The Narrating Mind

As anyone who’s tried to hush her inner storyteller will confess, the narrating mind cannot be stopped. Understanding how the storyteller spins facts into fables is the key to telling a new tale.

Once upon a time

On my fortieth birthday, my brother called. Not to wish me a happy birthday, but to let me know that Mom had been found wandering the supermarket crying. She could not remember how to walk the two blocks back to her house. Although doctors could still not officially diagnose her with Alzheimer’s, we would need to step up her care.

I spent the rest of that week telling myself stories—and not the Hollywood blockbuster kind. Will I be able to deal with this? Mom is going to suffer terribly. The sibs are going to argue over how to raise the money for her care. It’s going to get ugly before it gets resolved. These were painful stories. Each time I ran one of them through my head, they wound my normally competent and resourceful self tighter and tighter around a core of fear. Peace felt beyond my reach.

In the years since then, I’ve learned a lot about stories—and I’ve had a taste of how to get free from the stressful, painful ones. Researching everything I could find on stories, with experts varying from anthropologists to neurobiologists to cognitive psychologists, I’ve found that stories can both heal and torture. They can help us make sense of our experiences, or they can warp our perceptions in such a way that we keep recycling painful thoughts over and over.

Dan MacAdams, author of The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self,” suggests that stories and storytelling are the nexus of self and society, the medium through which we create our identity as adults. They are not so much based in reality as they are based in our beliefs of who we are and who we can be. And even more sobering, our stories sift and shape our experiences in such a way that the ones we tell most often really do come true.

Compelled to tell

We are born ready to tell stories. In his research with infants in the 1980s, cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner showed that by their first birthday, babies have developed the ability to understand that mommy and others have intentions, too. What they want to have happen, and what baby wants, might not be the same things. By age four, the baby-turned-child has developed what psychologists call “theory of mind,” the ability to know that everyone has their own private thoughts. From that point on, the child starts guessing what others’ thoughts are and makes up stories to entertain the possibilities.  

And so we guess, and so we tell. In fact, we tell a lot. A 1997 study by anthropologist and evolutionary biologist Robin Dunbar, then at the University of Liverpool in England, recorded dialogue in public places and found that both men and women, regardless of age, are telling stories an average of 65% of the time. But what are we telling? Facts? Fiction? Fables? Just how do our brains turn a constant stream of sensory impressions into stories?

Just the facts, please

To understand what’s happening inside the narrating mind, we turn to an unusual population, split-brain patients. Neurobiologist Michael Gazzaniga, in his forthcoming book Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique (due out fall 2008), studies patients who have had their brains’ left and right hemispheres surgically separated. He explains that only one side of the brain is involved in storytelling. “The left hemisphere,” says Gazzaniga, “is a chatty know-it-all, working behind the scenes to piece together a stream of sensory impressions into something that makes sense. The right brain is focused on the big picture, and does not have the same compulsion to figure out the ‘why’ behind events.”

In addition to pinpointing the left brain as the storyteller, Gazzaniga and his colleagues found that when the left brain didn’t know something, it went ahead and filled in the gaps. “The left brain recognizes patterns and pieces data together in ways that fit a pattern,” notes Gazzaniga.

Gazzaniga describes one experiment in which a split-brain patient was shown two pictures. The left brain saw a chicken claw, and the right brain saw a snow scene. Next the patient was asked to select a picture of an item using his left hand (controlled by the right side of the brain). The patient selected a shovel. When asked why, the verbal left brain launched into a detailed explanation of how a chicken claw is part of a chicken, and that a shovel is needed to clean out a chicken coop.

Besides making zero reference to the snow scene, the patient’s left brain was never at a loss as to “why” it had done something. It never questioned its chicken-coop story. “The left brain,” comments Gazzaniga in his book, “observing the left hand’s response without the knowledge of why it has picked that item, has to explain it. It will not say, ‘I don’t know’ ” [emphasis in original]. Gazzaniga’s book quotes numerous studies, all with the same results. When purposefully tricked or deprived of vital information, the left brain invented whatever it needed to make the story stick.

La la land

No wonder Gazzaniga calls the left hemisphere the “seat of consciousness.” Yet, it’s a bit worrisome how much the left brain messes with the facts, remembering some things, forgetting others, deciding what did and didn’t happen. If the left brain is doing all the piecing together, what’s the right brain doing? Feeling pretty darn good seems to be the answer. Described as the “seat of compassion,” the right brain helps us feel connected to everything around us. When right brain activity increases, personal boundaries disappear and feelings of compassion, empathy and joy have been known to increase.

New understanding of the right brain’s connection to compassion comes from Harvard neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor. My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey (Viking Press, 2008) is Bolte Taylor’s autobiographical account of a stroke that completely shut down her left brain. Bolte Taylor’s depiction of what it’s like to hang out in the right side of the brain has startled lay people and physicians alike.

In her account, Bolte Taylor describes the euphoria she experienced when she finally got rid of her left-brained chatter. “I lost 37 years of baggage,” she laughs, “who wouldn’t be happy?” Sitting in what she affectionately calls the “La la land” of the right brain, her mind was perfectly silent. No judgment. No worries. No compulsion to figure out what was happening, why it was happening, or what it all meant. “I felt like a genie liberated from its bottle,” she wrote in her book. “The energy of my spirit seemed to flow like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria.”

It was so enjoyable to silence the storyteller that Bolte Taylor’s greatest fear of recovering was that she might lose her newfound peace. “My stroke of insight,” Bolte Taylor writes in her book, “is that at the core of my right hemisphere consciousness is a character that is completely connected to my feeling of deep inner peace. It is completely connected to the expression of peace, love, joy, and compassion in the world.”

Why not just stay there? What motivated Bolte Taylor to commit to the long, painful recovery process? It was the desire to share with others her experience of right-brained bliss. “I had to regain my ability to use my left brain in order to share my experience with others,” Bolte Taylor explains. “To be a functional human being, we need to be able to call upon the skills of both hemispheres. Without the left brain, we are not able to connect to a shared external reality.”

As Bolte Taylor slowly regained left-brained functioning, she was able to integrate the two hemispheres, allowing right-brained joy to mix with left-brained explanations. In fact, her means of keeping the left brain from dominating her experience was profoundly simple. She writes, “Once you understand that your narrating mind is simply a small group of cells in your left hemisphere, and not all of who you are, you can choose to either run that circuitry or not. When I encountered a left brain thought pattern and noticed that running that thought pattern caused me pain, I chose not to run it. To pay attention to which thoughts cause you pain is the first step.”

Letting go

After reading Bolte Taylor’s account, I reflected on the stories I had told myself and others around my mother. I realized that at first I had used my narrating mind to keep my pain ever present. I had rehearsed the possibility of what might happen, or what shouldn’t have happened, again and again, and each time it was like scratching a bug bite. Those thoughts inflamed other thoughts, and pretty soon I couldn’t stop myself from scratching. With this tricky method, a single bite—a single story—could keep me feeling toxic for a long time.

But I wasn’t interested in how long I could keep my painful stories alive. I was more interested in how quickly I could drop them. What I needed to find out was how not to scratch when a painful thought arose. “You question the thought” was the answer from Kathryn Dixon, Director of Clarity Coaching Institute and long-term veteran in helping clients question their thinking. “You don’t have to question them all, just the painful, stressful ones.”

Seated across from Kathryn, I agreed to question my thoughts, but I was sure that my pain wasn’t going anywhere. After all, my mother’s physical condition was real enough. I wasn’t making it up. How would questioning my thoughts help? “An opening to peace comes when we question our stories and allow for the possibility that there’s more to this world than what we’ve been aware of up to this point,” said Kathryn. “It’s not the actual events that cause the emotional pain, but what we decide they mean about us and the world we live in—and how we treat ourselves and others as a result.”

In working with Kathryn, I came to realize that I had decided quite a few things that had caused me emotional pain. I had decided that my mother’s physical condition meant I would be burdened and my resources stretched. I had decided that my mom would suffer and that her ability to enjoy the rest of her life would be diminished. And I had decided that my siblings would argue and make my life miserable. As I told her my stories, Kathryn would ask, “Can you really know that that’s true?”  

We questioned each thought. Was I sure it was true? How did I react when I believed it?  How did I treat my mother? How did I feel around my siblings? How was my stress level? Through looking at each thought, I realized that I had made my mother an invalid before her time. I had mentally robbed her of her remaining abilities more than her condition had. I had used my mother to reinforce an old story about money—the story that I would never have enough and that life would rob me of anything I would be able to save. These thoughts, these stories, were keeping my pain alive. They were scratching my bite. And when asked if I could know for sure they were true, I realized that my left brain could have been filling in gaps, inventing futures, judging God, judging myself, judging my siblings.

Questioning the left brain

What happened when I questioned my stories? I relaxed. Just a bit. Just enough to allow that life possibly included more than I could ever sort out. Maybe I’m creating a chicken coop out of a snow scene, I thought. Let’s go have a look. When I looked, I discovered I’d been ignoring plenty of things and not realizing it.

I was telling myself a pretty painful story about money. What about all the times in my life when I had had enough money? In fact, when had I actually ever not had enough? I had always paid my bills, eaten well, and had money left over to enjoy a weekend or two away. It seemed that the story wasn’t as true as I had thought. Then there was the story about my siblings. What about all the times that my siblings had helped and had been able to agree? In fact, weren’t those times just as easy to find, once I started looking for them, as the times that we’d argued? 

Happily ever after

Not all my stories are painful. I tell happy, productive stories, too. But catching and questioning the painful ones has proved invaluable to me. When I start to replay a scene in which I’ve decided that someone should not have done what they did, or that something should not have happened, I ask myself whether I can know for sure that my story is true.

Some stories are stickier than others. Some loosen quickly and float away. What’s amazing is that every time a painful story is revealed as, well, just a story, I feel the same euphoria Jill Bolte Taylor described. Freed for a moment from my left brain’s need to be right all the time and have all the answers, I feel joyful, compassionate, peaceful bliss.

Now I go looking for snow scenes. Funny thing is, whether I find snow or not, I always find there’s more to my life experience than what I first believed. These realizations may not be happily ever after, but they do bring a moment of peace, and as I find it harder and harder to believe some of my own stories, those moments are lasting longer. I’ll take that for now.