Page 73 - The Power to Change Anything

62 INFLUENCER

into a gym. At some point, if emotions don’t kick in, people
don’t act.
As Lajos Egri suggested, not only do vibrant stories trans-
port the listener into the plot line, but when they’re told well,
stories stimulate genuine emotions. When they’re transported
into a story, people don’t merely sympathize with the charac-
ters—having an intellectual appreciation for others’ plight—
they empathize with the characters. They actually generate
emotions as if they themselves were acting out the behaviors
illuminated in the story.
To understand how this transportation mechanism might
work, let’s examine, of all things, monkey brains. In an effort
to understand how actions affect localized brain neurons,
Italian researchers Giacomo Rizzolatti, Leonardo Fogassi,
and Vittorio Gallese placed electrodes into the inferior frontal
cortex of a macaque monkey. As the researchers carefully
mapped neurons to actions, serendipity stepped in.
Rizzolatti explains: “I think it was Fogassi, standing next to
a bowl of fruit and he reached for a banana, when some of
the neurons reacted.” The monkey hadn’t reached, but the
monkey’s neurons associated with reaching fired anyway. These
weren’t the neurons that reflect thinking about someone else
reaching; these were the neurons that supposedly fire only
when the subject reaches.
The “mirror neurons,” as Rizzolatti labeled them, were first
identified as relatively primitive systems in monkeys. It was then
discovered that such systems in humans were sophisticated and
“allow us to grasp the minds of others not through traditional
conceptual reasoning, but through direct stimulation—by feel-
ing, not by thinking.”
It’s little wonder that the group of Tanzanian women who
had listened to Twende na Wakati threw stones at the main
actor when saw into him in person. They didn’t run up to him
and ask for his autograph or chat with him about the villain-