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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Will Storr
Read between
November 16 - November 26, 2022
‘We’ are our neural models. Our narrator is just observing what’s happening in the controlled hallucination in our skulls – including our own behaviour – and explaining it.
Because the narrator exists separately from the circuits that are the true causes of our emotions and behaviour, it’s forced to rapidly hash together any makes-sense (and usually heroic) story it can about what we’re up to and why.
The terrible and fascinating truth about the human condition is that none of us really know the answer to the dramatic question as it pertains to ourselves.
As well as having models of everything in the world, inside our heads, we have different models of self that are constantly fighting for control over who we are. At different times, under different circumstances, a different version of us becomes dominant. When it does, it takes over the role of neural narrator, arguing its case passionately and convincingly and usually winning. Beneath the level of consciousness we’re a riotous democracy of mini-selves
We have a core personality, mediated by culture and early life experience, which is relatively stable. But that core is a pole around which we’re constantly, elastically moving. How we behave, in any given moment, is a combination of personality and situation.
It’s structurally effective because of its adherence to cause and effect, with one event leading to another unexpected event which leads to another, and so on. It’s meaningfully effective because it keeps asking and answering that essential dramatic question: who is Bandini?
human consciousness works on two levels. There’s the top level on which occurs the drama of our day-to-day lives – that meeting of sight, sound, touch, taste and smell which is narrated by the hero-making inner voice. And then, beneath that, there’s the subconscious level of the neural models, a stewing night ocean of feelings, urges and broken memories in which competing urges engage in a constant struggle for control.
On the plot’s conscious top layer we experience the visible causes and effects of the drama. Then there’s the story’s subconscious that heaves beneath the visible. It’s a place of symbolism and division, in which characters are multiple and contradictory and surprising, even to themselves.
Inch by inch, scene by scene, characters and plot interact, each altering the other.
We believe we’re in control of ourselves but we’re continually being altered by the world and people around us. The difference is that in life, unlike in story, the dramatic question of who we are never has a final and truly satisfying answer.
But all archetypal stories are like this, even if the process is less overt in some. They’re about flawed selves being offered the opportunity to heal. Whether their endings are happy or otherwise depends on whether or not they take it.
‘the most memorable, fascinating characters tend to have not only a conscious but an unconscious desire. Although these complex protagonists are unaware of their subconscious need, the audience senses it, perceiving in them an inner contradiction. The conscious and unconscious desires of a multidimensional protagonist contradict each other. What he believes he wants is the antithesis of what he actually but unwittingly needs.’
In all great stories, each major character is altered somehow by their interpersonal encounters. As they clash, they send each other spinning outwards, only to clash again in new and altered ways, and then spin out again, and meet again and so on and so on, out across the plot, in an elegant and gripping dance of change.
Speech should be crammed with deep facts that can be greedily absorbed by readers and viewers, whose hyper-social brains rapidly construct models of the fictional characters’ minds.
Dialogue should be changeful, it should want something, it should drip with personality and point of view, and it should operate on the two story levels – both conscious and subconscious.
The emotions we experience, when under the power of story, don’t happen by accident. Humans have evolved to respond in certain ways to tales of heroism and villainy because doing so has been critical for our survival.
Gossip exists to teach us about other people, to tell us who they really are. Most concerns moral infractions: people breaking the rules of the group.
‘Stories arose out of our intense interest in social monitoring,’
We’re wired to find selfless behaviour heroic and selfish deeds evil. Selflessness is thought to be the universal basis of all human morality. An analysis of ethnographic accounts of ethics in sixty worldwide groups found they shared these rules: return favours, be courageous, help your group, respect authority, love your family, never steal and be fair, all a variation on ‘don’t put your own selfish interests before that of the tribe’.
Meanwhile, the story theorist Christopher Booker writes that ‘the “dark power” in stories represents the power of the ego . . . [and] is immensely powerful and concerned solely with pursuing its own interests at the expense of everyone else in the world.’
we’re designed to love watching the anti-social suffer the pain of tribal comeuppance.
Brain scans reveal that the mere anticipation of a selfish person being punished is experienced as pleasurable.
The surprising discovery that’s been waiting for us, at the destination of our long journey into our evolutionary past, is that all story is gossip.
Humans are driven to connect and dominate.
Underneath the noblest plots and pursuits of our lives, in other words, lies our unquenchable thirst for status.
‘The tendency of chimps to rally for the underdog creates an inherently unstable hierarchy in which the power at the top is shakier than in any monkey group,’ writes the primatologist Professor Frans de Waal. When troop leaders are toppled from their throne, it’s usually because a gang of low-status males has conspired against them.
‘The point is that the disorder in the upper world cannot be amended without some crucial activity taking place at a lower level,’
A common feature of our hero-making cognition seems to be that we all tend to feel like this – relatively low in status and yet actually, perhaps secretly, possessing the skills and character of someone deserving of a great deal more. I suspect this is why we so easily identify with underdog heroes at the start of the story – and then cheer when they finally seize their just reward. Because they’re us.
everyone seems to feel unfairly lacking in status.
A study of over 200 popular nineteenth-and early twentieth-century novels found the antagonists’most common flaw was an ineffably chimpish ‘quest for social dominance at the expense of others or an abuse of their existing power’.
The play is a tragedy, a form that frequently shows how hubris – which can be viewed as the making of an unsound claim to status – can bring personal destruction.
We can’t simply toss aside our flawed ideas as if they’re a pair of badly fitting trousers. It takes overwhelming evidence to convince us that ‘reality’ is wrong. When we finally realise something’s up, breaking these beliefs apart means breaking ourselves apart. And that’s precisely what happens in many of our most successful stories.
In story, an experience of humiliation is often the origin of the antagonist’s dark behaviour,
Because humiliation is such an apocalyptic punishment, watching villains being punished this way can feel rapturous. As we’re a tribal people with tribal brains, it doesn’t count as humiliation unless other members of the tribe are aware of it.
Because one of our deepest and most powerful urges is the gaining of ever more status, our tribal stories tell us how to earn it. A human tribe can be viewed as a status game that all its members are playing, its rules being recorded in its stories. Every human group that has a shared purpose is held together by such stories.
All of us are being silently controlled by any number of instructional stories at once. A unique quality of humans is that we’ve evolved the ability to think our way into many tribes simultaneously.
it can feel as if we’ve encountered revealed truth and our eyes have suddenly been opened. In fact, the opposite has happened. Tribal stories blind us. They allow us to see only half the truth, at best.
What’s insidious about these stories is that they each tell only a partial truth. Capitalism is liberating and it’s also exploitative. Like any complex system it has a trade-off of effects, some good, others bad. But thinking with tribal stories means shutting out such morally unsatisfying complexity. Our storytelling brains transform reality’s chaos into a simple narrative of cause and effect that reassures us that our biased models, and the instincts and emotions they generate, are virtuous and right. And this means casting the opposing tribe into the role of villain.
The brain enters this war state because a psychological tribal threat is a threat to its theory of control – its intricate network of millions of beliefs about how one thing causes another. Its theory of control tells it, among many other things, how to get what it most desires, namely connection and status. It forms the scaffolding of the model of the world and self it has been building since birth.
a tribal challenge is existentially disturbing. It’s not merely a threat to our surface beliefs about this and that, but to the very subconscious structures by which we experience reality.
We willingly allow highly simplistic narratives to deceive us, gleefully accepting as truth any tale that casts us as the moral hero and the other as the two-dimensional villain.
When all the good is on our side and all the bad on theirs, our storytelling brain is working its grim magic in full.
There’s a sense in which all protagonists are antiheroes. Most, when we meet them, are flawed and partial and only become truly heroic if and when they manage to change. Any attempt to find a single reason why we find characters root worthy is probably destined to fail. There isn’t one secret to creating empathy but many. The key lies in the neural networks. Stories work on multiple evolved systems in the brain and a skilled storyteller activates these networks like the conductor of an orchestra, a little trill of moral outrage here, a fanfare of status play over there, a tintinnabulation of
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But the awkward fact remains that, as we experience the story unfolding in our minds, we seem to enjoy ‘playing’ the antihero. I wonder if this is because, somewhere in the sewers far beneath our hero-making narrators, we know we’re not so lovely. Keeping the secret of ourselves from ourselves can be exhausting. This, perhaps, is the subversive truth of stories about antiheroes. Being freed to be evil, if only in our minds, can be such a joyful relief.
In most instances, the source material on which playwrights such as Shakespeare based their work clearly explained the causes of their character’s behaviour. But when he was working on Hamlet, Shakespeare decided to try artfully excising such neat and reassuring explanations. In previous versions of the play, Hamlet’s ‘madness’ had been tactical and fake, a ruse to buy time and foster the appearance of harm lessness. But in Shakespeare’s version, his suicidal madness is actually real and, writes Greenblatt, ‘nothing to do with the ghost’ that informed him of his father’s murder.
This experimentation in denying neat explanations, writes Greenblatt, resulted in plays that were ‘immeasurably deeper’ than what had gone before.
Shakespeare had always been sceptical of ‘accounts, whether psychological or theological, of why people behave the way they do’. In his scepticism he’s been proven entirely correct. As we’ve learned, none of us know why we do what we do – not King Lear, not Iago, not me and not you. Leaving his audiences to guess at the precise causes of a character’s actions enabled the playwright to toy wonderfully with their domesticated brains. There’s little more interesting to most of us than the causes and effects of human behaviour. In making the answer to the dramatic question more mysterious,
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Such examples show the freedom writers have in playing with origin damage. They can hint at it and tease it, use it to build empathy, even orient plots around a hunt for it. It’s my experience teaching these principles, though, that it’s valuable for the storyteller to know specifically when and how such damage happened to their principal cast before they start writing. It doesn’t do to be general and say, for example, ‘It’s because their parents didn’t love them enough,’ because such vague thinking can only lead to vague characters.
But if a writer is to conjure great characters on the page, they first have to model them vividly in their minds, and that means defining them precisely. They should be able to ‘see’ how they’ll behave in any dramatic situation and try to control the drama that flies at them. To do this, it helps to pin a character’s origin damage down to an actual event, as the writers of Citizen Kane did, even if it’s only hinted at in, or excised completely from, the final draft.
If origin damage in story most often occurs in youth, it’s because it’s in the first two decades of life that we’re busy forming ourselves out of our experiences.
