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The Storytelling Animal
- How Stories Make Us Human
- Narrated by: Kris Koscheski
- Length: 5 hrs and 32 mins
- Categories: Politics & Social Sciences, Social Sciences
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Made to Stick
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- Narrated by: Charles Kahlenberg
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
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Mark Twain once observed, "A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on." His observation rings true: urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus public-health scares circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas (business people, teachers, politicians, journalists, and others) struggle to make their ideas "stick". In this indispensable guide, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds draw their power from the same six traits.
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It Stuck!
- By Michael Weisnagel on 2020-03-19
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The Science of Storytelling
- Written by: Will Storr
- Narrated by: James Clamp
- Length: 6 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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How do master storytellers compel us? There have been many attempts to understand what makes a good story, but few have used a scientific approach. In The Science of Storytelling, Will Storr applies dazzling psychological research and cutting-edge neuroscience to our myths and archetypes to show how we can tell better stories, revealing, among other things, how storytellers - and also our brains - create worlds by being attuned to moments of unexpected change.
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The science behind the best sentences and scenes.
- By Amazon Customer on 2020-03-15
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Wired for Story
- The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence
- Written by: Lisa Cron
- Narrated by: Wendy Tremont King
- Length: 9 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Imagine knowing what the brain craves from every tale it encounters, what fuels the success of any great story, and what keeps people transfixed. Wired for Story reveals these cognitive secrets - and it's a game-changer for anyone who has ever set pen to paper. The vast majority of writing advice focuses on "writing well" as if it were the same as telling a great story. This is exactly where many aspiring writers fail - they strive for beautiful metaphors, authentic dialogue, and interesting characters, losing sight of the one thing that every engaging story must do.
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Storytelling with Data
- A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals
- Written by: Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
- Narrated by: Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
- Length: 5 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Storytelling with Data teaches you the fundamentals of data visualization and how to communicate effectively with data. You'll discover the power of storytelling and the way to make data a pivotal point in your story. The lessons in this illuminative text are grounded in theory but made accessible through numerous real-world examples - ready for immediate application to your next graph or presentation.
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Storyworthy
- Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life Through the Power of Storytelling
- Written by: Matthew Dicks, Dan Kennedy - foreword
- Narrated by: Matthew Dicks, John Glouchevitch
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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A five-time Moth GrandSLAM winner and bestselling novelist shows how to tell a great story - and why doing so matters. Whether we realize it or not, we are always telling stories. On a first date or job interview, at a sales presentation or therapy appointment, with family or friends, we are constantly narrating events and interpreting emotions and actions. In this compelling book, storyteller extraordinaire Matthew Dicks presents wonderfully straightforward and engaging tips and techniques for constructing, telling, and polishing stories that will hold the attention of your audience (no matter how big or small).
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Excellent and useful tips!
- By Rae on 2019-04-23
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Story Genius
- How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel (Before You Waste Three Years Writing 327 Pages That Go Nowhere)
- Written by: Lisa Cron
- Narrated by: Brittany Pressley
- Length: 9 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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It's every novelist's greatest fear: pouring their blood, sweat, and tears into writing hundreds of pages only to realize that their story has no sense of urgency, no internal logic, and so is a page-one rewrite. The prevailing wisdom in the writing community is that there are just two ways around this problem: pantsing (winging it) and plotting (focusing on the external plot).
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Made to Stick
- Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
- Written by: Chip Heath, Dan Heath
- Narrated by: Charles Kahlenberg
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Mark Twain once observed, "A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on." His observation rings true: urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus public-health scares circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas (business people, teachers, politicians, journalists, and others) struggle to make their ideas "stick". In this indispensable guide, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds draw their power from the same six traits.
-
-
It Stuck!
- By Michael Weisnagel on 2020-03-19
-
The Science of Storytelling
- Written by: Will Storr
- Narrated by: James Clamp
- Length: 6 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
How do master storytellers compel us? There have been many attempts to understand what makes a good story, but few have used a scientific approach. In The Science of Storytelling, Will Storr applies dazzling psychological research and cutting-edge neuroscience to our myths and archetypes to show how we can tell better stories, revealing, among other things, how storytellers - and also our brains - create worlds by being attuned to moments of unexpected change.
-
-
The science behind the best sentences and scenes.
- By Amazon Customer on 2020-03-15
-
Wired for Story
- The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence
- Written by: Lisa Cron
- Narrated by: Wendy Tremont King
- Length: 9 hrs and 10 mins
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Imagine knowing what the brain craves from every tale it encounters, what fuels the success of any great story, and what keeps people transfixed. Wired for Story reveals these cognitive secrets - and it's a game-changer for anyone who has ever set pen to paper. The vast majority of writing advice focuses on "writing well" as if it were the same as telling a great story. This is exactly where many aspiring writers fail - they strive for beautiful metaphors, authentic dialogue, and interesting characters, losing sight of the one thing that every engaging story must do.
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Storytelling with Data
- A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals
- Written by: Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
- Narrated by: Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
- Length: 5 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Storytelling with Data teaches you the fundamentals of data visualization and how to communicate effectively with data. You'll discover the power of storytelling and the way to make data a pivotal point in your story. The lessons in this illuminative text are grounded in theory but made accessible through numerous real-world examples - ready for immediate application to your next graph or presentation.
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Storyworthy
- Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life Through the Power of Storytelling
- Written by: Matthew Dicks, Dan Kennedy - foreword
- Narrated by: Matthew Dicks, John Glouchevitch
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A five-time Moth GrandSLAM winner and bestselling novelist shows how to tell a great story - and why doing so matters. Whether we realize it or not, we are always telling stories. On a first date or job interview, at a sales presentation or therapy appointment, with family or friends, we are constantly narrating events and interpreting emotions and actions. In this compelling book, storyteller extraordinaire Matthew Dicks presents wonderfully straightforward and engaging tips and techniques for constructing, telling, and polishing stories that will hold the attention of your audience (no matter how big or small).
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-
Excellent and useful tips!
- By Rae on 2019-04-23
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Story Genius
- How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel (Before You Waste Three Years Writing 327 Pages That Go Nowhere)
- Written by: Lisa Cron
- Narrated by: Brittany Pressley
- Length: 9 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
It's every novelist's greatest fear: pouring their blood, sweat, and tears into writing hundreds of pages only to realize that their story has no sense of urgency, no internal logic, and so is a page-one rewrite. The prevailing wisdom in the writing community is that there are just two ways around this problem: pantsing (winging it) and plotting (focusing on the external plot).
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Ultralearning
- Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career
- Written by: Scott Young
- Narrated by: Scott Young
- Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Future-proof your career and maximize your competitive advantage by learning the skill necessary to stay relevant, reinvent yourself, and adapt to whatever the workplace throws your way in this essential guide. Scott Young incorporates the latest research about the most effective learning methods and the stories of other ultralearners like himself - among them Ben Franklin, Judit Polgar, and Richard Feynman, as well as a host of others, such as little-known modern polymaths like Nigel Richards who won the World Championship of French Scrabble - without knowing French.
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Extremely helpful tool, even for regular learning
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Fooled by Randomness
- The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
- Written by: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 10 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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This audiobook is about luck, or more precisely, how we perceive and deal with luck in life and business. It is already a landmark work, and its title has entered our vocabulary. In its second edition, Fooled by Randomness is now a cornerstone for anyone interested in random outcomes.
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Harsh, brutal, but Brilliant and funny
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Save the Cat!
- The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need
- Written by: Blake Snyder
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 5 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Here's what started the phenomenon: This book has been a best seller for over 15 years and has been used by screenwriters around the world! Blake Snyder tells all in this fast, funny, and candid look inside the movie business. Save the Cat is just one of many ironclad rules for making your ideas more marketable and your script more satisfying.
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Great info but lacking PDF content
- By Jason on 2018-12-07
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The Power of Moments
- Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact
- Written by: Chip Heath, Dan Heath
- Narrated by: Jeremy Bobb
- Length: 6 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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While human lives are endlessly variable, our most memorable positive moments are dominated by four elements: elevation, insight, pride, and connection. If we embrace these elements, we can conjure more moments that matter. What if a teacher could design a lesson that he knew his students would remember 20 years later? What if a manager knew how to create an experience that would delight customers? What if you had a better sense of how to create memories that matter for your children?
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Great
- By Greg P on 2017-10-06
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Super Thinking
- The Big Book of Mental Models
- Written by: Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann
- Narrated by: René Ruiz
- Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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The world's greatest problem-solvers, forecasters, and decision-makers all rely on a set of frameworks and shortcuts that help them cut through complexity and separate good ideas from bad ones. They're called mental models, and you can find them in dense textbooks on psychology, physics, economics, and more. Or, you can just listen to Super Thinking, a fun, illustrated guide to every mental model you could possibly need.
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Creativity, Inc.
- Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration
- Written by: Ed Catmull, Amy Wallace
- Narrated by: Peter Altschuler
- Length: 12 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Creativity, Inc. is a manual for anyone who strives for originality and the first-ever all-access trip into the nerve center of Pixar Animation - into the meetings, postmortems, and “Braintrust” sessions where some of the most successful films in history are made. It is, at heart, a book about creativity - but it is also, as Pixar cofounder and president Ed Catmull writes, “an expression of the ideas that I believe make the best in us possible”.
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Great read
- By CanadianMommy on 2019-09-01
Publisher's Summary
Humans live in landscapes of make-believe. We spin fantasies. We devour novels, films, and plays. Even sporting events and criminal trials unfold as narratives. Yet the world of story has long remained an undiscovered and unmapped country. It's easy to say that humans are "wired" for story, but why?
In this delightful and original book, Jonathan Gottschall offers the first unified theory of storytelling. He argues that stories help us navigate life's complex social problems - just as flight simulators prepare pilots for difficult situations. Storytelling has evolved, like other behaviors, to ensure our survival.
Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience, psychology, and evolutionary biology, Gottschall tells us what it means to be a storytelling animal. Did you know that the more absorbed you are in a story, the more it changes your behavior? That all children act out the same kinds of stories, whether they grow up in a slum or a suburb? That people who read more fiction are more empathetic?
Of course, our story instinct has a darker side. It makes us vulnerable to conspiracy theories, advertisements, and narratives about ourselves that are more "truthy" than true. National myths can also be terribly dangerous: Hitler's ambitions were partly fueled by a story. But as Gottschall shows in this remarkable book, stories can also change the world for the better. Most successful stories are moral - they teach us how to live, whether explicitly or implicitly, and bind us together around common values. We know we are master shapers of story. The Storytelling Animal finally reveals how stories shape us.
What the critics say
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What listeners say about The Storytelling Animal
Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Story
- Amazon Customer
- 2020-11-03
I fuckin' loved it
Told like a story, I learned so much interesting facts and will revisit it soon!
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Story
- Lepponya
- 2020-01-03
Why we always have, and always will, love stories
I downloaded this book hoping to gain a glimpse into why us humans are programmed to love stories, from passed down oral stories to binge-worthy seasons of true crime shows. While I hoped the book went into more reasons why, or at least explained the listed reasons more deeply, I was pleased that it did convincingly and concisely answer my questions. In the end, stories may seem to be a luxury of our modern state, but prehistorically, they were vital for basic human survival. This explains why we love them so much.
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Story
- Carole T.
- 2012-10-04
It Was a Dark and Stormy Night...
We humans crave narratives. From ancient fire circles to books to radio and movies to TV sets, headphones, and computers, "story is the glue of human social life."
This short listen may not bring to light any really new concepts, but it offers interesting examples of how we use stories for education, entertainment, and reassurance that there is meaning in life. Gottschall also alerts us to reasons why we should be aware that this tendency also opens us up to the possibility of misinterpreting and being manipulated. We long for patterns and reasons - can conspiracy theories be far behind?
I especially enjoyed the discussion about ways in which new technologies are changing how we tell and experience stories -- from so-called "reality" shows to interactive and role-playing computer games.
The narrator is OK, but I wonder why he felt he had to deliver some quotes in quite bizarre accents. The book starts slowly but picks up in energy and interest as it goes along. I think most people interested in books and psychology will enjoy it.
14 people found this helpful
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Story
- Diane
- 2013-04-14
Making Sense of Life Through Stories
If you stop to think about it, stories are the framework around which we build our understanding of reality--whether the stories revolve around history, religion, myth, nationality, science, gaming, drama, fiction or our own lives.
This is Gottschall's premise and he makes his case pretty convincingly. The book does drag in parts and significant sections consist of summaries of materials covered in more depth in other books. However, unlike some other reviewers, I particularly enjoyed the sections on brain science and the role story plays in our dreams, in mental illness and in the development of human culture. In one example, the author contends that at root, the malaise of depression is the loss of our own story and the effectiveness of talk therapy is in helping us to rebuild our own personal narratives. Although the author doesn't take this step, one might argue that whenever a story loses its vitality, whether it is the story of a nation, culture or religion, it is only a matter of time before the demise of that institution inevitably follows.
Not surprisingly perhaps given his premise, the best parts of this book are in the stories. Narration is sub-par particularly when the narrator ineptly (and distractingly) attempts various accents.
8 people found this helpful
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- BLJ
- 2018-08-06
An okay book, an okay narration
I learned quite a bit from the book, but it needed more depth and more scholarly context.
2 people found this helpful
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- Szilard Pusztafalvi
- 2020-10-28
Warning
Only read it if you are stable and have a plan of your future. And consult with a terapist. Good information if you able to take it.
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- Josh
- 2020-04-10
Pretty good
Pretty good. Coalesces a number of fairly familiar ideas into insightful arguments and anecdotes . As a writer I feel like this book gave breadth to the dimension of which I understand narrative.
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- MyticalC
- 2019-12-16
A solid introduction
Most of this book is solid, it is a solid resource to get an overview and find more in-depth researchers. It has a fairly US centric bent and the final chapter and conclusions are a bit simplistic and preachy. NOTE: No one in the games industry or around it says MMORPG as “more-peg,” whoever told the author they do was pulling their leg.
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- Blue Spark
- 2019-08-01
Excellent book, idiosyncratic narrator
It’s an excellent book. The narrator had a few too many distracting mispronunciations (dropping the “L” in “wolf” or “werewolf”, and most irritatingly, pronouncing “experiment” like “experience” or “spearmint”). Once is odd, 20 times is a sin (where was the proofer/editor?!?)
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- Anne Liljedahl
- 2019-06-27
Fascinating!
Well written and read. I'm blown away by how much story actually shapes our lives. I'll keep "living the story of my life", rewriting it once in a while and continue enjoying stories of all kind.
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- sam gipson
- 2019-02-27
great material
Loved it. Reader didn't need to act so much. took us out a bit when he did so but its such a small portion of the book AND the book is so good it didn't really matter. like reading, when its listened to by rote, our imaginations can do more. my 2 cents!
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- Irrational Rob
- 2018-07-01
Did it answer the provocation of the title? Meh
weakly referenced. was expecting a more scholarly text with theory and practical examples. not sure what it was attempting to do in the end.