Plot Twist - Will Storr Flashcards
The villainous self and the uses of redemption
At any given moment, the brain is capable of receiving more than 11 million bits of information. And yet we are consciously aware of fewer than 40. How does the brain parse this maelstrom of input? It does it by telling stories.
The brain generates a narrative to make sense of the world around us, but also to make sense of ourselves. We think we’re captained by the part of us that’s self-conscious – the bit that we experience as our own living ‘me’, that collision of sense, memory and internal monologue at the centre of which sits the ‘I’.
Yet there’s a silent, unconscious ‘I’ to which we have no access. It communicates with emotions, wordlessly coaxing us this way and that with its ceaseless blooms of disgust and fear and desire. It influences everything we think and do.
Exactly how much influence does this self have over our behaviour? Experts disagree. Some say its control is total: that the voice that speaks in the privacy of our heads might seem like it’s in charge, but really it’s just a babbling spin doctor, making excuses for the misdeeds of its boss.
Others claim that our rational selves can play an executive role under certain, limited circumstances – but not much more than that.
Our brains conjure the illusion of order; they wrench a plot from the chaos and then place us heroically at its centre
This story-making has a name. It’s called ‘confabulation’. In an ordinary, healthy brain, it tends to make us feel good about ourselves and the reality that we feel we’re at the centre of. Religion is a kind of confabulation. It’s a story that explains the origin of life and the universe while answering profound questions about death, loneliness and morality.
Another story is the notion that your family is special, or that your political ideology is important. None of this is true. To insist we matter is to conduct a circular argument: people matter because they matter to people (in which case, if you got rid of all the people, it wouldn’t really matter). But we must believe these tales – and we do.
We live, moment to moment, in an emotional reality of love, hate, feuds, sorrows and dreams. We spin seductive, reductive narratives of heroism and villainy, struggle and victory, to parse reality and give ourselves esteem and our lives meaning. Rituals help. We use them to place ourselves at particular plot-points in the story of our lives.
In the chaos of the daily world and our irrational behaviour within it, our brains conjure the illusion of order; they wrench a plot from the chaos and then place us heroically at its centre. And what heroes we are!
A symphony of optimism biases soothe us into believing we’re smarter, better looking, more morally upright than we are. Primitive tribal instincts turn our enemies into ruthless ignorant baddies while our allies are crowned with undeserved haloes. We’re seduced into believing in the autonomy and moral behaviour of our coherent and comprehensible selves.
As a journalist with an interest in the mind on the fringes of human experience, I kept noticing this pattern. It seemed as though the brain would do almost anything to maintain its feeling of control, even if that meant turning our selves and the plot of our lives inside out and upside down.
Their hero narratives are strong – potent enough to adapt and survive, agile enough to pirouette across their psychic crises to emerge more powerful. That’s how they did it, that’s how they changed: the sheer, magnificent power of their urge to think well of themselves transformed their entire story of reality.
The only thing I ever wanted was the illusion of control.
