we have a brain that’s expert at constructing ‘elaborate theories and explanations about what is happening in the world and why,’ he’s talking principally about the neocortex. These theories and explanations often take the form of stories.

it’s believed the brain processes around 11 million bits of information at any given moment, but makes us consciously aware of no more than forty.

Turning the confusing and random into a comprehensible story is an essential function of the storytelling brain.

Orwell was even right when he wrote about writing. ‘A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image,’ he suggested, in 1946, before warning against the use of that ‘huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.’

Researchers recently tested this idea that clichéd metaphors become ‘worn-out’ by overuse. They

The bottlenecks reminded me of muzzles, as if they were small cannons with their barrels pointing in all directions.’ Knausgaard’s choice of language adds to the general deathly, angry aura of the passage by flicking unexpectedly at the reader’s models of guns.

works because it activates extra neural models that give the language additional meaning and sensation. We feel the heft and strain of the shouldering, we touch the abrasiveness of the day.

Brain scans illustrate the second, more powerful, use of metaphor. When participants in one study read the words ‘he had a rough day’, their neural regions involved in feeling textures became more activated, compared

Metaphor (and its close sibling, the simile) tends to work on the page in one of two ways. Take this example, from Michael Cunningham’s A Home at the End of the World: ‘She washed old plastic bags and hung them on the line to dry, a string of thrifty tame jellyfish floating in the sun.’ This metaphor works principally by opening an information gap.