language is one of the most primary facts of our existence it's something that you say what is human well many animals have methods of communicating with one another but none of them have our kind of extremely elaborate grammar so it is a it's it's it's right dead smack in the center of what it is to be him and the ability to tell a story there is another theory that has it that the narrative art is an evolved adaptation which we got in the Pleistocene because those who had it had a much greater edge they had
a much greater survival edge on those who did not have it if I can tell you that right over there in that River was where the crocodile ate uncle George you do not have to test that out in your own life by going over there and getting eaten by the crocodile and I can tell you all sorts of other things that are very useful to you for survival in your world if I can tell you a story and we know that people learn and assimilate information much more through stories than they do through charts and
graphs and statistics you might want to back up those things with the math but what really hits people is the story because it's not an intellectual thing and it's not just a scream it's not pure emotion it's a melding of those two things which is where we exist as human beings we're not thought machines we're not screaming machines we are thought feeling machines if we're machines at all let's pretend we're not we are thought feeling entities in fact some people have done Studies on it say that if you remove the emotion from the person through
some accident they have a lot of trouble making decisions because they try to reason everything out and you actually can't it's it's endless a lot of people sing in the bathtub it sounds really good it's got acoustics in there but they're not singers by that I don't mean that they can't or don't sing I mean that it's not their profession to sing people do not pay them to stand on a stage and make noises come out of their mouth so it's it's partly and partly a difference of job we love those moments and in amateur
in amateur night shows which have now become so big like American Idol and does Britain have talent etc we just love that moment when the person steps forward who has been a garage mechanic or something and bursts into prize-winning opera we just love it Oh it sort of chokes you up because I think it appeals to our humaneness it's it's okay this is something we all might possibly do even if we do have some other job that we don't like very much and people who say that ordinary people aren't interested in the arts or just
dead wrong everybody kind of is and they all do something in their life it's like that even if it's woodworking in the cellar or knitting their own special knit patterns they're doing something creative because we are very creative species the difference between everybody doing much no matter what their day job may be and the people who are professionals is that the people who are professionals have somehow been able to cross that threshold to the place where they have an informed audience and where they can scratch a living out of it in some way so I
think that's partly it and in order to in order to do that you have to be probably pretty dedicated that is you have to put them the work in it you have to put the practice in as I say to people you can't just sit down at the piano and be a concert pianist that there's the part where you have to practice and there's the drudgery there's the work there's the hours I think it's Malcolm Gladwell it has a theory about how many hours you have to put in to get really good at something and
that is why I will never ever be a star ballet dancer however however much I may like to leap about I am NOT that person because I did not start when I was 12 or whatever it was and put in the practice
