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The stories we use

Episode 2 of 4

Random things happen to us all the time, yet we can't resist finding a narrative in the chaos. This week, Michael Blastland reveals the storyteller lurking inside all of us.

Cast an objective eye back over our lives, and, if we are brutally honest, it's a whole set of random events that brought us to where we are today. Yet if you ask someone, or even yourself, about that life we get a coherent story of cause and effect - the holiday that led to a career as a ski instructor, the missed train that got you talking to your future spouse or the serendipitous meeting outside a pub that kick started your career as a radio journalist.

We need to tell stories to survive, the argument goes, to make sense of the terrifying confusion that is our existence. So how deeply is this embedded in our psychology - can we design experiments to explore and explain our ability to make sense out of chaos?

In this week's Human Zoo, Michael Blastland delves into our storytelling brains - the story of our stories.

Producer: Toby Murcott
A Pier production for 大象传媒 Radio 4.

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28 minutes

Last on

Mon 2 Jun 2014 23:00

Weekly experiment

The psychologists at Warwick Business School have developed some online experiments that you can do for yourself.

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  • Tue 21 Jan 2014 15:30
  • Mon 2 Jun 2014 23:00

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