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92 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?

The addition of contextual cues allows you to form a mental picture.
By withholding some information at the end I have used a dramatic trick
to cause your brain to free wheel and imagine what happens next. You
are involved in the story. Notice the longer story, with more data in it, is
paradoxically more comprehensible and memorable.

Ed Tufte makes the point about our ability to process information
very forcefully. He believes presentation experts are wrong when they
recommend you keep your slides to a few words! He points out the
common advice to use only six bullets per slide and six words per bullet
comes from a misconception that has blighted a generation of presenters.
Studies performed on memory in the 1960s measured unrelated word
recall. Six words are all you can remember if the words are meaningless.
But if the words have meaning we can comprehend and absorb many
pages of data. Hundreds of millions of people throughout the world read
a newspaper every morning and can recall the stories throughout the
day; the poems, songs and plays we memorize when young are usually
long, comprising thousands of words, yet we are able to remember them
verbatim for the rest of our lives.

When we tell a story, we are trying to draw the reader in so they
can to experience our imaginary world and be 'in' the story. When I read
a story – perhaps Harry Potter – I don’t think about the grammar and
punctuation, or even the accuracy of character portrayal. I’m transported
to a different place. I experience a piece of the reality or 'imaginality'
the storyteller has created. I can describe the characters, the scene, the
sounds and the smells. A good author forms a complete world in our
heads corresponding with the world they have in their heads. With more
abstract information, comprehension and retention is harder. Often if
the information does not hang together in a linear narrative it can be
impossible to take in at a single sitting. However, if it forms a story and
is well told so you 'get it', you do not need it repeated. We experience
something of this effect when we watch a good movie. “I’ve already seen
that one,” means you have absorbed the whole story in a single sitting.
You don’t need to watch it over again to comprehend it.

Comedy
Finally, when you mix all the elements up, emotional understanding,
body language, in-person communication and empathy; you get comedy.
Humans 'do' comedy from a very young age and it’s vitally important to
the fabric of our lives. What purpose comedy serves in communication

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