The Brain - A Storytelling Machine

Disclaimer: I am not a psychologist, psychotherapist, or neuroscientist. I am a learner. These reflections surfaced while reading The Sense of an Ending and The Science of Storytelling, alongside insights gathered from various podcasts and videos. What follows are solely my personal thoughts and my attempt to synthesize these learnings.

Have you ever looked at the night sky and wonder where does this all begin? Every civilization, every era, might have come up with different stories to answer this most fundamental question, and it varies over time and knowledge. For me I still lean into the big bang theory, and not sure what was before the big bang, please don’t add “The God” narrative here.

Stories. We all have our own. They are intertwined in everyone’s life. That’s what held us together throughout our journey from cave to city. Be it fighting a common enemy or building our tribe, its stories everywhere.

We are creature of narratives. Our brains are wired to connect the dots.I learned recently that the brain is also a prediction device. It cannot stand a vacuum; it must fill in the blanks to complete the picture. Don’t believe me?

Read this sentence: “Your brain is always one step ahead. In fact, you probably already know how this sentence is going to…”

Did you hear the word “end” in your head? I didn’t write it. You did.

Have you ever seen a pile of clothes over a chair in the middle of the night and thought, for a split second, that there was a ghost sitting there?

This is the brain’s “storytelling” mode in action. It takes a vague shape (the variable) and, based on fear and past experiences, predicts a threat. It hallucinates a ghost. It is only when we turn the light on and gather more variables, that we realize it is just fabric. The brain rushes to a conclusion because, for our ancestors, hesitation meant death.

So Vishwa, this is prediction, which is for future or near future, what about past?

The stories from the past are kinda exciting to explore, because we are not storing the actual events in our brain, instead we are storing what we have experienced. Irony is that we see the world through our lenses, through our thoughts, through our emotions, through what we claim as good and through what we claim as bad. Sometimes we ignore the variable that didn’t quite add up to the story we are building. So how can we believe a story?

For simplicity lets not go over the story we hear from others, or the film we watch or the book we read.

What about the stories I am saying myself all these years? Are those not true?

Do I love the olive green color? Here brain cherry-picks all the positive, memorable encounters with that color,

• the perfect summer lawn
• a beloved olive green shirt and white pant
• a beautiful forest view and join them together into a convincing narrative that confirms my love for the color. It does work for all the other questions as well like, “Do I love programming?” or “Have I ever been in love?”

The brain selectively presents examples to make you believe it. Even though it might have happened exactly the opposite way, by ignoring all the variable that didn’t quite add up to the narrative.

So Vishwa, what can we do about it?

Embrace the vacuum

• The most vital step is to consciously resist the urge to fill in the blanks.
• When faced with uncertainty, intentionally seek more variables.
• Find more information, more facts, and more angles before allowing a conclusion to form.
• Embrace the discomfort of the informational vacuum until you have sufficient data.

Engage in counter-narrative

• Since the brain cherry-picks examples to support a current mood (like “I’m not good at programming”), you have to force it to look at the “trash” folder of your memory, the data points you’ve ignored because they didn’t fit the story.
• What if the opposites are true? For every “truth” you believe about your past, find three inconvenient facts that contradict it.

Externalize the variable

• When we keep stories in our heads, the brain is free to edit them, so, make sure to treat your past like a cold investigative file.
• Write down the sequence of events without using adjectives. Be more objective than being subjective.
  • Subjective Story: “I miserably failed that interview because I wasn’t prepared.”
  • Objective Story: “I had an interview at 10:00 AM. I answered 4/6 technical questions. The recruiter did not call back.”

Recognize the predictive errors

• The difference between what we predict and what actually happens is the Prediction Error.
• Instead of trying to find the “true” story (which may not exist), focus on the errors. Search your past for those times you were proven wrong.
• Those are the only moments where you were truly seeing reality clearly because the story broke.

So to conclude, you are what you tell yourself you are. If the brain is a prediction engine, then the stories you tell yourself are the training data. If you feed the engine a narrative of “I always mess things up,” the brain will prioritize and “cherry-pick” every mistake to prove the model correct. It will literally filter out the successes because they don’t add up to the story you are building.

By changing the story, you aren’t just thinking positive, you are actually reprogramming the filter through which you perceive reality. You are giving the prediction engine a new set of variables to look for.

You’ve spent years building your current story. It takes a second to realize the ghost is just a pile of laundry, but it takes practice to stop seeing the ghost the next night.