The Storytelling Brain: Our Human Need for Narrative
You did not decide to turn today into a story. It happened anyway. Something went wrong at work and by lunchtime you had a version of it with a beginning, a villain and a moral. Someone cut you off in traffic and you invented a whole personality for them in under a second. We do this constantly, involuntarily, and mostly without noticing, which is a strange thing for a species that likes to think of itself as rational.
Stephen Jay Gould suggested we would be better named Homo narrator than Homo sapiens. The idea is not that stories are a nice cultural extra layered on top of thinking. It is that narrative is closer to the machinery itself, a way the brain compresses a chaotic stream of events into something it can hold, remember, act on and pass to someone else. It is also why we are so easy to convince, and why a good story will beat a good argument almost every time.
In this Growth Lab LIVE session, Oscar Vilarroya (physician and cognitive neuroscientist), traces the evolutionary and neurological roots of our narrative drive: where it came from, what it does for us, and what it costs us. Expect a talk that moves between neuroscience, evolution and philosophy of mind, and that will leave you slightly suspicious of the stories you tell about yourself.
What you'll learn
Why the brain defaults to narrative, and what evolutionary problem storytelling appears to have solved
What is happening neurologically when we construct a story, including during sleep and dreaming
How narrative shapes memory, identity and belief, and why the stories we accept about ourselves are so hard to revise
Why persuasion, culture and social trust run on narrative, and what that means for anyone whose work involves convincing other people of something
About the Speaker
Oscar Vilarroya is a physician and cognitive neuroscientist at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where he leads the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Unit, and a researcher at the Hospital del Mar Research Institute. His work spans the neuroscience of the maternal brain, decision making and the nature of thought, and he is the author of several books on how the mind builds its picture of reality.
Agenda:
1845h - Doors open
1900h - Talk starts
1945h - Q&A
2015h - Drinks & Networking
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