Storytelling is a social, mental activity that uses both of our “minds”: our conscious mind and our unconscious mind. They are both important, and they can work together. Sadly, this is not what most of us were told in school—which typically ignores unconscious thinking (the fast-thinking part of our mind).
To be sure, our conscious mind is very capable. In a single second, it can process up to 50 pieces of information! That’s extraordinary: in the time you can say “one-one-thousand”; your conscious mind can process as many as fifty things!*
The unconscious mind, though, is like the bottom of an enormous iceberg. It’s many times larger than the conscious mind at the top of the iceberg. In one second, it can process up to 11 million pieces of information!
How Much?
How can we grasp 50 pieces of information vs. 11 million pieces?
One simple way: convert those numbers to measures of time. Fifty seconds, for example, is easy to imagine: it’s less than one minute.
But what about 11 million seconds? Brace yourself: that’s more than 120 days…a third of a year!
How Do Our Two Minds Cooperate With Each Other?
If our unconscious mind processes such enormous amounts, how can it possibly communicate what it knows to our conscious mind? To be sure, it passes on to our conscious mind only a tiny percentage of the information it processes. But how?
Miss Marple’s Method
As an example, think of Miss Marple (Agatha Christie’s fictional solver of mysteries). In story after story, Miss Marple happens to learn of an unsolved murder. After hearing the early facts known about the murder, she typically finds herself thinking about someone she knew, perhaps long ago, in her home village.
At first, she can’t explain why she’s reminded repeatedly of that specific person (out of the hundreds she has known), and the local police dismiss her as a "doddering old woman."
Eventually, the accumulating clues trigger a realization in Miss Marple’s mind: she understands what is similar between the foibles of the person she’s reminded of, on the one hand, and the behavior of one of the suspects for the murder, on the other.
At that point, she knows who the murderer is. Then she typically finds some way to verify her conclusion and to share it with the authorities, who arrest the culprit and admit (perhaps begrudgingly) that Miss Marple did, in fact, solve the crime.
A Message from Below…
For Miss Marple, the signal from her unconscious mind to her conscious mind came in the form of being reminded—for no apparent reason—of the person from her village.
That’s typical of our unconscious mind: unlike the conscious mind, which tends to express itself in concepts, the unconscious mind tends to express itself in images. And many of those images come unbidden.
This phenomenon (of breakthroughs coming to our minds as images) has a long and glorious history in science, including among others:
Kekule’s discovery of the structure of the benzene molecule,
Mendeleev’s first version of the Periodic Table of the Elements, and
Einstein’s thought experiments that led to his revolutionary discoveries about relativity.
In each case, after years of work, someone's unconscious mind was able to grasp an important piece of reality, but not to describe it analytically. Instead, the person’s unconscious mind sent just the right images to the person's conscious mind—and the recipient of those images was then able to “translate” from the language of images to the language of ideas.
That’s how our unconscious and conscious minds can combine forces to allow us fuller thinking than either type of thinking alone.
How Does This Apply to Storytelling?
Telling a story to people requires your unconscious mind to take into account everything in your story—but also everything you notice about your listeners.
You might be speaking to a roomful of, say, 100 people—too many to track individually with your conscious mind as you tell. But your unconscious mind tracks their responses. You may not be tracking each person separately, but your mind reacts when people become silent, laugh, or inhale as a group at a moment of suspense. At least unconsciously, you probably notice their responses to your stories in their eyes, facial expressions, postures, and more.
Based on all that subliminal information, your unconscious may send you images or feelings that help your conscious mind know what to do next.
The Job of the Storyteller
As you tell stories, your job is to entice your listeners to connect to your stories. You can’t directly “make” that happen, so you need to use both your conscious and unconscious thinking to:
Relate to your story both cognitively and emotionally,
Present your story, and
Relate to your listeners in ways that will
Entice those listeners to make a connection to each story.
If you only cultivate your conscious mind, you may be missing opportunities to succeed. But if you honor the role of your “adaptive unconscious”,* you’ll be bringing your full creative intelligence to your storytelling!
*Wilson, Timothy D., Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Page 24.