For nearly 20 years, I’ve been researching and writing about the human brain as a storyteller. My work has unalterably changed the way I see the human world in general, and myself in particular. It has helped me understand everything from political hatred and religions to cults to the nature of identity and suicidal thought. It has even made sense of my own lifelong struggle with making friends.
Our evolution into Homo narrans, the storytelling animal, is the secret of our success. Like other animals, humans exist in a realm of survival in which we seek sustenance, safety and procreation. But, uniquely, we also live in a second realm, a story world that’s made out of the collective imagination. The human brain has evolved to remix reality and turn it into a narrative. We are made to feel like the underdog heroes of our own lives, surrounded by allies and enemies, pursuing meaningful goals and striving towards imagined happy endings. We have a voice in our head that authors a constantly unfolding autobiography of who we are and what we’re doing. We experience, and remember, the events of our lives in three-act episodes of crisis, struggle, resolution. We think in stories, we talk in stories, we believe in stories, we are stories.
This story world is where we spend most of our psychological time. The self as it exists in this imaginary realm is not made of flesh and blood, but a collection of ideas about who we are. We call this collection of ideas our “identity”. Our identity is the character we play in the story of our lives and it is of immeasurable importance to us. Indeed, our devotion to it can be more important than life itself. From the Christian martyrs to the 9/11 terrorists to the countless millions throughout human history who have willingly given their lives in defence of their nation or revolution or some idea of what is right, it’s ordinary for human beings to choose identity over their actual survival.
Just like heroes in fiction, we measure the health of our identity in two ways: by how much connection we experience to other humans and how much status they afford us. All humans yearn to be loved and respected, and dread the loss of these essential social resources. It’s no coincidence that survival, connection and status are the subjects of virtually all archetypal stories. Films such as Alien and The Revenant are about survival; Brokeback Mountain and Stand By Me are about connection; Whiplash and Barbie are about status. The stories that feel exceptionally rich and complex, and that can be enjoyed over and over again – Star Wars, Romeo and Juliet, The Godfather – are about all three.
This understanding of myself as a made-up character in a made-up story world who is restlessly seeking connection and status has helped me understand what’s going wrong when life becomes painful. In a period of anxiety or depression, it gives me a model to analyse what’s actually happening. Is it a survival issue? Am I physically unwell? Or is it connection? Am I feeling distant from my wife, or somehow rejected by someone else who I care about? Is it status? Is it an anxiety about how work is going, or some stupidity on social media, or something in the news cycle about how my political ‘team’ is doing versus its rivals? Without exception, I find the answer in one of these buckets. Periods of more significant sadness are usually defined by issues with both connection and status.
I have come to think of connection and status problems as “identity stress”. This is a concept that has helped me in my work as a listening volunteer for the Samaritans: a great many use the service while suffering personal crises related to connection or status. Those thinking about ending their lives, meanwhile, are often experiencing the hell of identity failure. In my experience as a volunteer, callers tend to struggle with suicidal thoughts for one of three reasons: chronic pain, recent bereavement or identity failure – the final category being by far the largest. It’s both remarkable and heartbreaking to hear the impact that a few honestly felt supportive words can have, during these conversations, about how interesting or brave or clever or insightful they seem.
Identity stress is what we do to each other. The pain is by design. One of the core roles of story is to tell us who we should be, to show us how a hero looks, acts, speaks and believes and to try to press us into its shape, in order that we be a more successful co-operative member of our tribe. That pressure comes from other people, who punish us when we err by withdrawing the hero’s rewards of connection and status. Anyone who struggles socially will be overwhelmingly familiar with these punishments. Ever since school, I’ve struggled to make friends. I have a bad personality. I’m not going to go on about it, it’s just a fact. Awakening myself to the reality of story world has helped me see past my unlikeability. I know, now, that the experience of self-hatred that can be triggered by identity stress is just the merciless machinery of the story world, trying to punish me into fitting in. I console myself that, in reality, there are more ways of serving the human family than merely being pleasant company.
Perhaps most urgently, in this era of intense political division, my research has helped me understand the apparent madness of our ever-warring tribes and the divisions which humans seem to make between each other helplessly and continuously and with often horrendous effect. Story’s original purpose was to enable us to work together in the form of highly co-operative groups. Humans are a species of ape that has learned to solve the problems of existence in a way that’s more similar to ants. Tribes, religions, cults, societies, economies, corporations, science labs, football teams – they’re all ant-like superorganisms in which individuals collaborate to pursue the aims of their group, with each person playing their part. Story’s role is to fuse all those individual human minds together and to get them thinking as one.
We experience its power whenever we go to the cinema and allow ourselves to become transported into a film. Sitting in the auditorium, a crowd of disparate people are merged into one, as they put aside their own existence and replace it with the characters on the screen, following their trials and feeling their defeats and their victories almost as if they are happening to them. This quasi-magical effect can linger even after the credits have rolled. How many of us have experienced that weird dissociative drunkenness as we stagger out of the cinema somehow feeling, for a strange minute, that we are the hero – that we have come to be possessed by the film’s protagonist? This is story working as it’s designed to. Its job is to get inside our head and alter our perceptions.
This is why even the smartest among us can seem so irrational. The human brain isn’t especially interested in truth. It’s not a fact-finder, but a story processor. It’s designed to absorb the story world of the groups we identify with – their narrative of right and wrong, their tale of what we need to do together to make the future, their heroic model of the ideal self – and reorganise our perceptions around it. Which is not to say anything so silly as there’s no such thing as “truth”, of course, or that we’re completely immune to arguments based on data. It’s just that, for even the most brilliant humans, “truth” and “data” so often become subservient to story. Most of all, the human brain wants to make us believe the narrative that binds our group together and disbelieve that of its rivals. It has a raft of techniques for doing this: we find mean-spirited and lawyerly ways of dismissing their strongest arguments; we seek to undermine their reputation and therefore silence them; we use the most egregious actions of their worst members to define them all; we assign them the worst possible motives; we simply forget the most persuasive things they have to say. This is story making. It is dividing the human world into heroes and villains, and casting ourselves in the winning role.
I’ve learned the uncomfortable truth that those people who seem so cartoonishly villainous are usually just honest actors who are living in a different narrative universe to mine. No matter how clearly and obviously deranged their perception seems, I know that, to them, it feels inarguably real. As hard as it can be to accept emotionally, they’re not the evil, calculating baddies they appear to be. They’re a made-up character in a made-up story world, as am I.
A Story is a Deal by Will Storr is published by Little, Brown at £20, or £18 at guardianbookshop.com.
If you have been affected by any of these issues, contact Samaritans on freephone 116 123
