My Favorite Fictional Character?
To help prepare for some planned writing, I read The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr. I highly recommend it to anyone who tells or wants to tell stories, no matter the medium.
One of the biggest lessons in the book for me is that the reality we experience as humans is not at all the objective tape-recording I’ve always imagined it to be. Instead, it’s a highly subjective narrative construct, creatively assembled by each of our brains, in which we are each the hero of our story. Regardless of cultural or societal differences, each of our brains does this, and all our reality-stories are incredibly similar. This is why every human culture is based upon narratives, and these narratives have massive parallels despite distances in time and space from each other.
The reasons why aren’t exactly clear to me, but I suppose this is a shared biological trait that helps humans to make sense of the huge amount of sensory data we gather, and more importantly to communicate abstract ideas to each other using a common base reality.
The cold hard scientific fact that the world I’ve witnessed all my life, including me as part of it, is different from what exists in actuality, has three major implications. The bummer one is that I am not the heroic character I see myself to be. On the brighter side, the uplifting one is that some others are probably not the arch villains I see them to be; also, my shortcomings and flaws are probably not as glaring or fatal to me as they seem. My brain has exaggerated these things to “fit” the story it has invented.
Another uplifting fact that gives me hope is that people not only love a good story, they need a good story universally. As an amateur storyteller this means I have an audience wherever I go!
Here endeth the lesson on our “fake” realities.
Bike Newbie 