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."
