Narratives bring order to the world and entice us with emotional rewards. They also help people bond and recover after times of crisis.
By Matthew Hutson. Mr. Hutson is the author of The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane.
He reviewed the book The Narrative Brain: The Stories Our Neurons Tell by Fritz Alwin Breithaupt.
Excerpts:
"If humans were fish, our water would be narratives. We never experience
reality unmediated. Light and sound filter through our senses and we
impose meaning and order, building our familiar perceptual world of
trees, people and buildings. At a higher level, we string events
together into stories, ranging from brief encounters to autobiographical
arcs to historical epochs and beyond. We use narratives to understand
the causal influences in our lives; these unseen forces, manufactured by
our minds, become what we know of reality."
"The first question is what defines a narrative. An important aspect is
the segmentation of time. Every story has a beginning and end. Exactly
how the human brain segments time is murky, and different people do it
differently."
"in a narrative, a protagonist typically turns from active to passive or
vice versa, as when a worker in a dead-end job decides to rebel. Mr.
Breithaupt ignores Kurt Vonnegut’s delineation of other story shapes,
like “man in hole,” where a character’s prospects turn from good to bad
to good. Elsewhere, the author defines narratives as “strings of
events,” and events as things that “bring about important, lasting, and
irreversible changes that were not clearly recognizable in advance.”"
"narratives . . . bring order to the world
and entice us with emotional rewards—amusement, astonishment,
satisfaction, triumph. These are proximal benefits. One can also give
ultimate or evolutionary accounts. “Narrative thinking offers numerous
survival benefits,” Mr. Breithaupt writes, “expressed in better
remembering, planning, reacting, and orienting, and potentially in
overcoming depression and trauma.”"
"Narratives help people bond, coordinate and communicate. During and
after times of crisis, we use narratives to repackage our experience of
events, enabling us to recover and prepare for future hardship."
"the retold stories (in an experimental game of “telephone”) were often simplified, shrinking with each
iteration. Sometimes details or major plot points changed. But what
remained true were the core emotions"
"Mr. Breithaupt argues that “the mobility of consciousness”—the ability
to take another’s perspective—would not have emerged without the rituals
of performance."
