#narrative-memory

#narrative-memory

"We're talking about political leaders who were moved by an enormous sense of responsibility and fear for the world."

I wanted to write a book about how the smartphone changed the world, but the more I researched, the clearer it became that phones were actually the latest step in this evolution of storytelling technology that stretches all the way back to prehistoric times.

Attention is the brain's filtering mechanism; what passes through that filter is what gets encoded. What gets encoded becomes memory. And memory is the raw material of identity. So in the architecture of your identity, attention is the doorway.

The neural networks that process written and oral language are deeply intertwined and largely overlap when reading print books or listening to audiobooks. There isn't much of a difference between the brain network for reading and the brain network for language comprehension. The brain area we call the 'letter box,' which processes print, is not as engaged when you listen, but it has been shown that when some people listen to words, they visualize them, so the letter box gets activated as well.

We've all been there. Someone starts telling a story, and within seconds, your mind starts wandering. Maybe you pull out your phone, suddenly remember an urgent email, or find yourself mentally reorganizing your weekend plans. The storyteller doesn't notice. They keep going, completely unaware that they've lost their audience. After interviewing over 200 people for various articles, I've noticed patterns in how people communicate their experiences. Some captivate you from the first word, while others lose you before they've even gotten to the point.

The Stasi, the secret police, were legendary for their data files. Their work was based on instilling fear, and they induced stunningly amazing numbers of East Germans into informing on their neighbors. Something along the lines of 1 in 6 East Germans were informants, whether out of fear or out of approval of what the East German government was doing.

Psychologists who study narrative identity have found that elderly individuals often repeat specific stories as a way of preserving and transmitting their core identity and values. These aren't random tales that bubble up from failing memory. They're carefully curated selections from a lifetime of experiences, chosen unconsciously for their significance.

Hyperphantasia is a cognitive trait characterised by an abundance of vivid mental imagery. In an area of developing science (the term was only coined a decade ago), those who identify with this experience have an imagination of lifelike quality and can create detailed images and scenarios in their minds. It can also extend to multiple senses.

I babysat for a weird family during my early adulthood. They had two kids, 6-ish and 2-ish. They were adamantly anti-screen for the kids, which isn't weird. But this was a relatively wealthy family, both parents were college professors, and most of the kids' toys were like Tupperware bowls full of rocks, things they'd found outside, homemade fabric dolls, etc. Apparently, the dad had grown up in communist Russia and didn't think that kids needed much to become resilient.

Neuroscientists have a name for the brain network that fires up when you're not focused on an external task: the default mode network, or DMN. It's the constellation of regions - the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and angular gyrus among them - that hums to life when you daydream, reflect on yourself, or think about other people's mental states.

I remember the moment this photo was taken: five years ago, on my partner Claire's birthday, in a National Trust for Scotland garden six miles east of Edinburgh. We were standing on a wooden deck, an ideal spot for pond-dipping with the kids and a lesser-known viewing platform for trainspotters. This is where my autistic son, then six, loved (and still loves) to jump in tandem with the ScotRail trains toggling back and forth in the middle distance.

Systematic developmental and neuro-phenomenological research is needed to understand childhood consciousness. Anyone who has spent time with young children knows they have a way of saying things that make you pause and reconsider what you thought you understood. Many report non-ordinary experiences-moments of "just knowing," feeling outside their bodies, or sensing a deep unity with the world around them. These accounts suggest a form of consciousness that is relational, pre-linguistic, and not yet organized around a solid, separate self.

You know that ache you get when you stumble across evidence of your past self being genuinely, effortlessly happy? It's not that you want to go back. Not really. I think what kills you is the proof staring back at you - proof that you were once capable of feeling that alive, that connected, that certain about where you belonged in the world.

Did someone with spatial-sequence synaesthesia design the calendar app on mobile phones? Because that's how time and dates look in my brain. If you say a date to me, that day appears in a grid diagram in my head, and it shows if that box is already imprinted with a holiday, event or someone's birthday. Public holidays and special events like Christmas and Easter are already imprinted for the year, and the diagram goes backwards to about 100,000BC

In the "Arabian Nights" ( The Thousand and One Nights) story collection, a young Persian queen named Scheherazade prevents the king's plans to execute her by telling a succession of stories so enthralling that the king doesn't want to miss the endings. In "The Crow and the Pitcher," one of Aesop's fables, a thirsty crow can't reach the water in a tall jug, so it drops pebbles into the jug until the water rises to its beak.