The good and the bad of our storytelling brains

In a talk to a U3A (university of the third age) group, I made the point that beauty does not exist in the natural world but is a creation of our brains. Aware the point seems totally at odds with our experience and intuition, I provided an opportunity for comments or questions. One man could not get his mind around the idea, insisting that beauty is in nature quite apart from what might be going on in our brains. I am glad I had not presented the full picture – that our brains create EVERY experience we have of the world. As Will Storr says in his book, The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better: The world we experience as ‘out there’ is actually a reconstruction of reality that is built inside our heads. It’s an act of creation by the storytelling brain. This is how it works. 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’s this hallucination that you experience as the world around you. Were you aware that you have a ‘storytelling brain’? And that we depend on our stories to make sense of the world around us and to tell us how to negotiate it day-by-day? As Will Storr points out, the world we respond to moment by moment is the world as seen through the lens of our stories. Our brains are creating and using stories all the time, even when we are asleep. Our dreams are stories, and so too are most of our daydreams. None of us could function without our stories. Our stories shape and define who we are. Our brains are hardwired to be storytellers and to process the world through stories. It cannot be otherwise. The human brain resides in a dungeon, the skull. The only information it secures about the world is through the portal of the senses. And regardless of whether it is from the eyes, ears, nose or any other sensory organ, the information the brain receives is always in the same form – electrical impulses delivered by nerve cells or neurons. It falls to the brain to give meaning to these impulses, to perceive colours, for example, to hear sounds, to smell odours. Even the information arriving at our senses bears no resemblance to what the brain finally perceives. There is no colour, as such, no sound, no odour. What there is are light waves, sound waves, air-borne chemical molecules and other physical messengers. Humans can perceive millions of different hues but only because there are specialised colour and brightness detecting cells in the eye. Likewise, we hear sounds only because our ears are built to detect vibrations (pressure waves) of different frequencies and magnitudes. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, is there any sound? The answer is, No. There are vibrations but no sound. Sound, like colour, is a product of brain activity. What is true for colour and sound is true for every perceived property of the Universe (including beauty). Our versions of the world (or ‘hallucinations’ in Will Storr’s words) are inevitably ours and ours alone. The world as it is known to you, is not and can never be the world as known to me. Even if we may appear to be sharing the same moments in time, the same environment and participating in the same event, we are having different experiences – similar perhaps but not the same. We live quite literally in worlds of our own. The human brain must work like this because it has a massive limitation. It receives far more information every second than it can deal with. It is impossible for it to take account of every detail of every situation and event. So, what does it do? Well, it doesn’t try to read the world in all its details. Instead, it attends to information selectively and having formed an impression of what is going on, it creates its own version of events by drawing on general memories it has formed of similar events. Will Storr and many others speak of these general memories as ‘stories’, because like the stories we find in novels, films, and TV soap operas, they are accounts of connected events. They may be a little light on such things as character development, plot twists and detailed descriptions of scenes but stories they are, nevertheless. Stories are the brain’s preferred and most efficient way of remembering – not only mental or cognitive information, but also the emotions, sensations and actions associated with that information. This way of knowing the world is called intuitive because it is guided by how things appear and what the brain ‘thinks’ (or guesses) is happening. While the brain is constantly adjusting its version of events to ‘fit the facts’, it is disposed to ignore, distort or even invent ‘facts’ to spare itself the effort of creating a new version. Generally, our brains and minds get away with working like this. In fact, humanity’s triumphs and achievements are the products of our stories, rarely the stories of individual minds alone but the stories generated by many minds working together. And it’s important to note that not all our stories are unreliable subjective versions of the world. Many are the product of shared formal study and reasoning. These are the stories education instils in us, the stories that scholarship of every kind creates. These are the kind of stories that have enabled human beings to become the most successful, adaptable and accomplished species on Earth. But our stories are also at the root of humanity’s failures, giving rise to ignorance, arrogance, prejudice, hatred, discrimination and downright stupidity. This happens because we are easily misled by our own stories. • We are strongly disposed to think our versions of events are the correct ones, making us error-prone, sometimes irrational, and often ignorant. • We are given to thinking we understand more than we do, making us prone to arrogance and narrow mindedness. • We are likely to believe that we understand things we know little about, making us overconfident and prone to hubris. • We tend to fix on to a story, often for no good reason at all, to cling to it tenaciously If you have ever wondered why prejudice, bigotry, intolerance, misinformation, disinformation, “spin”, hubris and foolhardiness flourish, then look no further than the stories created by the human mind. Consider, for example, the false and conflicting narratives underlying the carnage in the Middle East and the alarming schisms in American politics and society. Australian society is no less plagued by false and conflicting narratives. In a recent Sydney Morning Herald article addressing the social narratives underlying Australia’s irresolute response to the climate crisis, Tom Winton points out that the chief storytellers influencing these social narratives are not novelists but “PR hacks and lobbyists”. “For nearly 40 years”, he says, “the fable they’ve spun, the tale that’s managed to set the agenda for all of us, has been a noxious myth fixated on the price of everything and the value of nothing”. In his book, The Story Paradox: How our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears Them Down, Jonathan Gottschall, rightly argues that behind all civilization’s greatest ills – environmental destruction, runaway autocrats, warfare – you will always find the same master factor: a mind-disordering story. A question we must all ask ourselves, Jonathan Gottschall insists is, How can we save the world from mind-disordering stories? Does anyone have anything like an adequate answer to this question? I certainly don’t, but I have some thoughts about it – drawn from my experience of nature – which I’ll share in my next post.