you find makes for a good story? Are there certain key elements or aspects that make for good story? 

[00:06:26] Laura Spinney: Definitely. This kind of comparative approach that I referred to is allowing people to draw out the kind of more universal structures from stories that do repeat across space and time. They have this capacity to revive what eyewitnesses might have seen, put us in the places as if we are there at the action. And, and some of the ways that, some of the tricks they have to do that are, for example, to violate some of our expectations. So if you want to make people's hearts beat a bit faster and them to remember things, you need to give them a little bit of a shock, a tiny little surprise, not too much because then they'll shut down, but a little bit of a violation. That's one theory, for example, about why we love things like ghost stories, because ghosts are things that most people don't encounter.

[00:07:09] They violate our expectations of what you might meet in your daily round, but also a story intrigues and obviously a good story entertains. So one of the important theses for why we tell stories is that they have this appeal that draws us into the situation in the first place where we're gonna sit down with other people and listen. They have to be entertaining. And the hero's journey is one very common example of that. That would be Luke Skywalker, Spider-Man, Harry Potter, you know, the genial protagonist who comes up against a major obstacle, clears the obstacle. And this triumph over adversity inspires feelings of joy and empathy in the listener. So it's a fairly basic plot line that has endured through the ages and is apparently highly entertaining to us. 

[00:07:57] Matt Abrahams: So it sounds like a few things that really make for a good story, and that is that there is some kind of violation of expectations. Our brains are certainly wired for things that are novel, and so a story can violate expectations and draw us in. I heard you, although not name it, but really describe it, this notion of building curiosity pulls us in. The entertainment value and the empathy. So if you're trying to craft a story that can really draw people in, I think using any or all of those novelty, curiosity, entertaining empathy, can really help. And you shared with us one of the most predominant structures, the hero's journey. Story falls into structures and one way is to use the hero's journey. There are others. And I think that's really important because if we're going to try to leverage storytelling for whatever goal we're trying to have, thinking about what we can do to make it relevant, engaging, interesting, is really important and I appreciate you delineating those.

[00:08:56] Laura Spinney: So you could think about sort of entertaining vehicle into which you load your ecologically important information, the message you wanna get across. 

[00:09:04] Matt Abrahams: Absolutely. And that was very helpful for our species for a long time, and still probably today. I'd like to turn our attention to your latest book, Proto, which dives deep into language and looks at the origins of the Proto-Indo-European language. That's a mouthful to say. Why is studying the origins and evolution of language important and what impact can the learnings we have from that affect how we communicate today? 

[00:09:29] Laura Spinney: Great question. I think first of all, in the case of the language family that I'm talking about, Indo-European, the world's largest language family today, spoken by nearly half of humanity, that family was born before writing. And studying it does a number of things for us. First of all, it reveals the very deep connections, cultural, psychological, between groups of people who we would not necessarily connect on those levels. So the Ind0-European language family is so-called because even in the ancient world, it was spoken from Ireland in the West to the Indian subcontinent in the East.

[00:10:04] In fact, actually further afield because there was one branch of it that was spoken in what is now China. Uh, from 1492, the age of exploration on it went, moved onto the other continents. So it's huge. And yet when you look down into the deepest layers of these languages and the stories that people have been telling in those languages for five thousand years or more, the same tropes repeating, words and units of stories, things we've just been talking about. And for example, an obvious example is a Dragon Slayer stories. Across the Indo-European world we tell that story, which is very old, in similar ways with similar themes and similar words.

[00:10:40] There are levels in which we are really connected, but there's another really important function that this kind of research does for us. I said that the family predates writing, but language in a way is an archive of its own journey because languages are ceaselessly changing. They are, language is, and this is how we started the conversation, it's considered humanity's oldest tool. And so in order for it to be a useful tool, it has to adapt. It's the way that we function in our environment's, one of the ways that we adapt to our environment. And so it's constantly changing. And if you can extrapolate back and understand ancestry of our modern languages and how they've evolved over time, and much of that information is locked into them, then you can tell a lot about what was happening in the past, even before historical records began.

[00:11:25] Matt Abrahams: Language as a tool, not just to communicate what we need to communicate, as we do through stories, but language as a tool to better understand humans and our evolution is really cool. I want to take a step back because maybe some of our listeners aren't familiar with this, but you talked about language families. Can you just give an overview of what that means and perhaps some examples of other language families? 

[00:11:50] Laura Spinney: Yes. Okay. Just to give the kind of basic concept, a language is spoken in a place. The people who speak it, their population, imagine grows. They spread out over space. The language divides into dialects. We see that happening all the time. And then if the circumstances allow or promote, those dialects can become languages in their own right. Become even more separated. And so you can imagine one ancestral language essentially diverging through branches to become many generations and a large number of offspring. That's what we think happened from, for example, the Indo-European family, that it was originally just a small cluster of dialects spoken by a group of people.

[00:12:29] Probably on the Eurasian Steppe about five thousand years ago as they moved out, as their descendants moved out, their languages diverged with them. There has to be a caveat there 'cause it's not exactly like human families or biological families because languages can change both vertically by dissent, but they can also change through horizontal transmission, through loans, lending to each other and contact. So both those mechanisms are very important in shaping language evolution. And when you see, for example, in my book, a family tree of languages, that's really only part of the story. It's kind of a simplification of the truth because in the white space between the nice crisp branches are all the effects of contact.

[00:13:05] So today it's estimated there are about a hundred and forty language families in the world, but most of us speak the top five of those. So it's very unevenly distributed. And the two behemoths, if you like, are Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan. The major representative of Indo-European is English. The language we are now speaking in, and the major representative of Sino-Tibetan is Mandarin. Mandarin has more native speakers than English, but Indo-European as a whole family has more native speakers than Sino-Tibetan. So Indo-European is, whether you measure it by the number of speakers or geographical spread, today the largest language family on earth. 

[00:13:39] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for that explication, it's very helpful and I am fascinated by that transmission horizontally that you talked about. We see that all the time. So in English, we use words that, for example, came from French, even though that's the same family. The notion is that that we co-opt and leverage words. And what I find fascinating, and I don't mean to take us on a tangent, is that in some languages that are words that we just don't have easily explained or correlates to in other languages. So we borrow these concepts. And I find that really fascinating that if you have a term for it, you can have a shared meaning for an experience or an idea, but if you don't have a term for it, in some ways we're limited in how we envision and see what the world is like. And that to me is a really fascinating conundrum and really interesting because it means we have to rely a lot on our communication skills to try to build a shared mental model for whatever it is we're discussing. 

[00:14:33] Laura Spinney: And by the way, both the vertical and the horizontal processes can be really informative about history. So if I compare what the same word across a number of Indo-European languages, I find that it has varied according to a sort of predictable set of rules. And so I can say that those languages are related, they form part of the same family, but I can also trace loans through languages and piece together history that way. And I'll give you one very concrete example of where that happened, fascinatingly, if you ask me. So the Romani people, who used to be called, and we don't use this term anymore because it's considered pejorative, gypsies. The word gypsy came from Egypt because there was a time when we thought they came from Egypt.

[00:15:11] They do not come from Egypt. They originally came from the south of India. And part of the piecing together of the Romani people's backstory was done with the help of lone words. So you could trace their, basically, it took them a thousand years to get from India to the eastern fringes of Europe. They passed through Persia, what is now mainly Iran. And there they picked up some Persian words. I think donkey was one of them, uh, honey, pear, as in the fruit. But they didn't pick up any Arab words so that we know they went through Persia before the Muslim conquests. So in this way you can use loan words as a sort of way of piecing together, reconstructing the history of peoples.

[00:15:50] Matt Abrahams: So language in essence, becomes the clues that we use to solve some of these mysteries about humanity. How neat that this is one of the fundamental investigation stories for being human. Before we end, I like to ask three questions of all my guests. One I create just for you, and the other two are similar across all of the guests. So, are you up for answering?

[00:16:11] Laura Spinney: Absolutely.

[00:16:12] Matt Abrahams: Question number one, given all the work that you do on a wide variety of topics, what advice would you give someone who wishes to improve their communication? 

[00:16:21] Laura Spinney: So the biggest challenge is to make them care. And I suppose it's pretty simple a recipe really. Maybe imagine trying to tell a story to somebody you know, your friend in the pub where there are competing demands on their attention. There's a TV screen with a football match on it, or how are you gonna draw them in and how are you gonna get the information across to them and how are you gonna make them care, again, the most important thing. 'Cause you have to engage their attention before you can do anything else.

[00:16:47] Matt Abrahams: Very well said. Yeah, it's all about attention and as you suggested, making it really relevant and salient is the place to start. But you do that, not by thinking about what it means for me, the writer, the communicator, but what does it mean for the people that I'm communicating to? And thank you for that. Question number two, I'll be curious to get your answer to this. Who is a communicator that you admire and why? 

[00:17:07] Laura Spinney: People I admire are people who raise us up. Give us a sense of grandeur, give us a sense of why this matters, how this story connects you to the bigger why. Why it's important to push against the big, enormous, black enveloping pillow of uncertainty in which we all live. I'm going to name a French journalist who I admire very greatly, although she's not a science writer at all, Florence Aubenas, who is a very important reporter at the newspaper, and she's written some amazing books where very often she goes underground for a long period of time and describes her experiences.

[00:17:38] Matt Abrahams: It sounds to me what's important to you, and communicators that you admire, is that they can engage, they can intrigue, they can entertain, and they can connect to something bigger, and that's important. So final question for you. What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe?

[00:17:54] Laura Spinney: I think I said it in other answers to others of your questions, but grab the attention, draw people in intrigue, lift. Give them the sense of that grandeur that, as I think of it, pushing against that great big pillow of uncertainty that surrounds us, and resolve whatever question you're asking, even if you're not giving the answer to the question so much as explaining why it's important and why the question needs to be asked. So it goes back to the beginning of what we were talking about, the vehicle of entertainment with the message inside it. But you have to also make sure your vehicle gets to the destination. 

[00:18:28] Matt Abrahams: I like the analogy there to help us understand, but this notion of attention, lift, and resolution I think are really powerful. And we've heard some of that before, but this notion of lift, bringing people to something bigger, helping them understand the uncertainties of their worlds, I think is really powerful. Laura, you've done a fantastic job of introducing us to some really insightful and interesting ideas. The notion and power of language in our lives and understanding its evolution is really helpful, and I appreciate you taking the time to make us all better communicators, and please keep writing the interesting, intriguing, and uplifting articles that you do. Thank you. 

[00:19:06] Laura Spinney: Thank you very much for some great questions and a great conversation. 

[00:19:11] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about storytelling, please listen to episode 168 with Matthew Dicks, and dive deeper into language by listening to episode 91 with Valerie Fridland. This episode was produced by Katherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. With thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram. And check out fastersmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletters. Please consider our premium offering for extended Deep Thinks episodes, Ask Matt Anythings, and much more at fastersmarter.io/premium.