Paul J. Zak: The Neuroscience of Good Storytelling

Charlie Melcher:

Hi, I’m Charlie Melcher, founder of The Future of StoryTelling, and I’m so glad to have you here with me today for the FoST podcast. If this is your first time listening, welcome. And if you’re someone who’s listened to us and enjoyed the show before, please consider sharing it with a friend and leaving us a five star rating wherever you get your podcasts. As a storyteller, I’ve always wished that there was some concrete way to measure how moving a story was for the audience. How impactful or immersive was it? Sure, you can conduct surveys and organize focus groups, but these are pretty imperfect tools. So what if there was a method backed by science that we could use to measure the power of a story? Could it help us become better storytellers?

Charlie Melcher:

Today’s guest, Dr. Paul Zak, is a professor at Claremont Graduate University who’s been studying that exact question for over two decades. His lab has come up with a measurement that he believes is a powerful tool to help storytellers and marketers not just measure the effectiveness of their stories, but also improve upon them. Paul’s work led him to found Immersion Neuroscience, a software platform that allows anyone to measure what the brain loves in order to improve outcomes in entertainment, education, advertising, and to monitor emotional wellness. He also recently released a book on the subject called Immersion: The Science of the Extraordinary and Source of Happiness, which I can’t wait to discuss with him today. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Paul Zak. Paul, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the FoST podcast. Welcome.

Paul Zak:

Thank you, Charlie. Great to be back.

Charlie Melcher:

So I’ve really been enjoying reading your new book, Immersion, and one of the things that I was struck by was this question that you pose early in the book about here we are as a species that’s been telling stories for thousands of years, and yet most of the stories that get told these days, we don’t know fundamentally whether the stories we’re making are good or bad. How is that? Why is that? How come we’re still struggling with something as simple as that?

Paul Zak:

So first we have to define good and bad. So I could create a story, a video, some fiction and love it, but other people may not, and that’s okay. At one level, I think we should say, if you’re a creative person and you love this thing so much, you should do it, in my view. The question we asked is, when do stories or experiences capture a large market? Could there be an indicator that there is demand for this kind of experience in a larger set of individuals? So just to put a fine point on that, we were tasked by the US Government to see if we could identify signals on the brain that in combination would predict accurately what people would do after a story or after an experience.

Paul Zak:

What we ultimately discovered was a set of signals from the brain that I believe capture the value that our brains get from experiences with social content. Those could be stories. It could be videos. They could be podcasts. So the book is based on 50,000 brain observations. No one’s ever done that before at scale. And from that, I tried to derive key takeaways that tell us how to create better stories, how to create better live experiences, oh my gosh, how to improve education or training.

Charlie Melcher:

Before I ask you how that actually works, I’m just curious about your definition. You use this term immersion. The book’s called Immersion. If I simplify, it was first we get your attention and then we give you something to care about, a reason to care. And you’re defining those two things as what’s necessary to have this feeling of immersion, or you’re describing those two things together as being an immersive experience.

Paul Zak:

Right. First, you’ve got to get my attention, and then you’ve got to get me to care. So the attention precedes the caring part. But then they flow together. And what’s super cool from a science perspective is that two core neurochemical components seem to be part of this valuation mechanism. One is the attentional response, which is associated with the brain’s binding of dopamine to the prefrontal cortex. And that attention is a zero one variable, either attending to this or attending to something else or to nothing. And most of the second by second variation in immersion is driven by another neurochemical, oxytocin, which captures what I call emotional resonance. There’s a degree to which this really speaks to me emotionally. The release of oxytocin then facilitates greater dopamine binding in areas of the brain associated with a reward. So it generates a craving to repeat or extend this experience. So just same pathways associated with drugs of abuse are activated when we hear great stories or have a great customer service relationship.

Charlie Melcher:

So in other words, we’re going to keep craving immersive experiences once we have them.

Paul Zak:

You’re still in business, I’m still in business because there’s no shortage of demand for great stories and great experiences. We’re going to continue to want them.

Charlie Melcher:

Could you explain what’s involved in being able to judge someone’s immersion?

Paul Zak:

Right. So originally we did this in the lab with 19 PhDs and $100,000 machines. And then eventually, honestly, Charlie, you know me well enough, I’m a cheap bastard and neuroscience is expensive.

Charlie Melcher:

That’s what we always say about you, Paul.

Paul Zak:

And so, yeah, companies just started coming to my lab with suitcases full of money and saying, we want to create a better story, a better message, a better experience. Can you measure it for us? And then, you met me, Charlie, I’m probably a typical weirdo PhD, lucky I cut here most days. So we said, “Hey, maybe there’s demand for this. Could we get rid of the PhD’s $100,000 machine?” So we built a platform and over many years wrote algorithms that allow subscribers to that platform to measure neurologic immersion in real time by pulling data from smart watches and fitness sensors. So the brain is embodied. These cranial nerves pass through the heart. And by feeding in heart rate, we can infer these third and fourth order very subtle changes in the cranial nerve activity that tells us, that quantifies how immersed you are second by second.

Charlie Melcher:

So originally you were doing this by actually drawing blood and measuring the chemical response to stories in some regular intervals. And then that gave you a whole bunch of data and then you could correlate that data without actually drawing the blood, but to other physiological signs that you could track.

Paul Zak:

And so the wonderful video that we did for FoST that you invited me to do, which is wonderful, 10 years ago, it’s got a bazillion views, by the way. I talk about the neurochemicals of immersive storytelling. Wait, I didn’t think I used that term then. So we in my lab to start with changes in neurochemicals because it gives us confidence. It’s very concrete to see a change in neurochemicals in blood. And then we work backwards. We say, “Okay, where did these neurochemicals live in the brain?” And then we can optimize the measurement of these high frequency electrical signals.

Paul Zak:

And then once we find these signals in the brain, we can trace out where they go, again, down the cranial nerves and through the rest of the body. And again, it turns out that under our government contract, we had to have a level of accuracy at predicting what people would do after a message and a level of consistency. So this cranial nerve activity is really consistent because it’s this network effect. So it’s cool that we can infer activity of the brain from these very subtle changes in the cranial nerve activity. And something like an Apple Watch, by the way, correlates with a medical grade electrocardiogram at 0.90. These are amazing devices.

Charlie Melcher:

I didn’t think that I was buying that to be able to track my response to immersive experience and stories. I thought I was just doing it for my training and running and swimming. But exciting to know that you’re able to use that for the dark arts of storytelling.

Paul Zak:

Well, it solves that philosophical dilemma for which we started this conversation, which is, if I love it, everyone should love my baby. And unfortunately, that’s not true. So it allows content creators, creatives to do a quick test, “Hey, send this to your friends by email. Hey, I made this nice video, or I made this nice podcast, could you just watch this and use this app on your smart watch? And then boom, I’ll get some feedback on how to craft and edit. Should I linger on the little boy’s face longer or should I move to the next scene? Should I swell the music more or less?” So for me, from a science perspective, that’s just a data question. But again, the creative people have to think about what they want to test with that data. So there’s no sense in which immersion replaces creatives. So I call this system creative plus. I’m going to give you an extra power as a creative person to gut check your own work and ensure that other people love the content you’ve created as much as you do.

Charlie Melcher:

What are some of the other learnings that you’ve had now being able to test people’s neurological responses to lots of different kinds of content? What else could you share with a storyteller that might help them be better at making impactful stories?

Paul Zak:

A couple things. We find that you have 15 seconds to grab attention. If you don’t get attention within 15 seconds, it’s very difficult to get it back. And then really tell stories at human scale. Again, most storytellers know this already, but have those authentic characters with real emotions. Let them face some kind of crisis. Build a mystery around them. And then for long form storytelling, have multiple storylines. So here’s the high tension storyline, and I start storyline number two at lower tension, I build some tension, I’m going to do storyline three. And so really think about modulating that, but then leading up to a key point.

Charlie Melcher:

Talk about how immersive experiences are memorable. Do they stay with us more than something that is less immersive?

Paul Zak:

Yeah. So if you think of the high points of your life, getting married, birth of a child, or maybe low points, 9/11 if you lived in New York or Washington, those are actually saved a memory in a very particular way. Because immersion is this valuation mechanism for social experiences, that tagging of emotion also saves that experience in memory. We get to re-experience that when we have a reminder of the experience. So if it’s a live experience, think about sending a follow up with a little, I don’t know, popup of the theater. If it’s a movie, hand out a little tchotchke so you can take it home. Think about really building super fans. So in the book, I talk about identifying super fans neurologically, and oftentimes they’re not who we think they are.

Paul Zak:

One of the movie trailers they tested was a comedy starring a group of African American female comedians. So the target audience is female African Americans and maybe African Americans. What we found through measurement was that middle-aged white males just love this movie. So that’s a targeting issue to me. That means, okay, I maybe want to do my core advertising for the African American community on, I don’t know, BET or something, but I also want to put it on some channels that whatever white males watch, middle aged white males watch. That’s a little piece of intel that to me is valuable. My hope, Charlie, if I can tell you my dream for the world, is that every smart watch eventually has a set of rings that capture your immersion and experiences. And that could be from socializing in person, it could be from entertainment events, it could be from volunteering at your kid’s school. And we should begin to fill these rings so that we fill our lives with really these deep social connections that we need to stay happy and healthy.

Paul Zak:

And we just published research, I think, three weeks ago showing that in a vulnerable population, in this case, elderly people living in a retirement home, and that’s a risk factor for depression, but older people tend not to report depressive symptoms. So we use our platform every second measuring 10 hours a day for three weeks for about 25 people, and we could predict two days in advance when they’d have a mood trough with 98% accuracy.

Charlie Melcher:

Wow. How does tracking immersion give us insights into how it might affect education or training?

Paul Zak:

So one of the longest uses of the Immersion platform actually is for corporate training because there’s no really good measure of the return on that investment other than the liking question, did you like this? Well, sure, you flew me to Miami and put me in a nice hotel. Of course I liked the training. So there’s a strong correlation, positive correlation between immersion and information recall weeks later. So that’s a pretty good measure the training was good. So companies like Accenture have been very public about their use of Immersion to create more immersive training. So they found what I call the 20/20/20 rule. They never had anybody speak who was a trainer for more than 20 minutes because Immersion always flags. Then they have 20 minutes of a new task, something participatory, table work, and then 20 minutes of, say, a debrief of some new task.

Paul Zak:

So they’re still using that 60 minute clock, but they’re really breaking it down to much smaller modules. They’ve also found that because immersive training is so metabolically costly, that breaks are important. So something that we see in the old days in theater, still in live theater, is having an intermission, and there may be a good reason for that. Even some evidence that the US style of TV, which is five to seven minutes and then a commercial, people find TV viewing more enjoyable than the British version, which is a whole show and then a bank of commercials because that little break is nice. So yeah, think about shorter is better, shorter, but more immersive.

Charlie Melcher:

And the more immersive, the more you retain. So that must have tremendous applications in traditional education as well for schools.

Paul Zak:

We’re seeing that a couple of subscribers to the platform use this in K-12 schools, and these are generally flipped classrooms where students can be monitored in real time, again anonymously. And when they’ve lost the immersion level, great, let’s take a break and reset and do something else. So again, I think it’s shorter, more intensive, and ensuring that students are working really well. So one of these companies, actually, the parents opt in, the teacher doesn’t know, but they’ll send the parent a report showing the immersion for that class. So the parents know that the students are actually getting value from these classes.

Paul Zak:

And when my kids were in Zoom school on the lockdown, gosh, a lot of wasted time. So I think I would love to be part of a revolution for K-12 education in which it’s much more self-paced learning. Even housing kids by age makes no sense to me when you think about it. Kids learn at different rates, so why not just have them gain competency? Some kids graduate high school at 15, some graduate at 20. It doesn’t really matter. Let’s just learn the material. Go home, you go into school, you have coaching, you have social stuff. I think we can really do a lot better than the literally medieval system that we use now.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, I just love this idea that you could be tracking these happy moments in our lives, that there’s a way to keep some stats on that, to keep track on it, and that it could be used to help us more optimize for the things that give us pleasure, the things that make us feel good and feel connected. You care about the things you measure. Where are we measuring happiness? Where are we measuring our physiological positive energy? I don’t know of anything else that does that really.

Paul Zak:

Yeah, I’m with you. And I think we are what we do. And so if we live in that negative space obsessing about the news and lots of bad things in the world, not to say that we should be Pollyanna-ish, but I do think for our brains, for human brains, we need connection. And so having a way to measure that objectively and remind us to do that. And I think a good substitute actually is entertainment. If I’m feeling disconnected, I can watch a wonderful movie, which is a human scale story, and I can get that sense of connection. Zoom, we found that video conferencing gives you between 50 and 80% of the immersion of an in-person experience. The variation is due to how much people interact on that Zoom. I think VR is going to get very interesting. And for storytellers, there is just more and more demand for great stories and great experiences.

Charlie Melcher:

But you do acknowledge that stories, in order to create that drama, have conflict. And sometimes they’re playing to emotions that are even about fear or negative emotions can be quite immersive and capture your attention. Not all stories are going to substitute for positive human interaction for sure.

Paul Zak:

And sometimes we want to live in that negative space. Again, the stuff we’ve discussed at length now, stories teach us things. There’s a real reason that we tell stories as humans very naturally. And learning about fear, learning about danger, those are important things and they can be very immersive.

Charlie Melcher:

I’m interested to talk about how your platform and research is also being used by companies. Is there some danger here that may be as companies can optimize their StoryTelling to create the kinds of actions that they’re looking to get consumers to take, that that could become abused or lead to a higher level of manipulation than might be healthy?

Paul Zak:

Yeah. And so I take this on in the book. I think it’s an important point. And so I go through a set of guidelines on when it’s appropriate to push on these three dimensions that create a great immersive and influential experience, an experience that influences people’s behaviors. One is that creating this space of readiness, I can create a space like a theater, bringing the lights down, turning off screens. That creates neurologic space. I’m ready for that experience, the second is the content itself, and the third is how I deliver it. But as long as people have the option to opt out, they’re not being pressured, they’re not being coerced, if we’re going to create experiences for consumers, they should be great experiences.

Charlie Melcher:

One of the things that you describe in the book is how you have created a metric, an actual one to 100 to measure immersion. Can you just describe exactly how that works? And then you also talk about this idea of peak immersion, and what is that?

Paul Zak:

So because we want to create a platform where people didn’t have to talk to weirdo scientists like me, the platform does two things. It first of all gets a baseline on you. Everyone’s baseline physiology is a bit different, so we remove that baseline, so it’s all changes from baseline. And then second, we normalized immersion to run from zero to 100 because everybody understands that, and it’s a linear measure. So it’s meant to be so easy to understand that you don’t need to talk to the weirdos. And then we discovered that for some experiences, that the proportion of that experience that’s just super fabulous to your brain, which I call peak immersion, so think of peak as how much of the time and to what extent was it like, “Oh my god, this is the best thing ever.” So for things like identifying hit songs months before they’re released, peak immersion is a better measure than average immersion of the song.

Paul Zak:

And Charlie, I don’t really know why that is. It’s just that… So the book talks about this collaboration we had with Pandora. So Pandora told us that there are 24,000 new songs released every day worldwide, and they have to somehow pick some subset that suggests people add to their playlists. And they use humans to do this, and they use some technology, AI and also humans ultimately. So they just said, “We don’t think neuroscience can actually find hit songs.” So again, I don’t really know why peak immersion is so valuable. I think it’s like the golden nuggets on this little journey that we’re on. And for some experiences, the peak is more valuable than just knowing what that average is.

Charlie Melcher:

I have become someone who really is seeking these type of, what I call, immersive experiences, I think the more traditional form of immersive experience where you’re actually going to a theater experience and you’re embodied in it, you are having interactions, you have agency, it’s multi-sensoral. You feel like your decisions have some consequence. You’re really in that story in an embodied way. And I find the peak immersion experience from that incredibly stimulating. I just find myself wanting, almost like an addict, I want to go do more of those. I can’t get enough of them. The more immersive they are, the stronger the high, if you will, or the excitement from them. So I’m very curious, I’ve read your book very closely with that in mind, what are the lessons there? And is it everything you say when you’re measuring somebody who’s watching a commercial or a trailer or a movie, is it all of that just at an even higher level when I’m actually experiencing this in that multi-sensoral, immersive, participatory, social, personalized kind of story?

Paul Zak:

Exactly right. That’s what the data show. So as I add in more sensory components, I get higher immersion, almost always. So that would be smells, touch, temperature. All those things change the experience. So in the book, I talk about going onto attractions at Disneyland and measuring immersion. I think for half the rides we were on, queuing up, Disney’s so good at having giving an experience as you queue up, half the rides, the queue in was actually more immersive than the ride itself, because they’re giving you so much to enhance you, the smells, the sounds, the lights, the music. So I agree with you, Charlie, that I think the live immersive experiences take that thing that Disney is doing at scale, but adds in that deep social layer.

Paul Zak:

And then lastly, you said something very profound, which is when you have a choice and your choices matter. So term in psychology for that is locus of control. So you feel like you control the story you’re in, your brain has to devote more resources because you’d like to make better decisions rather than worse decisions. That’s a really smart way to do that. And you’re right, immersive theater does that. But in the VR world, we’re seeing some very interesting, I think we’re in VR 2.0 now in my view, much richer environments guides on where to go. So if you’re an immersive experience live or VR and you don’t know what the hell you’re doing, which is frustrating. That’s not fun. But if you have a goal and you have some guideposts on how to get to that goal and you have feedback on your decisions, then yeah, you’re just sucked in.

Charlie Melcher:

And ultimately, that is recreating life. That’s what it is. We’re getting closer to experiencing racing down the mountain on the skis or the Indiana Jones running out of the temple. These immersive experiences are reminding us of the emotional and sensory joy of being alive.

Paul Zak:

Yeah. And the reason for the demand, I think, is because those in real life, high immersion, multisensory experiences are rare. They’re actually hard to get. And so if we can have great immersive theater designers create them for us, then we can more easily experience them. So as you talk in the book about some wild, crazy experiences like Dining in the Dark, and they are amazing. And so I make a case that these are so valuable to the brain. Even though they only raise your average margin a bit, they really raise your peak immersion, and that’s a good thing. And the long subtitle of the book about happiness, one claim in the book, based on evidence, although let’s say not conclusive evidence, is that when you have more of these peak experiences, you are training your brain to be fully present, to be emotionally engaged in other activities.

Paul Zak:

And the [inaudible 00:26:25] in neurosciences, neuros that fire together, wired together. So you’re building networks of deeply connected yourself to experiences. So now when you see your romantic partner or when you see a friend, you’ve stretched that neurologic muscle and you can really have that great experience. And so people who have those deep social relationships, high quality ones live longer and live healthier. Most of my professional life has been spent creating knowledge and technology so that people live happier lives, and I think immersion really reaches that ultimate goal. Again, that’s why I’m excited about having smart watches with immersion rings where we go, “Okay, I need a great experience, and maybe I want to go to immersive theater, or maybe I want to see a really great movie, or maybe I want to call up a friend I haven’t seen in three months and then take him or her out to dinner or coffee or whatever.”

Charlie Melcher:

I love this idea, Paul, that immersive experiences are actually training us to of transform our brains and our lives to be happier and healthier and live longer. That it has a profound, and not just in the moment, but a lasting effect that’s really positive, and that’s not a perspective that I’ve had before. Maybe I intuited it, I felt it, but I didn’t have anyone who’s studied 50,000 brains help support it. How does one get involved in the platform? How does one subscribe? How does that work?

Paul Zak:

Super easy. You can just go to getimmersion.com. You can get a free trial for listeners. Upload a video, we’ll give you free feedback on it, and then you can just try it out. So super easy. You just pay for what you use. So we really want to make this available to as many people as possible. I think, Charlie, when we saw each other couple years ago, pre-COVID, it’s hard to know even when that was now, but we had version one of the platform, it was a little bit clunky. Now we have beautiful designers. It’s so nice to use. It’s so stable. So yeah, people should try it. If it works for you, awesome. If it doesn’t, that’s okay too. So you tried something, hopefully it was fun.

Charlie Melcher:

We’re working on a video right now for FoST, so we’re going to run it through.

Paul Zak:

Let’s do it.

Charlie Melcher:

I really love that idea and I so appreciate you. I so appreciate us getting to spend time together. I wish that it wasn’t through Zoom so I could give you a hug. And I just want to say thank you for the work that you do, Paul, and for the important insights that you share with us through your work and this book, and can’t wait for our getting to spend time together in real life.

Paul Zak:

Thank you so much, Charley. I’ll see you at the next Future of StoryTelling.

Charlie Melcher:
My warm thanks to Paul Zak for being on today’s podcast. To learn more about Paul’s work, check out the Immersion platform and buy his book. Please visit the links in the episode’s description. And thank you for listening. If you enjoyed the podcast, you can stay updated on new episodes and become part of the Future of StoryTelling family by signing up for our free monthly newsletter at fost.org. FoST Podcast is produced by Melcher Media in collaboration with our talented production partner, Charts & Leisure. I hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of StoryTelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.