Something unexpected happens, we brush it off, and it persists until it cannot be ignored. This is the beginning of every story. The protagonist, flawed, meets an unexpected challenge, a call to action, an adventure, where danger lies ahead. Through this journey, they are changed, they let go of the old, and embrace the new, chaos reignites for one final battle, and the ultimate sacrifice to pay is to slay the dragon. Here, we are reborn, victorious, having faced not just the outside battle, but most importantly the inner one, with oneself. We have changed, for the better.
“Story is what brain does. It is a ‘story processor’, writes the psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt, ‘not a logic processor’.”
‘Almost all perception is based on the detection of change’ says the neuroscientist Professor Sophie Scott. ‘Our perceptual systems basically don’t work unless there are changes to detect.’
Brain scans reveal that curiosity begins as a little kick in the brain’s reward system: we crave to know the answer, or what happens next in the story, in the way we might crave drugs or sex or chocolate.
These micro-narratives of cause and effect–more commonly known as ‘beliefs’–are the building blocks of our neural realm. Taken in sum, the vastly intricate web of beliefs can be seen as the brain’s ‘theory of control’. It’s this theory of control that’s often challenged at the story’s start.
In the novel Remains of the Day, we meet a proud butler named Stevens, we learn that his core world belief came from his father, also a prodigious butler. “Dignity”, which key is emotional restraint, is what Steven's world is built upon. “Just as the English landscape is beautiful because of its ‘lack of obvious drama or spectacle’, a great butler ‘will not be shaken out by external events, however surprising, alarming or vexing’.