Quotes from Will Storr

Locked inside the black vault of our skulls, stuck forever in the solitude of our own hallucinated universe, story is a portal, a hallucination within the hallucination, the closest we'll ever really come to escape.

As the psychologist Professor Brian Little writes, 'All individuals are essentially scientists erecting and testing their hypotheses about the world and revising them in the light of their experience.

Researchers find our reward systems are activated most when we achieve relative rather than absolute rewards; we're designed to feel best not when we get more, but when we get more than those around us.

Researchers into bird communication have revealed the astonishing fact that not only do ravens listen to the gossip of neighbouring flocks, but they pay especially close attention when it tells of a reversal in another bird's status.

The world we experience as 'out there' is actually a reconstruction of reality that is built inside our heads. It's an act of creation by the storytelling brain.

Whenever people use a word so often that they abbreviate it, it is clearly central to their moral and emotional vocabulary.

the only thing necessary to trigger tribal behaviour in humans is the creation of two completely arbitrary groups. Leave them alone in a room and watch it all begin:

The Narcissism Epidemic, Twenge and Campbell

People believe when you're richer you'll be happier,' he said. 'When you focus on the goal you don't commit suicide. But what happens when you get there and it's not what you expect?

If men could not trust in the divine agency of the gods, and if human perfection were no longer possible within the polis, the only conclusion seemed to be that man's fate was solely a personal matter.

is a 'story processor', writes the psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt, 'not a logic processor'.

Plato believed in metaphorical realm of pure form.. Aristotle, his pupil, rejected this, insisting that the only reality is that which we consent. We live in the world of things, he thought and each of those things have unique properties that can be defined and categorized and acts predictably according to certain laws.

ready-made theories of control that are internalised by their followers, instructing them how to behave in order to achieve connection and status.

Identifying and accepting our flaws, and then changing who we are, means breaking down the very structure of our reality before rebuilding it in a new and improved form. This is not easy. It's painful and disturbing. We'll often fight with all we have to resist this kind of profound change. This is why we call those who manage it 'heroes'.

If you're prone to social perfectionism, your self-esteem will be dangerously dependent on keeping the roles and responsibilities you believe you have. You'll tend to agree with statements such as "Success means I must work harder to please others." It's not what you expect of yourself. "It's what you think other people expect

fascinating book on story structure Into the Woods

We've found this relationship between social perfectionism and suicidality in all populations where we've done the work, including among the disadvantaged and the affluent." What's not yet known is why. "Our hypothesis is that social perfectionists are much more sensitive to signals of failure in the environment.

Whilst we play life as a game, our conscious experience of it takes the form of a story.

We build an infinite variety of imaginary games. Groups of people gather together, agree what symbols they're going to use to mean "status," then strive to achieve it.

Everyone who's psychologically normal thinks they're the hero.

Everyone is flawed in their own interesting and individual ways. Our flaws help define our character.

First and foremost, health and safety,' she said. 'If a UFO lands, you must wait until it's stopped completely before approaching. Only invite the ETs to come closer if it is absolutely safe to do so. If anyone gets zapped, the first-aid kit is in the back of my tent.

most of the unexpected changes we react to will turn out to be of no importance:

We have our moment of origin damage and the belief about the world that it created. In this next step, the character needs to see powerful evidence that their belief is correct.