The Narrative Brain Review: The Sense in a StoryNarratives bring order to the world and entice us with emotional rewards. They also help people bond and recover after times of crisis. By Matthew Hutson If humans were fish, our water would be narratives. We never experience reality unmediated. Light and sound filter through our senses and we impose meaning and order, building our familiar perceptual world of trees, people and buildings. At a higher level, we string events together into stories, ranging from brief encounters to autobiographical arcs to historical epochs and beyond. We use narratives to understand the causal influences in our lives; these unseen forces, manufactured by our minds, become what we know of reality. Grab a Copy The Narrative Brain: The Stories Our Neurons Tell By Fritz Alwin Breithaupt Yale University Press 296 pages We may earn a commission when you buy products through the links on our site. Buy Book In The Narrative Brain, Fritz Breithaupt attempts to deconstruct these processes and reveal how they work, going between high abstraction and specific cases. Real-world stories include Elizabeth Holmess Theranos fraud, the attacks of 9/11, Covid-19 and the murder of the authors father; made-up ones include Game of Thrones and The Giving Tree.The first question is what defines a narrative. An important aspect is the segmentation of time. Every story has a beginning and end. Exactly how the human brain segments time is murky, and different people do it differently. Some segmentation cues are concrete; walking through a doorway, as researchers have shown, mutes our memory of what happened immediately before.Mr. Breithaupt, a professor of Germanic studies and cognitive science at Indiana University, draws on Aristotle and the 19th-century German writer Gustav Freytag to argue that, in a narrative, a protagonist typically turns from active to passive or vice versa, as when a worker in a dead-end job decides to rebel. Mr. Breithaupt ignores Kurt Vonneguts delineation of other story shapes, like man in hole, where a characters prospects turn from good to bad to good. Elsewhere, the author defines narratives as strings of events, and events as things that bring about important, lasting, and irreversible changes that were not clearly recognizable in advance.Copyright 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8VideosMost Popular NewsMost PopularOPINIONFurther ReadingAdvertisement