// The Science of Storytelling // 24.04.19
How we behave in any given moment, is a combination of personality and situation. This is how it works: You walk into a room. Your brain predicts what the scene should sound and look and feel like, then it generates a hallucination based on those predications. It’s this hallucination that you experience as the world around you. It’s this hallucination that you exist at the centre of, every minute of every day. You’ll never experience any actual reality because you have no direct access to it. This hallucinated reconstruction of reality is sometimes referred to as the brain’s ‘model of the world'.
As well as having models of everything in the world, inside our heads we have different models of self that are constantly fighting for control over who we are. Beneath the level of consciousness we’re a riotous democracy of mini-selves which are locked in a chronic battle for dominion. Our behaviour is simply the end result of the battles. All the while our confabulating narrator works around the clock to stitch together a pattern of logic to our daily lives: what just happened and what was my role in it?
Saccades
Our biological technology simply can’t process most of what’s actually going on in the great oceans of electromagnetic radiation that surround us. Human eyes are able to read less than on ten-trillionth of the light spectrum.
The curse of belonging to a hyper-social species is that we’re surrounded by people who are trying to control us. Because everyone we meet is attempting to get along and get ahead, we’re subject to near-constant attempts at manipulation. Our is an environment of soft lies and half smiles that seek to make us feel pleasant and render us pliable. In order to control what we think of them, people work hard to disguise their sins, failures and torments. Human sociality can be numbing. We can feel alienated without knowing why. It’s only in story that the mask truly breaks. To enter the flawed mind of another is to be reassured that it’s not only us who are broken, conflicted, confused, and who have dark thoughts and bitter regrets. It’s not only us who feel possessed, at times, by hateful selves, who are scared. The magic of story is its ability to connect mind with mind in a manner that’s unrivalled even by love. Story’s gift is the hope that we might not be quite so alone in that dark bone vault after all.
Myoclonic jerk (that sudden jarring contraction of the muscle when we’re asleep)
Dreams feel real because they are made of the same hallucinated neural models we live inside when awake. The sights are the same, the smells are the same, objects feel the same to the touch.
"A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the audience." - Tolstoy
"Everyone is always, always thinking about themselves." - Russell T Davies
Eudaemonia (you-de-monia)
Aristotle contemptuously dismissed the hedonists, saying that, “The life they decide on is a life for grazing animals”. For Aristotle, happiness was not a feeling but a practice. He was saying, stop hoping for happiness tomorrow. Happiness is being engaged in the process.
When we push ourselves towards a tough yet meaningful goal, we thrive. Our reward systems spike not when we achieve what we’re after, but when we’re in pursuit of it. It’s the pursuit that makes a life and the pursuit that makes a plot. Without a goal to follow and at least some sense that we’re getting closer to it, there is only disappointment, depression and despair.
Humans are built for story
When posed with even the deepest questions about reality, human brains tend towards story. What is a modern religion if not an elaborate neocortical theory and explanation about what’s happening in the world and why?
Story is a form of play that allows us to feel we’ve lost control without actually placing us in danger. It's a rollercoaster, but not one made from ramps, rails and steel wheels, but from love, hope, dread, curiosity, status play, unexpected change and moral outrage.
All of us are in search of writers who somehow capture the distinct music made by the agonies in our heads. If we prefer storytellers with similar backgrounds and lived experiences to our own, it’s because we often crave in art the same connection with others that we seek in friendship and love. Storytelling will always be full of associations that speak directly to our particular perspectives.
Animism
We willing allow highly simplistic narratives to deceive us, gleefully accepting as truth any tale that casts us as the moral hero and the other as the two-dimensional villain. We can tell when we’re under its power: when all the good is on our side and all the bad is on theirs, our storytelling brain is working is grim magic in full. We're being sold a story. Reality is rarely so simple.
Each of us is ultimately alone in our black vault, wandering our singular neutral realms, ‘seeing’ things differently, feeling different passions and hatreds and associations of memory as our attention grazes over them. We laugh at different things, are moved by different pieces of music and transported by different kinds of stories.
How we behave in any given moment, is a combination of personality and situation. This is how it works: You walk into a room. Your brain predicts what the scene should sound and look and feel like, then it generates a hallucination based on those predications. It’s this hallucination that you experience as the world around you. It’s this hallucination that you exist at the centre of, every minute of every day. You’ll never experience any actual reality because you have no direct access to it. This hallucinated reconstruction of reality is sometimes referred to as the brain’s ‘model of the world'.
As well as having models of everything in the world, inside our heads we have different models of self that are constantly fighting for control over who we are. Beneath the level of consciousness we’re a riotous democracy of mini-selves which are locked in a chronic battle for dominion. Our behaviour is simply the end result of the battles. All the while our confabulating narrator works around the clock to stitch together a pattern of logic to our daily lives: what just happened and what was my role in it?
Saccades
Our biological technology simply can’t process most of what’s actually going on in the great oceans of electromagnetic radiation that surround us. Human eyes are able to read less than on ten-trillionth of the light spectrum.
The curse of belonging to a hyper-social species is that we’re surrounded by people who are trying to control us. Because everyone we meet is attempting to get along and get ahead, we’re subject to near-constant attempts at manipulation. Our is an environment of soft lies and half smiles that seek to make us feel pleasant and render us pliable. In order to control what we think of them, people work hard to disguise their sins, failures and torments. Human sociality can be numbing. We can feel alienated without knowing why. It’s only in story that the mask truly breaks. To enter the flawed mind of another is to be reassured that it’s not only us who are broken, conflicted, confused, and who have dark thoughts and bitter regrets. It’s not only us who feel possessed, at times, by hateful selves, who are scared. The magic of story is its ability to connect mind with mind in a manner that’s unrivalled even by love. Story’s gift is the hope that we might not be quite so alone in that dark bone vault after all.
Myoclonic jerk (that sudden jarring contraction of the muscle when we’re asleep)
Dreams feel real because they are made of the same hallucinated neural models we live inside when awake. The sights are the same, the smells are the same, objects feel the same to the touch.
"A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the audience." - Tolstoy
"Everyone is always, always thinking about themselves." - Russell T Davies
Eudaemonia (you-de-monia)
Aristotle contemptuously dismissed the hedonists, saying that, “The life they decide on is a life for grazing animals”. For Aristotle, happiness was not a feeling but a practice. He was saying, stop hoping for happiness tomorrow. Happiness is being engaged in the process.
When we push ourselves towards a tough yet meaningful goal, we thrive. Our reward systems spike not when we achieve what we’re after, but when we’re in pursuit of it. It’s the pursuit that makes a life and the pursuit that makes a plot. Without a goal to follow and at least some sense that we’re getting closer to it, there is only disappointment, depression and despair.
Humans are built for story
When posed with even the deepest questions about reality, human brains tend towards story. What is a modern religion if not an elaborate neocortical theory and explanation about what’s happening in the world and why?
Story is a form of play that allows us to feel we’ve lost control without actually placing us in danger. It's a rollercoaster, but not one made from ramps, rails and steel wheels, but from love, hope, dread, curiosity, status play, unexpected change and moral outrage.
All of us are in search of writers who somehow capture the distinct music made by the agonies in our heads. If we prefer storytellers with similar backgrounds and lived experiences to our own, it’s because we often crave in art the same connection with others that we seek in friendship and love. Storytelling will always be full of associations that speak directly to our particular perspectives.
Animism
We willing allow highly simplistic narratives to deceive us, gleefully accepting as truth any tale that casts us as the moral hero and the other as the two-dimensional villain. We can tell when we’re under its power: when all the good is on our side and all the bad is on theirs, our storytelling brain is working is grim magic in full. We're being sold a story. Reality is rarely so simple.
Each of us is ultimately alone in our black vault, wandering our singular neutral realms, ‘seeing’ things differently, feeling different passions and hatreds and associations of memory as our attention grazes over them. We laugh at different things, are moved by different pieces of music and transported by different kinds of stories.
