Storytelling as an organisational medium for information

I was a former librarian. Perhaps it is therefore not surprising that something about storytelling immediately captivated my imagination. It was not just the plots, and the characters and the voices and the acting, there is something deeply satisfying in identifying the key characteristics of a story and organising them in your mind without the need to commit each element of the story to our minds. The skeleton of the story is what should be remembered, we can then clothe the story with different minutiae as we go along... in this case, each time we tell a story it is fresh, and slightly different, because our, audiences, our voices, our imagination and our feelings will be different each time. There is real beauty in this, because, in a sense, each storyteller is a little bit like a virtuoso improviser, with an outline to guide the heart and the voice. Dr. Sturm from the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill has researched some of the organisational principles behind storytelling as a mechanism to store and retrieve information to memory and I find his presentation in YouTube fascinating. Dr Sturm is also researching the trance-like state hat people experience when listening to stories. I am particularly interested in this because sometimes, some of the children in the audience can be really captivated and attentive to the sotry unfolding in their imagination, through my voice and actions. His article on trance and storytelling is really fascinating.