Neuroscience and Narrative

Abstract

The narrative template is the form into which consciousness populates its memories and assembles a coherent self. A specific brain circuit exists to create and comprehend story. This circuit generates simulations or small stories, mostly about the important people in our lives and about ourselves. A salience network helps us switch between story brain and central-executive function or task mode, in which we get things done. Memory is not stored accurately but more as a skeletal framework with gaps to which we add generic detail upon recall. At each recall, the memory changes in accordance with the demands of the situation in which we find ourselves and is re-stored in that modification. A simple narrative structure characterizes the activity of the default mode in which characters interact sequentially with beliefs and intents (theory of mind) to produce outcomes that are more or less desirable to us. People are fundamentally narrative, whether or not they are conscious of the stories they generate. Memory is fundamentally flawed with gaps that are filled at recall to fit the needs of the situation for which our story is being told. Life may be more fiction than we have previously realized. Our goal is a conceptual review of narrative concepts in relation to neuroscience and neuroscience in relation to narrative concepts.