cognitive storytelling Quotes

I'm predisposed to think that as a people, we're hardwired to understand things through the telling of stories. I think that as human beings it's part of who we are.

The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.

We all have an ongoing narrative inside our heads, the narrative that is spoken aloud if a friend asks a question. That narrative feels deeply natural to me. We also hang on to scraps of dialogue. Our memories don’t usually serve us up whole scenes complete with dialogue. So I suppose I’m saying that I like to work from what a character is likely to remember, from a more interior place.

The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.

The book is a film that takes place in the mind of the reader. That's why we go to movies and say, "Oh, the book is better."

We aren't natural statisticians. What we are is natural storytelling machines. And so what we do after we have the facts in hand is build a story to explain the facts.

The only reason we find structure in stories is because it's there naturally in human interaction, and in the way that people tell stories.

Stories about ourselves and about the world continually arise in our minds and shape our beliefs about reality.