The Science of Storytelling. Уилл Сторр

it’s true. He feels it’s true. He sees evidence for it everywhere.

      There’s something else you should know about Mr B. He’s psychotic. One healthy part of his brain, writes the neuroscientist Professor Michael Gazzaniga, ‘is trying to make sense out of some abnormalities going on in another’. The malfunctioning part is causing ‘a conscious experience with very different contents than would normally be there, yet those contents are what constitute Mr B’s reality and provide experiences that his cognition must make sense of.’

      Because it’s being warped by faulty signals being sent out by the unhealthy section of his brain, the story Mr B is telling about the world, and his place within it, is badly mistaken. It’s so mistaken he’s no longer able to adequately control his environment, so doctors and care staff have to do it on his behalf, in a psychiatric institution.

      As unwell as he is, we’re all a bit like Mr B. The controlled hallucination inside the silent, black vault of our skulls that we experience as reality is warped by faulty information. But because this distorted reality is the only reality we know, we just can’t see where it’s gone wrong. When people plead with us that we’re mistaken or cruel and acting irrationally, we feel driven to find a way to dismiss each argument they present to us. We know we’re right. We feel we’re right. We see evidence for it everywhere.

      These distortions in our cognition make us flawed. Everyone is flawed in their own interesting and individual ways. Our flaws make us who we are, helping to define our character. But our flaws also impair our ability to control the world. They harm us.

      At the start of a story, we’ll often meet a protagonist who is flawed in some closely defined way. The mistakes they’re making about the world will help us empathise with them. We’ll warm to their vulnerability. We’ll become emotionally engaged in their struggle. When the dramatic events of the plot coax them to change we’ll root for them.

      The problem is, in fiction and in life, changing who we are is hard. The insights we’ve learned from neuroscience and psychology begin to show us exactly why it’s hard. Our flaws – especially the mistakes we make about the human world and how to live successfully within it – are not simply ideas about this and that which we can identify easily and choose to shrug off. They’re built right into our hallucinated models. Our flaws form part of our perception, our experience of reality. This makes them largely invisible to us.

      Correcting our flaws means, first of all, managing the task of actually seeing them. When challenged, we often respond by refusing to accept our flaws exist at all. People accuse us of being ‘in denial’. Of course we are: we literally can’t see them. When we can see them, they all too often appear not as flaws at all, but as virtues. The mythologist Joseph Campbell identified a common plot moment in which protagonists ‘refuse the call’ of the story. This is often why.

      Identifying and accepting our flaws, and then changing who we are, means breaking down the very structure of our reality before rebuilding it in a new and improved form. This is not easy. It’s painful and disturbing. We’ll often fight with all we have to resist this kind of profound change. This is why we call those who manage it ‘heroes’.

      There are various routes by which characters and selves become unique and uniquely flawed, and a basic understanding of them can be of great value to storytellers. One major route involves those moments of change. 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. These micro-narratives of cause and effect – more commonly known as ‘beliefs’ – are the building blocks of our neural realm. The beliefs it’s built from feel personal to us because they help make up the world that we inhabit and our understanding of who we are. Our beliefs feel personal to us because they are us.

      But many of them will be wrong. Of course the controlled hallucination we live inside is not as distorted as the one that Mr B lives inside. Nobody, however, is right about everything. Nevertheless, the storytelling brain wants to sell us the illusion that we are. Think about the people closest to you. There won’t be a soul among them with whom you’ve never disagreed. You know she’s slightly wrong about that, and he’s got that wrong, and don’t get her started on that. The further you travel from those you admire, the more wrong people become until the only conclusion you’re left with is that entire tranches of the human population are stupid, evil or insane. Which leaves you, the single living human who’s right about everything – the perfect point of light, clarity and genius who burns with godlike luminescence at the centre of the universe.

      Hang on, that can’t be right. You must be wrong about something. So you go on a hunt. You count off your most precious beliefs – the ones that really matter to you – one by one. You’re not wrong about that and you’re not wrong about that and you’re certainly not wrong about that or that or that or that. The insidious thing about your biases, errors and prejudices is that they appear as real to you as Mr B’s delusions appear to him. It feels as if everyone else is ‘biased’ and it’s only you that sees reality as it actually is. Psychologists call this ‘naive realism’. Because reality seems clear and obvious and self-evident to you, those who claim to see it differently must be idiots or lying or morally derelict. The characters we meet at the start of story are, like most of us, living just like this – in a state of profound naivety about how partial and warped their hallucination of reality has become. They’re wrong. They don’t know they’re wrong. But they’re about to find out …

      If we’re all a bit like Mr B then Mr B is, in turn, like the protagonist in Andrew Niccol’s screenplay, The Truman Show. It tells of thirty-year-old Truman Burbank, who’s come to believe his whole life is staged and controlled. But, unlike Mr B, he’s right. The Truman Show is not only real, it’s being broadcast, twenty-four hours a day, to millions. At one point, the show’s executive producer is asked why he thinks it’s taken Truman so long to become suspicious of the true nature of his world. ‘We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented,’ he answers. ‘It’s as simple as that.’