Recognize that we help all invented characters in a story world to understand people

I have been researching and writing about the human brain as a storyteller for almost 20 years. My work has changed the way I see the human world in general and in particular. It helped me to understand everything from political hatred and religions to cults to the nature of identity and suicide thinking. It even has my own lifelong struggle to find friends.

Our development in homo StoriesThe story of our success is storytelling. Like other animals, people exist in a realm of survival in which we are looking for food, security and generation. But we clearly live in a second area, a story that consists of the collective imagination. The human brain has developed to remix reality and transform it into a story. We feel like the outsider heroes of our own life, surrounded by allies and enemies, pursue the sensible goals and strive for the presented happy ends. We have a voice in our head that develops the authors an constantly unfolding autobiography of who we are and what we do. We experience and remember the events of our lives in three-act episodes of crises, struggle, solution. We think in stories, we talk in stories, we believe in stories, we Are Stories.

In this story of history we spend most of our psychological time. The self, as it exists in this imaginary area, does not consist 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 that we play in the history of our life and it is of immeasurable importance for us. In fact, our devotion to it can be more important than life itself. From the Christian martyrs to the terrorists from September 11th to the countless millions in the entire human history, who willingly have their lives to defend their nation or revolution or an idea of ​​what is correct to choose identity about their actual survival.

Just like heroes in fiction, we measure the health of our identity in two ways: through the connection we experience with other people and how much status they affect us. All people long for being loved and respected and fear the loss of these essential social resources. It is no coincidence that survival, connection and status are practically all archetypal stories. Films like Foreigner And The Revenant it is about survival; Brokeback Mountain And Stand by Me it is about connection; Whipped -up trauma And Barbie it is about status. The stories that feel exceptionally rich and complex and which can be enjoyed again and again – star WarsPresent Romeo and JuliaPresent The Godfather – are about all three.

This understanding of me as a fictional character in an invented world of world who is looking uneasy for connection and status has helped me to understand what is painful when life becomes painful. In a time of fear or depression, I have a model to analyze what actually happens. Is it a survival problem? Am I physically uncomfortable? Or is it the connection? Do I feel removed from my wife or somehow rejected someone else I am interested? Is it status? Is it a concern of how work is going, or a little stupidity on social media or something in the news cycle about how my political ‘team’ works compared to his competitors? Without exception, I find the answer in one of these buckets. Periods with greater sadness are usually defined by problems with connection and status.

I viewed myself as a “stress of identity” in connection and status problems. This is a concept that helped me in my work as a hearing aid for the Samaritan: use the service while you suffer personal crises in connection with connection or status. Those who think about ending their lives often experience hell of identity failure. In my experience as a voluntary struggle, callers tend to struggle with suicide thoughts for three reasons: chronic pain, recent grief or identity failure – the final category is far the largest. It is both remarkable and heartbreaking to hear the effects that some 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 with each other. The pain is the design. One of the core roles of the story is to tell us who we should be to show us what a hero looks like, acts, speaks and believes and try to push us into its form so that we are a more successful cooperative member of our tribe. This pressure comes from other people who punish us when we are wrong by withdrawing the heroes’ rewards and status. Anyone who has to fight socially will mostly be familiar with these punishments. I have had problems finding friends since school. I have a bad personality. I won’t go on, it’s just a fact. I woke up in the reality of the story world helped me to survive my unfortunateness. I now know that the experience of self -hate, which can be triggered by the stress of identity, is only the merciless machinery of the story world and tries to punish me. I comfort myself that in reality there are more opportunities to serve the human family than just being a pleasant society.

The most urgent, at this time intensive political division, my research helped me to understand the obvious insanity of our ever difficult tribes and the divisions that seem to make people with each other, helpless and continuously and with often terrible effects. The original purpose of the story was to enable us to work together in the form of highly cooperative groups. People are a species of monkeys who have learned to solve the problems of existence in a way that is more similar. Tribes, religions, cults, societies, economies, companies, science laboratories, soccer teams sie are all bold-like super organisms in which individuals work together to pursue the goals of their group, whereby everyone plays their role. The task of the story is to merge all these individual human heads together and to make them think.

We experience his power when we go to the cinema and allow ourselves to be transferred to a film. When they sit in the auditorium, a lot of different people are merged because they put their own existence aside and replace them with the characters on the screen, track their exams and feel their defeats and their victories almost as if they are happening to them. This quasimagic effect can also linger after rolling the credits. How many of us have experienced this strange dissociative drunkenness when we somehow stumble out of the cinema for a strange minute Are The hero – that we are obsessed with the protagonist of the film? This is the story that works as it was designed. His task is to go into the head and change our perceptions.

That is why even the smartest among us can appear so irrational. The human brain is not particularly interested in the truth. It is not a fact finder, but a story processor. It is intended to record the stories of the groups with which we identify – their narrative of law and wrong, their history about what we have to do together to do the future, their heroic model of the ideal self – and reorganize our perceptions around them. That means nothing as stupid as there is of course no “truth” or that we are completely immune to arguments based on data. It is only that even the most brilliant people are “truth” and “data” so often subject to history. Above all, the human brain wants to believe that the narrative that our group ties together and which of its competitors is incredulously. There are a number of techniques for this: we find common and legal opportunities to reject your strongest arguments; We try to undermine their reputation and therefore silence them; We use the most outrageous actions of your worst members to define them all. We assign the worst possible motifs to you; We just forget the most convincing things you have to say. That is the making of history. It divides the human world into heroes and villains and throws us into the winning role.

I have learned the unpleasant truth that the people who seem to be so cartoononically malignant are usually only honest actors who live in another narrative universe to mean them. No matter how clear and obviously your perception appears, I know that it feels indisputably real for you. As difficult as it may be to accept emotionally, they are not evil and calculate bad guys that they seem to be. They are an invented character in an invented world world, as on the I.

A story is a deal by Will Storr, who is published by Little, Brown for £ 20 or £ 18 at GuardianBookshop.com.

If you are affected by one of these problems, contact Samarita 116 123