Since our brain has to process numerous things every second of the day and it is impossible and inefficient to record everything verbatim, it has chosen to record things in an abstract manner such that the gist is preserved without the entire content. Simple examples such as Gestaldt images as you see below are examples that our brain is excellent in forming the whole using incomplete parts.
Can you see the dog in the picture?
Obviously, such condensation of information is not without its disadvantages. The first one is misinterpretation which occurs when the brain tries to create the reality from its gist but does so in a way that is different from the original reality. An example of this is the classic game that shows how rumors are created. The second and more subtle issue is that of creating a non-existent reality. The power of stories is so strong that when the brain is given a bunch of data points that do not necessarily fit together, it still tries to make up a story that makes it fit somehow, kind of like pushing a square peg in a round hole. This has been demonstrated by neuroscientists like Oliver Sacks in his book "The man who mistook his wife for a hat
" and V S Ramachandran in his book "Phantoms in the Brain
". Even so, such issues are overlooked by the brain in favor of the efficiency it gains by condensing information as stories. Maybe realizing this tremendous power of stories, our ancestors across the world have chosen fables, parables, stories, dramas, and epics as the means to capture the wisdom gathered over the years in lieu of raw facts - or maybe it was the most natural form of information storage. Over the last few decades however, we seem to have ignored this idea of storing information within stories in favour of storing real facts. With increasingly cheaper storage mediums, it is probably logical for us to conclude that we should be storing raw data as opposed to processed information to avoid the fallacies of condensed information. However, we are overlooking the fact that even though the raw data is stored as is, our brain still processes information in a more abstract story format. Thus every person who reads the raw data has to create a story within his brain to make sense, which can still lead to misinterpretation. Moreover, such storage of raw data is typically done without the context in which it existed, thereby robbing crucial information that would be required for the reader to process the data later. This is where the story overpowers raw data in that it can also codify the context within which the data was created.
Such zeal in trying to store raw data in favour of stories can be seen everywhere. Presentations stuffed with bullet points are one such example. As many of the visual presenters such as Garr Reynolds in his "Presentation Zen
" and more recently Carmine Gallo in "Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs
" will tell you, slides with a single "story line" coupled with a visual is far more appealing and impactful than a slide full of bullet points. The underlying principle however, is in trying to give raw facts as opposed to a story. You can see which one is more powerful. For example, here are two slides that summarizes this blog. Which one sticks in your mind better?
Google's philosophy is somewhat similar. It encourages users to store all the raw data in the world so that it can be retrieved easily at a future date. While one can argue that the 'more than 200 parameters' it uses to rank the results is equivalent of processing the data, it still does not come close to the effectiveness of a story, primarily because the context is lost along the way.
Recently, there seems to realization in the IT/Business sector of the power of stories. Books such as "The Story Factor
" and "Made to Stick
" are good examples. Even with such compelling evidence in favor of using stories as a medium of communication as opposed to raw data, we still tend to choose the latter, probably because it is the easy way out. It is far less time consuming to dump information in bullet points than to hunt for a visual and try to condense your message into a single line. However, we are making the mistake of allowing the users to create their own interpretation instead of providing ours to them. The problem seems more intense in the IT industry compared to other areas. The whole movie industry thrives on stories. Industries related to arts such as cooking rely on apprenticeship, which is in effect, creating your personal story by observing data in context. Another known attempt was done a decade or so back by Peter Naur (famous for his Backus-Naur Form notation) in his article 'Programming as Theory Building' where he touched upon the notion that software design is in some sense akin to building a story.
However, when it comes to IT or even Business in general, we seem to ignore this powerful medium in favor of the much less efficient raw data. Those who break away from this mould such as Steve Jobs are seen as charismatic and visionary. I wonder if we can take a cue from our past and focus more on creating better stories than trying to deluge people with information.
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