El cerebro narrativo

Human beings live surrounded by stories that condition our way of understanding the world and understanding each other. These stories can be real or fictional, our own or someone else's, happy or heartbreaking, but they never go unnoticed: our brain interprets, records and uses them. Through narratives we see and hear, we communicate, we learn from the environment and we give shape to every stimulus that reaches us; In short, we live through narratives. In this brilliant essay, Professor of Cognitive Sciences Fritz Breithaupt sheds light on the sophisticated neural mechanisms that make the brain interpret the world through the stories it receives and the stories it makes up. Breithaupt talks to us about literature, sociology and our daily lives; he unravels the particularities of those narratives that reside in us almost instinctively, like those of the Brothers Grimm; and explains how societies need collective stories to help them overcome their traumas, as happened after 9/11 or as, he points out, is happening and will happen after the coronavirus pandemic. The Narrative Brain is a rigorous and didactic work that balances deep scientific research with examples drawn from literature, film, or everyday life. It is, in short, a fascinating inquiry into the way narratives make us who we are.