We enter life equipped, neurologically, with all the tools we need to conceive of ourselves as distinctive human selves, and this conception takes a narrative form. —William Randall, St. Thomas University
We begin life as we would begin a story—in this case, The Story of Us. The Story of Us is a constantly evolving narrative that provides us with a sense of self: not only who we are, where we’ve been, and what we’ve experienced, but also what we like and dislike, what we believe, our strengths and weaknesses, and most importantly the actions we take.
We naturally create a mythic “me,” which is nearly always imagined as a traveler on a journey, as we live in the arrow of time. —David Williams, The Trickster Brain
Our Inner Narrator makes sense of our experiences and observations, decides which are important and what they mean, and weaves everything together into a unified whole. The Inner Narrator gives our life a sense of continuity so that our experiences feel sequential and (usually) logical rather than segmented and random.
This is a pretty neat trick, given that our Inner Narrator is a function of unconscious processes in the Default Mode Network. It means that our sense of self is communicated to us by our Inner Narrator in the form of self-talk, impulses, suggestions, and even directives. Yet we experience ourselves as the protagonists of our stories, the makers of conscious choices or decisions.
We perceive, we remember our experiences, we make judgments, we act—and in all of these endeavors we are influenced by factors we aren’t aware of. —Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal
The Inner Narrator, in search of a cohesive story, altogether ignores details that don’t fit and “enhances” the ones that make a better story. It is far more interested in consistency than it is in accuracy. And if it doesn’t have factual information, it will make something up on the spot. This tendency to confabulate has been repeatedly demonstrated in split brain patients, but it applies to all of us. Confabulation isn’t exactly lying, since it doesn’t include an overt intention to deceive. But the result of all this adding, subtracting, and editing is a far-from-factual account.
Flashbulb memory research shows that some of the most confident memories in our heads are sheer invention. —Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal
As we go through life we have new experiences, learn new things, and gain new knowledge that alters our understanding of ourselves and the world and is incorporated into the lens through which we view our entire past, present, and future. That lens, like any lens, shapes and distorts what we see. When looking back, the temptation to view our past through the lens of the present is, as Daniel Gilbert says, almost overwhelming.
The autobiographical self is very good at self-revision. In effect, we are constantly rewriting our histories to keep our inner autobiographies intact. —Julian Baggini, The Ego Trick
The Inner Narrator views our inner and outer worlds through the lens of our mental model, which largely determines what we pay attention to, how we interpret events, and the meaning we assign to them. In addition to weaving our world together, the Inner Narrator also keeps change at bay by reinforcing the status quo (what is normal for us). If we want to change the status quo, we have to loosen the grip on our belief in The Story of Us.
The Story of Us is a useful fiction generated, maintained, and narrated by our unconscious, which would like us to believe it’s simply reporting on reality, not shaping or creating it. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Some of us, for better or worse, develop very stable, consistent, and largely predictable machineries of self. But in others, the self machinery is more flexible and more open to unexpected turns. —Antonio Damasio, author of Self Comes to Mind
Would you prefer creating the story your Inner Narrator is telling about you or being at the effect of it?