Quotes from Will Storr

Whenever and whatever happened to alter the boy's view of the world so radically, from the moment that it happened, Mackay's story becomes one of subservience to the contrary will within him that he calls God.

We are incapable: ever since Eve's crime, we've been born this way - outlaw failures, fucking and sinning with callous abandon as the planet we've been given withers around us.

Story is what brain does. It is a 'story processor', writes the psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt, 'not a logic processor'. Story emerges from human minds as naturally as breath emerges from between human lips. You don't have to be a genius to master it. You're already doing it. Becoming better at telling stories is simply a matter of peering inwards, at the mind itself, and asking how it does it.

In a major study, researchers in Queensland collated the results of 2,748 papers and concluded the average variation across all human traits and diseases is caused by 49 per cent genetic factors and 51 per cent environmental factors.

We typically have a bias that tells us we are less susceptible to bias than everyone else.

I know that I am not right about everything, and yet I am simultaneously convinced that I am. I believe these two things completely, and yet they are in catastrophic logical opposition to each other.

Intelligence is no protection against strange beliefs.

Exposure to a mixed body of evidence made both sides even more convinced of the fundamental soundness of their original beliefs.' Confirmation bias is profoundly human and it is appalling. When new information leads to an increase in ignorance, it is the opposite of learning, the death of wisdom.

The gift of story is wisdom

We build our understanding of the emotional world through the myths and legends of our culture. We are all, in part, made of fairy tales.

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.

we go through our social lives convinced that everything we are saying, doing and feeling is being closely examined by those around us even though, in reality, they are all preoccupied with themselves, equally convinced the spotlight is on them.

I was aware and increasingly suspicious of the separation between the things i felt and the voice that interpreted those feelings. We really are, as people sometimes glibly say, a mystery to ourselves. we really are

But once more, here I am - confronted with the counter-intuitive notion that intelligence is no protection against strange beliefs.

When we behave badly, it is usually because we were put in an unhappy situation. Circumstance has conspired against us. Really, I had no choice. When others do wrong, it is because of their character flaws.

for now though our investigation into how future enters and then changes us must return to the idea of the self as a storyteller. In doing so we will realize just how porous the boundary is really is between the stories that surround us and the story that is us.

Haven't we all done this? Hardened a particular position, not as a response to superior information, but because of anger?

The only thing we'll ever really know are those electrical pulses that are sent up by our senses.

the Ann Arbor, Michigan, School Board, near where I live, had a debate as to whether the primary mission of their schools was imparting knowledge or raising self-esteem. Self-esteem won.

In the memorable words of Professor Roy Baumeister, 'Life is change that yearns for stability

and a motto in a frame: sometimes i feel like giving up but then i remember of a lot of motherfuckers to prove wrong

We are betrayed by our maps of salience. They plot our narratives, identify our enemies and then coat them in distorting layer of loathing and dread. We feel that hunch - withdraw - and then conduct a post factum search for evidence that justifies it. We are motivated to fight our foes because we are emotional about them, but emotion is the territorial scent-mark of irrationality.

If tribal thinking is original sin, then story is prayer. At its best, it reminds us that, beneath our many differences, we remain beasts of one species.