You Are The Story

Exploring the internal workings of the storytelling animal

Mind Candy is a newsletter on practical philosophy and human flourishment—aka how to live “the good life.” Each month we tackle a new theme.

This month we’re exploring the theme of Story.

Each of us tells stories, though how these stories surface within our lives is not always clear. Deep within us lies mechanisms that weave together the narratives of our experienced life. In turn, we’re not just the storytellers, we’re also the story.

Story is foundational to being human. Every one of us creates, takes in, and processes stories every day. We could not survive in the world without our ability to tell stories and interpret them.

But where do they come from? And why are stories so engrained within our lives?

Will Storr has theorized that stories are a form of our brain’s ability to not only make sense of the world, but to bring it to life.

“The brain constructs its hallucinated model of the world by observing millions of instances of cause and effect then constructing its own theories and assumptions about how one thing caused the other.”

The neuroscientist Anil Seth has stated that the brain’s main purpose, outside of everything else we know it to do, is to assist in bringing to life this “controlled hallucination.”

“Perceptions do not come from the bottom up or the outside in, they come primarily from the top down, or the inside out. What we experience is built from the brain's predictions, or 'best guesses', about the causes of sensory signals.”

In other words, our brains are continuously making a guess of what the actual world is and is rendering that for us within our mind.

These predictions are not just guesses, they are critical mechanisms to our survival. Our brain works to build narratives to better assist us with controlling the world.

Storr argues the brain builds the world around us—colors, objects, sounds—as a way to help us control our environment and increase our chances of survival.

“Brains have to perceive the physical environment and the people that surround it in order to control them. It's by learning how to control the world that they get what they want. Control is why brains are on constant alert for the unexpected. Unexpected change is a portal through which danger arrives to swipe at our throats.”

Put simply, our brain is continually looking at everything we interact with in an effort to better assist us in navigating and controlling the environment we’re in.

“In order to tell the story of your life, your brain needs to conjure up a world for you to live inside… Just as characters in fiction exist in a reality that's been actively created, so do we.”

On the surface, this sounds insane. We know the world through our own eyes. And yet, do we really? We have films such as The Matrix and The Truman Show that ask us to think outside the box, outside of the reality we think we know.

Hundreds of years ago, René Descartes asked the same questions. His famous line of “I think, therefore I am,” brought about a significant change to our understanding of conscious thought. In this simple phrase, Descartes set out and answered a fundamental question of consciousness: we cannot have a thought without the existence of thoughts, therefore, his thoughts, and his consciousness, must be real.

But it also showed that we cannot know anything from a perspective outside of our own. Everything is based upon how we take in the world, and that can be very different from someone else.

“This is how it works,” writes Storr. “You walk into a room. Your brain predicts what the scene should look and sound and feel like, then it generates a hallucination based on these predictions.”

It is this “controlled hallucination” we live in every day, that we are at the center of.

“You'll never experience actual reality because you have no direct access to it.”

So in essence, our reality is a story, one that our brain spins up based upon predictions it makes to assist us in surviving, learning when and how to act, and constantly adapting to our ever-changing surroundings.

We are the protagonist in our story, and our brain is the wizard behind the curtain, pulling multiple levers and operating invisible machinery based upon cause and effect. It draws from memory as well as anticipating what could arrive and the expected outcome.

“These micro-narratives of cause and effect - more commonly known as ‘beliefs’ - are the building blocks of our neural realm.”

When we take a step back and recognize the story of our lives, we come to realize it’s not just what happens to us. Rather, there are millions of events being processed and woven together to create the reality we know.

We are the writer of our stories, but we’re also the central character trapped within them.

Before you go…

If you enjoyed the above article, you may be interested in the article that kicked off our monthly theme:

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Until next time,

D.A. DiGerolamo

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