Each provided stories of particular episodes from their lives or an overarching narrative summarising their entire life story. For our personal narratives to be akin to an aspect of personality, they need to show a degree of meaningful stability over time similar to the stability of our character traits.
Recent research suggests this is indeed the case. For instance, Robyn Fivush at Emory University and her colleagues asked nearly adult volunteers to tell their life stories in an interview. They caught up with them again four years later, at which point they invited them to tell their life stories once again. This notion that our life stories reflect a stable and important aspect of our personalities may have important consequences.
A few years ago, Jonathan Adler at the Franklin W Olin College of Engineering and his collaborators, including Iliane Houle at University of Quebec at Montreal, reviewed 30 previous investigations into life stories and found that several aspects are linked to wellbeing. People who tell more positive stories and stories with more elements of redemption for example, that time that you lost your job, but ended up switching career paths into something you enjoy much more tend to enjoy greater wellbeing, at least based on research with Western samples, in terms of more life satisfaction and better mental health.
So do people whose stories express a greater sense of being a protagonist in the events of their life and having more meaningful communion with others. For example, the episodes they remember frequently involve loved ones and close friends, such as that hilarious hen night in Brighton, or shared hobbies, like the time they and their cousin went to cooking classes together.
Does this mean that if you can revise your life story, such as by considering the positives that came out of negative experiences, you might be able to develop a more robust and healthy personality? The idea is not entirely far-fetched. As philosophers have long argued, there is a sense in which we construct our own realities. The world is what we make of it. Usually this liberating perspective is applied by psychotherapists to help people deal with specific fears and anxieties.
Any Hollywood writer will tell you that attention is a scarce resource. Scientists liken attention to a spotlight. We are only able to shine it on a narrow area. If that area seems less interesting than some other area, our attention wanders. This is why you can drive on the freeway and talk on the phone or listen to music at the same time.
Your attentional spotlight is dim so you can absorb multiple informational streams. You can do this until the car in front of you jams on its brakes and your attentional spotlight illuminates fully to help you avoid an accident. What internal resources will he draw upon to be strong and support his dying son?
We attend to this story because we intuitively understand that we, too, may have to face difficult tasks and we need to learn how to develop our own deep resolve. In the brain, maintaining attention produces signs of arousal: the heart and breathing speed up, stress hormones are released, and our focus is high.
Transportation is an amazing neural feat. We watch a flickering image that we know is fictional, but evolutionarily old parts of our brain simulate the emotions we intuit James Bond must be feeling. And we begin to feel those emotions, too. Emotional simulation is the foundation for empathy and is particularly powerful for social creatures like humans because it allows us to rapidly forecast if people around us are angry or kind, dangerous or safe, friend or foe.
Such a neural mechanism keeps us safe but also allows us to rapidly form relationships with a wider set of members of our species than any other animal does.
The ability to quickly form relationships allows humans to engage in the kinds of large-scale cooperation that builds massive bridges and sends humans into space. We have identified oxytocin as the neurochemical responsible for empathy and narrative transportation. My lab pioneered the behavioral study of oxytocin and has proven that when the brain synthesizes oxytocin, people are more trustworthy, generous, charitable, and compassionate.
What we know is that oxytocin makes us more sensitive to social cues around us. In many situations, social cues motivate us to engage to help others, particularly if the other person seems to need our help.
This is surprising since this payment is to compensate them for an hour of their time and two needle sticks in their arms to obtain blood from which we measure chemical changes that come from their brains.
We ran another experiment that featured Ben and his father at the zoo to find out why. Stories are entertaining. But they are also an affirmation of identity and belonging. Every culture has a storytelling tradition. Just like small groups of friends, countries define themselves with stories: sagas, folktales, and heroic epics that celebrate the national character.
Even religious rituals are stories, insofar as they are often symbolic reenactments of something that has happened in the past. As soon as infants are able to focus on a sequence of pictures, they show a keen interest in storybooks. They can understand and appreciate a story before they have acquired language. Adults, too, find stories more compelling than facts. This aspect of human psychology has been exploited mercilessly by politicians for millennia. A good story is always more persuasive than a well-constructed argument backed up by evidence.
This is why populists and dictators favor simple narratives over nuanced discussion. During crises, people are reassured when commentators tease explanatory narratives out of breaking news. The ease with which the attention of infants can be captured by stories and the universal popularity of storytelling demonstrate something very fundamental about the human brain and how it works. Stories help us to organize experience.
The world is more navigable if we can recognize patterns of cause and effect. When we encounter a monster in a fairy tale, we know that the monster must be slayed so that the prince and the princess can live happily ever after.
Narrative templates, what we think of as familiar plots, are instructive. They identify obstacles and show us how we might overcome them. Our instinctive appreciation of stories and storytelling was probably established very early in our evolutionary history.
This was a large, tree-dwelling creature that weighed approximately ninety pounds and moved through its habitat slowly, by clambering.
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