Castles, concreteness, and human communication
Summary: Stories help us share our ideas more clearly by embodying them in transferable forms.
You’re probably tired of me saying this (if you’ve been here for any amount of time), but it’s still true: The best communication is human-shaped. I repeat the claim so often because it’s so important for the study of storytelling. In fact, I believe it’s one of the main reasons why storytelling itself is so effective as a communication tool. Stories fit the shape of our minds. They make our ideas “graspable.”
In a 2016 paper on aesthetic emotions, cognitive scientists Felix Schoeller and Leonid Perlovsky discuss a theory of “cognitive hierarchy.” In our minds, complex, abstract concepts are composed of simpler, more concrete ones:
“Lower-level representations of objects (rows of chairs, listeners, scene, performers, etc.) [organize] into a unified concept of the symphony hall. Similarly, concepts of a symphony hall, concerts, (etc.) are unified into a concept of ‘conservatory,’ and ‘higher up’ the hierarchy to ‘culture,’ etc.” (Schoeller and Perlovsky, The instinct of knowledge section)
The challenge for us as communicators is that, as we move up the ladder of abstraction, it becomes harder and harder for us to meaningfully transfer ideas to one another.
Abstracts take effort to compose and modify
Imagine, for a moment, that your mind is a castle.
On the ground level, you store barrels and boxes containing the mundane, prosaic goods you need for everyday life — food and drink and resources like nails and cord, which you need to build and repair things. These represent the most simple, concrete concepts in your world, your mental representations of physical objects. (Think of something you could picture in your mind’s eye, like a cup or a spoon or a chair.)
If I were to climb the stairs of your castle keep, I’d find on higher levels that you have richer things in store. One one level, I might find spools of fabrics and fine threads. A level above that, I’d see tapestries and fine garments. These represent more abstract ideas which, over time, your mind has constructed from compositions of lower-level, more concrete concepts. Think of your mental representation of algebra, for example, or what it means to have a “fancy dinner.”
These concepts are more valuable to you because they took more effort to create. You want to keep them safe where invaders cannot threaten them, so you place them above ground level, up flights of stairs and down hallways and behind doors. But what keeps them safe also makes them harder to share with other people. They are less accessible to anyone but you.
As we continue to climb the keep, we find more and more rooms with higher and higher levels of abstraction.
At last, tucked away at the very top of the tallest tower, we find a very special room. In this room are not plain barrels and boxes, nor even spools or tapestries or fine garments. This room contains delicate instruments, lovingly crafted from precious metals, and chests full of beautiful, glittering treasures. These are your most precious and abstract concepts, things like your sense of values, morality, and identity.
The objects in that highest room take the most effort to create and modify. To move one of them around requires you to displace a lot of things on lower levels to accommodate the change. This kind of work is costly, so you don’t do it often. (Schoeller and Perlovsky, Conclusion section)
Concretes are easier to share
When it comes to communicating our ideas, the ones that are lower down are easier to transfer. It’s as though our mind’s castles were roughly pyramid-shaped. The bases nearly touch. When I want to give you a simple, concrete concept — take our wooden spoon example from earlier — you have a relatively easy time grasping that idea.
However, as we go up to higher levels, it becomes more and more difficult for us to clearly communicate. The gap between our castles widens, and we must attempt to toss our ideas to each other across that divide. But my throwing accuracy may not be very good. Often, only part of the idea makes it, and you’re left to try to reconstruct the rest of the idea from materials you have on-hand. Sometimes that means you and I end up with very different looking concepts.
Moreover, sometimes we don’t want to accept someone else’s concepts exactly the way they present them. Maybe I prefer green tapestries, and what you try to toss to me is blue. If that’s the case, I may decide to not make much room for your tapestry. I don’t want to displace one of my green ones, which I like better anyway.
And, of course, the transfer is the most difficult with the highest abstracts. We hold our treasures at the safest point at the top of the castle, but that is also the farthest point from anyone else, the loneliest point. To share one of those concepts across the wide gap is extremely challenging.
I can say a word like “love” or “morality” or “meaning” or “purpose,” but the content of those words — in the way that it is most meaningful to me — isn’t directly accessible. You’ll inevitably base your mental representations of those ideas upon your own experience, not mine. We may sit down and talk about “purpose” for quite a while, all along never really referring to the same thing. My green tapestry and your blue one don’t match much. Our treasures, even less so.
Story makes abstract ideas concrete
The true magic of storytelling is that it provides us a way to bring things that are higher on the ladder of abstraction down to lower levels. We can wrap our tapestries — sometimes even bits of our treasures — in concrete details that make them as easy to transfer as a barrel of nails. Instead of attempting to toss an idea across the wide chasm between our towers, I can meet you at ground level, where our castle walls almost touch.
Let’s look at an example from popular fiction to show you what I mean.
In Steven Spielberg’s 1981 film, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, you could articulate Indiana Jones’ goal in the film as something like “stop the bad guys.” But that goal is vague, abstract. So, the film’s creators make their protagonist’s goal more concrete. “Bad guys” becomes “Nazis.” “Stopping” them is embodied in a visible symbol of victory: possession of the Ark of the Covenant.
MacGuffins like the Ark sometimes get a bad reputation from critics. Life is never as simple as that! When done poorly, they can be both transparent and implausible. But when done well, they’re an extremely useful tool. They make the story goal concrete. They help audiences track progress and setbacks and invest themselves in the protagonist’s mission. MacGuffins put the story’s stakes on ground level, where the castle walls meet.
And in a sense, story as a whole is a kind of MacGuffin. Raiders takes a concept that’s very high on the ladder of abstraction — the virtue of scrappily, tenaciously resisting evil — and embodies it concretely.
And here’s a neat trick: Because we can see and feel and vicariously experience the concept, we are more likely to accept it. We get to preview it and “try it on for size” before we buy. Instead of attempting to catch an idea that’s flying at me from across the gap, I can take my time, feel its texture, inspect its quality. Maybe blue tapestries aren’t so bad, after all.
I could tell you, “you should resist evil,” but it’s far more effective to state implicitly, “be like Indiana Jones.”
The best stories do this. They make ideas embodied, human-shaped, creating a “transfer protocol” for our minds. They help us share our treasures, taking them down out of our tall towers and exchanging them at ground level.
Rate this note
Get the latest updates for free
Read this next
Design your story to fit humans
The best tools are designed to be ergonomic, fitted to people, rather than requiring people to fit them. Similarly, as a storyteller, you should design your stories to fit the way people's minds work.