Why Your Brain Turns Life Into Stories

It would be decades before people found the brain circuitry that underlies this construction. Doing so required both new technology and the courage to use it in a novel way. Developed in 1991, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures blood flow as a proxy for neural activity, was conceived as a window to the workings of the human brain. But as of the early 2000s, Uri Hasson, then a graduate student at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, didn’t think it was being put to good use.

…

To understand a character change, a person must not only recognize the character but also grasp a story’s context. Dartmouth College cognitive neuroscientist Emily Finn and her colleagues recently homed in on the brain’s machinery for context in stories. In an fMRI machine, they played audio of an episode called “The Dark End of the Mall” from the podcast The Truth, created by Jonathan Mitchell. It is set in a bridal shop and features a dialogue between an irritable customer (Steve) and a polite but curt shopkeeper (Lucy). Although the exchange is testy, listeners perceive nothing extraordinary until partway through the story, when they learn that Steve is one of the last humans alive after a 2050s apocalypse. He has survived because he knows that some bridal shops store energy bars and water behind the counter. Lucy is a robot whose rigid programming, listeners realize, will cause her to thwart Steve’s plans and hasten his demise.

…

The same machinery also most likely extracts meaning from experiences. Starting in adolescence, people become able to reflect on their experiences to draw conclusions. After winning a student election in high school, a teenager might start to think of herself as a leader. A young adult might see himself as bold if he risked harm to save a friend. In this way, stories establish identity. “If you could see an identity, what would it look like?” asks Dan McAdams, a psychologist at Northwestern University and a pioneer of the subfield “narrative psychology.” “It’s a story in a person’s mind about how they came to be and where their lives are going.”

Read the whole story (subscription may be required): Scientific American