‘instead of telling us a thing was “terrible”, describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description.’

Precise and specific description makes for precise and specific models.

Modern filmmakers mimic saccadic behaviour when editing. Psychologists examining the so-called ‘Hollywood style’ find the camera makes ‘match action cuts’ to new salient details just as a saccade might, and is drawn to similar events, such as bodily movement.

Dreams feel real because they’re made of the same hallucinated neural models we live inside when awake.

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.

Abrams has described his controlling theory of storytelling as consisting of the opening of ‘mystery boxes’. Mystery, he’s said, ‘is the catalyst for imagination . . . what are stories but mystery boxes?’

his paper ‘The Psychology of Curiosity’, Loewenstein breaks down four ways of involuntarily inducing curiosity in humans: (1) the ‘posing of a question or presentation of a puzzle’; (2) ‘exposure to a sequence of events with an anticipated but unknown resolution’; (3) ‘the violation of expectations that triggers a search for an explanation’; (4)

and also when entirely convinced they do. The place of maximum curiosity – the zone in which storytellers play – is when people think they have some idea but aren’t quite sure.

The more context we learn about a mystery, the more anxious we become to solve it. As the stories reveal more of themselves, we increasingly want to know, Where is Spot? Who is ‘Bunny’ and how did he die and how is the narrator implicated in his death?