of consciousness we’re a riotous democracy of mini-selves which, writes the neuroscientist Professor David Eagleman, are ‘locked in chronic battle’ for dominion. Our behaviour is ‘simply the end result of the battles’. All the while our confabulating narrator ‘works around the clock to stitch together a pattern of logic to our daily lives: what just happened and what was my role in it?’ Fabrication of stories, he adds, ‘is one of the key businesses in which our brain engages. Brains do this with the single minded goal of getting the multifaceted actions of the democracy to make sense.’
