The Self Delusion

But, I wondered, if everyone remembered everything, would our differences get shaved away? What would happen to our sense of self? It seemed to me that a perfect memory couldn’t be a narrative any more than unedited security-cam footage could be a feature film.

McAdams makes an important point about identity: It is a story you tell about yourself to make sense out of what has happened in the past and the kind of person you are now. From this perspective, it is not essential that the story be true.

We experience our day-to-day lives in story mode. The brain creates a world for us to live in and populates it with allies and villains. It turns the chaos and bleakness of reality into a simple, hopeful tale, and at the centre it places its star – wonderful, precious me – who it sets on a series of goals that become the plots of our lives. Story i

This ability to construct narrative is more than just a skill we’ve managed to master, it’s become our very means of interpreting reality. Similar to our instinct for learning language, researchers have observed an almost universal inclination in children for absorbing and creating narrative. And our personal identities can be seen as the most intr

personal identity to exist, there has to be a personalized prior history, a thread of autobiographical memories, a remembered past and a projected future.