Frank Rose speaks on “narrative thinking” — what it is and why it matters.

Narrative thinking means understanding that stories comprise a distinct mode of thought, one that’s as important as logic and reasoning — and that comes far more naturally to us. A mode of thought that relies on emotion, and is all the more powerful for that. A mode of thought that plays such a central role in human experience that anyone who wants to sell something, communicate ideas, motivate people, or change their way of thinking needs to know how it works.

Frank has delivered this message at film fes­tivals, mar­keting conferences, academic seminars and industry gath­er­ings world­wide, from Lucasfilm in San Francisco to the Festival della Scienza in Genoa to the Film4 Innovation Forum in London. His overarching point, informed by findings in cognitive science and adapted and expanded from his books The Sea We Swim In and The Art of Immer­sion: That the brain is a pattern-seeking organ, driving us to try to make sense of the world we inhabit. That while data is critical to understanding what’s going on around us, we need stories to communicate what the data tells us. And that our understanding of the world — our perception of reality — depends on the stories we tell each other and ourselves.

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After getting his start covering the New York punk scene at CBGB for The Village Voice, Frank became a contributing editor at Esquire, where he wrote about unusual subcultures — New Wave in New York, bureaucrats in the Pentagon, Christian surfers in Southern California. He went on to become a contributing writer at Premiere, the movie magazine, and later at Fortune. In 1999 he became a contributing editor at Wired, focusing on developments at the intersection of media and technology. He left Wired in 2009 to write The Art of Immersion and currently contributes to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, among others. An archive of his reporting and essays for these and other publications is available here.