Anecdotes and Stories: How to educate.
rzwitserloot posted in presenting on April 17th, 2006
Funny article by Guy Kawasaki about how to ‘drive your competition crazy’. It’s simple and to the point: It includes just 6 examples, nothing more. Yet reading this article drives the point home quickly, whereas you can waste time talking about that notion without concrete examples, until the cows come home and none of your listeners will probably have a clue. They’ll just be bored out of their skulls.
So here’s my advice to those of you who present information, be it verbally or visually: Tell stories. If possible, interesting and with a humorous edge. It helps if you assume that your audience isn’t stupid. Let them conclude your own point from the stories you tell, instead of laying it out in easily processed chunks of information.
As a bonus, I’ve included a little story about ‘thinking outside the box’ for your perusal, in spirit of the ‘telling stories’ adage. Mostly because I often hear instructions ‘to think out of the box’ yet I doubt that helps any to illustrate what that means.
Neurological research tries to figure out, amongst other things, how the brain works. A particular research team decided to attempt to figure out how exactly ‘the brain’ physically changes as a reflection to learning something.
To keep it simple, the experiment was designed thusly:
Buy a bunch of cockroaches. Hold them above water using a pair of tweezers, then dip their legs into the water. They don’t like this - a normal cockroach will lift its legs up when they touch water. Keep moving them long enough and eventually they will lift their legs up the moment you pick them up with the tweezers - they learn that it means water is about to appear right below them.
Now ‘train’ 20 cockroaches in this way, and have another batch of 20 untrained cockroaches. Chop the heads off of all 40, and inspect them for any statistically relevant difference using some extremely time-consuming tests on some extremely expensive equipment.
After 6 months of this project, lots of debate was ongoing about the results, which were ambiguous and could be interpreted either way - that there WAS physical changes responsible for the learned effect, or that it was not, and that there was no measurable difference between the groups.
At this point a student from a different research group, who happend to hear this conversation going on at the lunch tables, suggests he might have a way out of the dilemma.
He walks to the lab with the rest of the project, takes a trained cockroach, chops its head off, grabs a pair of tweezers, and picks it up. As is common in simpler lifeforms, the body of the cockroach doesn’t die immediatly after decapitation. The moment he lifts the little fellow in the air…
it retracts its legs.
April 18th, 2006 at 0:33
hahaha, that story is funny. The downside of annecdotes is: are they truth? I mean, where was this done, do you have a refference, etc.
April 18th, 2006 at 1:46
It doesn’t matter if its true or not, and that identifies a ‘good’ anecdote in my book: It’s a story that teaches something. A ‘bad’ anecdote would be something where you try to make an argument for the sheer sake of the content of the story itself, and not the implications of it.
The effectiveness of the cockroach thing is that it is somewhat humorous and shows a clear example of ‘thinking outside of the box’. Even if the cockroach did NOT retract its legs, that is a useful experiment to run. Even if this experiment never happend, if it hypothetically would be, etcetera.
I don’t know if it’s true. I heard it from someone who heard it from some dude who gave a seminar on pointless speak like ‘thinking outside of the box’. He had another fun one. See next comment. (Needless to say, the guy KILLED at his seminar).
April 18th, 2006 at 1:53
As most of those who are known to read a bit or watch discovery are aware of, salmon, to mate, swim all the way back to their birthing ground, involving swimming upstream against the flow of a river, possibly jumping up small waterfalls and such.
Once arrived at the bed of the river, they mate, and then they die of exhaustion.
ALMOST true. Someone decided to test this out after they noticed the soon-to-die salmon swimmin frantically around the riverbed. They waited patiently for the salmon to swim up, ‘do their thing’… and then they caught the salmon, threw him in a large tank, barreled down to the sea, and threw them in, along with a little tracking tag.
Turns out the salmon are fine if you do this, and will happily brave the river again next year.
A theory is that the salmon, completely overtaken by their libido, are so focussed on doing the nasty that they completely forget everything else that’s going on. After the act, when the haze fades, they are thoroughly confused as to where they are, and die of stress - frantically spinning around the tiny river instead of just heading back downstream again.
I like this one a lot less because it sounds fishy (he, he, he) to me - they have to change body chemistry to adapt to surviving in freshwater. Then again, wikipedia’s article on salmon reports that various species of salmon do not in fact ALWAYS die, though these species still don’t last more than about 3 seasons, and even then 40 to 50% die. I guess it’s just me getting hung up on details.
April 18th, 2006 at 10:19
Truth is mostly irrelevant when it comes to persuasion.
And take the Italian adage ‘Si non è vero è bien trovato’ to heart.
April 18th, 2006 at 11:41
Perhaps unfortunately for many that’s true. However, there are those who have adapted a more skeptical outlook. Cristiano challenged the truth of the cockroach story in this line of comments even.
I had to look it up - it means: “Maybe it isn’t true but it’s still a nice story”. Works better in dutch: “Zo niet echt, dan toch goed bedacht”.