The Foundation of Story

Neuroscience and psychology tells us how and why stories exist.

Insights from neuroscience and psychology deepens our understanding of story. Studies in these scientific fields tell us that stories are central to how we perceive the world. Stories also play a crucial role when it comes to who we think we are, our self-perception and personal identity.

At a general level, neuroscience describes how our brain receives sensory impressions, turns them into mental images, and combines them, continuously, into coherent sequences. The process of organizing information into narrative structures happens outside of our consciousness.

When the information comes to our self-perception, we create personal stories about who we are. Based on our interactions with the world, and built from mental images, symbols, and concepts formed in the brain, coherent sequences are shaped, which make up the story of who we are. This story helps form our values, morals, and dreams, and it, in turn, influences how we perceive and interact with the world. This complex interplay between cognitive processes and other genetic and cultural factors provides the content of the personal story.

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I will now lay the groundwork for how and why stories even exist, according to cognitive neuroscience and psychology.

The films and series we watch are composed of images, as well as sound, music, text, and other elements. However, here we look at something more fundamental: in cognitive neuroscience, we have the concept of mental images. They make up a large part of the basis for our becoming conscious, the basis for the light being on inside our heads. They also form the foundation for the narratives and stories we create.

In the following, we limit ourselves to mental images based on sensory data from vision. This is because the term mental image is also used for mental representations from hearing, smell, taste, and touch.

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In the example with the mental images of the eagle and the mouse, it may be that the brain quickly links them to the concepts of predator and prey, creating a coherent sequence of images where the mouse ends up in the eagle’s claws and is flown away to the eagle’s nest. There, two small, scruffy eaglets are fed with the fresh prey.

We filter the world through narratives because it is the most efficient way for the brain to process and understand a complex existence:

A vast array of individual experiences is stored as memories and integrated into coherent sequences, making it easier for the brain to store and retrieve information. The narrative structuring makes complex information more manageable. Narratives give context, and coherence, to facts, making it easier to see how various problems can be solved and easier to make decisions. Stories evoke emotions, and emotional engagement makes the information in the story more memorable than fragmented memories would be.

After this pre-conscious cognitive process, where the brain constructs narratives in the form of explanations and interpretations of events and phenomena and meaning is attributed to events and phenomena, they enter our consciousness.

This is how neuroscience and psychology explain that stories provide a framework for making sense of the world.

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There’s an interesting link from neuroscience’s and psychology’s descriptions of how our self-perception is formed to popular culture and the series, films and doumentaries we indulge in.

Many of these are about characters who discover that they are not who they think they are. This is transformative for them, since the story they have told themselves and the world about their own identity has to be rewritten.

And that feels very dramatic because, until then, they have relied on their strongest traits and used their usual coping strategies in challenging situations, thus avoiding exposing their bad sides.

BUT, when the conflict becomes so serious that the strong sides, the crutches that have held them up, no longer support them - then fear begins to grow. Their mask is about to fall.

Either they let fear consume them - the conflict remains unresolved, and the worst sides of the characters are nurtured to develop.

Or, they throw themselves into the conflict situation without a safety net - they overcome their fear, resolve the conflict using new qualities they didn’t trust they had, and learn through this more about what’s within them.

While discovering new and better sides of themselves, they also realize how they have had a negative impact on people around them until then. They must make a moral decision in the story, which confirms that they have changed for the better and become more well-rounded people.

Just like science, good stories also depict how the story of who we are is formed and transformed in a continuous process. 

In a conscious process, we humans actively use stories as a way to share and understand experiences, emotions, and perspectives, even those different from our own. This can help us develop greater empathy by seeing the world from new viewpoints and understanding others’ challenges and motivations.

The essence of storytelling is both simple and monumental: To show “How we live our lives, and why we live as we do.” The best filmmakers and writers manage to depict this through stories that engage our emotions. And thus, we follow the story to its end, giving the storyteller the opportunity to deliver the message about how to live better in society with others.

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Let’s say we’re on a walk in the woods. We see an eagle soaring high in the sky above us. A little later, we see a mouse scurrying past our feet. Before these fresh, unprocessed visual impressions enter our consciousness, the visual sensory information is transferred to the brain. This input, the visual impression of the eagle and the mouse, contains data about properties like shape, color, and light intensity.

This information is processed and transformed into mental representations, here into a mental image of an eagle and a mental image of a mouse. The images are mental constructions of the eagle and the mouse and can be thought of as an internal model of the external world.

The image is integrated with knowledge, memories, and other related information already in the brain. Once the mental images are fully processed and integrated, they enter our consciousness, and we become aware of the sensory stimuli.

The mental images become part of our subjective experience, and we can "think" about them, consciously focus our attention on them, and make judgments or react based on them.

Over time, our brain seeks patterns and connections among these internal models. This natural tendency to connect related concepts helps us understand causality and handle complex information. And this inherent tendency provides the foundation for the formation of narratives and stories.

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Furthermore, these disciplines explain how the formation of our self-perception occurs in a continuously ongoing process where we adopt and create narratives about ourselves and the world.

We construct personal stories about our characteristics, abilities, roles, interests, values, and relationships.

Our self-perception is not formed in isolation but is also influenced by social, cultural, and genetic factors.

These stories about who we are help shape our values, morals, and dreams, and they, in turn, influence how we perceive and interact with the world.

For the sake of order, it must be mentioned that the interplay between the various factors at play is very complex, and other scientific fields may have different perspectives on perception, mental images, and the nature of consciousness.

Some philosophers exploring consciousness, free will, and related topics may challenge neuroscientific theories, arguing that one cannot reduce explanations of human behavior and decision-making to purely biological or cognitive explanations.

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In the documentary The Act Of Killing (2012) the main character experiences a profound self-revelation, leading him to physically vomit as he confronts his own behavior in the past, and the immense pain and death he has caused.

Schindler's List" (1993) is a good example of a film where the protagonist, Oskar Schindler, undergoes significant inner growth and change.

At the start of the movie, Schindler is portrayed as a selfish, profit-driven entrepreneur who sees the war as an opportunity to make money. As he witnesses the horrors of the Holocaust and the suffering of the Jewish people, he risks his wealth and life to save over a thousand Jews from certain death.