Michelle: Most people think the key to a good life is being right. What if the secret to understanding yourself—and every great story ever told—is admitting just how wrong you are about everything? Mark: Wow, okay. That's a bold way to start. So, my entire sense of self is built on a lie? Thanks, Michelle, I feel great already. Michelle: (Laughs) It’s a provocative idea, but it’s at the very heart of the book we’re diving into today: The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr. Mark: Right, and Storr isn't your typical writing guru sitting in an ivory tower. This is a guy who's an award-winning investigative journalist. He spent years reporting on human rights from some of the most intense places on Earth. That real-world, gritty understanding of human nature just bleeds through every page. Michelle: It absolutely does. He’s not just talking about theory; he’s talking about how the human mind actually operates under pressure. And it all starts with a fundamental, and frankly shocking, misunderstanding of our own brains.

Mark: Okay, so where does he begin? How does he prove we're all so wrong about reality? Michelle: He argues that the brain isn't a logic processor, it's a 'story processor.' It’s not a window onto reality; it’s a model-maker. It takes the messy, chaotic, infinite data of the world and builds a simplified, coherent narrative to help us navigate it. Mark: A model? You mean like just having a point of view? Michelle: It's much more extreme than that. Storr, drawing on neuroscientists, calls it a 'controlled hallucination.' Our experience of the world isn't the world itself, but a reconstruction of it happening inside our heads. Mark: A controlled hallucination. That sounds a bit much. I mean, I’m looking at this microphone right now. It feels pretty real. Michelle: It does, because the model is incredibly convincing. But Storr shares this chilling medical case about a patient named Lizzy. She had a series of strokes that completely destroyed her occipital lobes, the parts of the brain that process vision. She was rendered totally and permanently blind. Mark: Oh, that's awful. Michelle: Here’s the incredible part. When her doctor, Todd Feinberg, came to see her, he asked if she was having any trouble with her vision. Lizzy said no. She described seeing friends and family in the room. She even described the clothes the doctor was wearing—which were completely wrong. Her brain hadn't processed the blindness yet, so it just kept on projecting its old model of the world. She was living inside a complete visual hallucination and had no idea. Mark: Whoa. That is genuinely terrifying. So her brain was just… making it all up to protect her from the chaos of that sudden change? Michelle: Exactly. It prioritizes a coherent story over raw, factual data. It desperately needs the world to make sense. And the primary way it does that is by simplifying reality into cause and effect. As the screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna famously said, you want all your scenes to have a "because" between them, not an "and then." Our brain does that automatically with life. This happened because of that. Mark: So it’s like our brain is a movie director, constantly editing reality to make a coherent film starring 'Me: The Hero'? It cuts out the boring bits, ignores data that doesn't fit the plot, and makes sure I always look like I know what I'm doing. Michelle: That is the perfect analogy. The brain is the ultimate biased narrator. And this heroic, but fundamentally flawed, model of reality is the engine for everything that follows, both in our lives and in the stories we love. It leads directly to what Storr calls the 'Sacred Flaw.'

Mark: Okay, I’m with you. Our brains are telling us a flawed story. So how does that connect to writing a great novel or a screenplay? Michelle: Well, if our brains build a flawed, biased model of reality, it means every single one of us is operating based on a fundamental error, a mistaken belief about how the world works. Storr argues that this is a character’s 'Sacred Flaw.' Mark: A 'Sacred Flaw.' What makes it 'sacred'? Is it just a weakness, like being bad at math? Michelle: It’s much deeper than that. It’s a flaw that the character has elevated to a virtue. It’s the broken piece of their belief system that they've built their entire identity around. They hold it sacred. And Storr’s most powerful example of this is the butler, James Stevens, from Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day. Mark: Oh, I love that book. And the movie. Heartbreaking. Michelle: Utterly. Stevens’s sacred flaw is his belief that 'dignity,' achieved through absolute emotional restraint, is the highest virtue a man can aspire to. This is the core of his world model. He learned it from his father, another butler, who he saw as a man of 'prodigious talent.' Mark: Right, and he dedicates his entire life to this ideal. Michelle: To a devastating degree. The plot of the novel is essentially a series of events that relentlessly test this sacred flaw. The most painful example is when his father is upstairs, dying from a stroke, while Stevens is downstairs, managing a crucial international conference for his employer, Lord Darlington. He chooses his duty over his father. Mark: I remember that scene. He barely sheds a tear. He convinces himself it's a moment of professional triumph. Michelle: Exactly. He tells himself his father would have wanted it that way. He rationalizes his lack of emotion as the ultimate expression of his sacred virtue. But in reality, this flaw costs him everything—a relationship with his father, and most tragically, a chance at love with the housekeeper, Miss Kenton. He can't express his feelings for her, and she eventually leaves to marry someone else. Mark: It’s what Salman Rushdie said about him, that he was 'destroyed by the ideas upon which he has built his life.' So the entire plot is just the world finding new and more painful ways to poke at that one single flaw? Michelle: Precisely. The plot emerges from the flaw. Storr says a story begins with an 'ignition point'—an event that strikes at the character's flaw and forces them to react in a way that kicks off the plot. For Stevens, it’s his new, more casual American boss who likes to banter. This simple change threatens Stevens's entire model of a dignified, formal world, and it sends him on the road trip to find Miss Kenton, forcing him to confront his past. Mark: This is fascinating for writers, but what does the 'Sacred Flaw' idea mean for the rest of us in our own lives? Should we be on a quest to find our own sacred flaw? Michelle: Storr would argue absolutely. He believes self-awareness is fundamentally about interrogating the flawed model your brain has built. It’s about asking: what is the mistaken belief I’ve made sacred, and what is it costing me? Mark: That’s a heavy question. Okay, so our brains are flawed story machines, and that creates flawed characters whose sacred flaws generate the plot. But that still doesn't explain why we care so much. Why do I get so emotionally invested in what happens to a fictional butler, or a chemistry teacher who starts cooking meth? Michelle: Ah, for that, Storr zooms the camera all the way out. The answer, he says, lies not in the individual, but in the tribe. It’s about story as an ancient, evolutionary technology.

Mark: Ancient tribal technology? What does that even mean? Michelle: For tens of thousands of years, humans lived in small, cooperative tribes of about 150 people. Survival depended on everyone working together. But humans are also selfish. So how did they enforce cooperation without police, laws, or courts? Mark: I have no idea. Michelle: Storr argues they used stories. Or, to put it more bluntly, high-level gossip. Mark: (Laughs) Wait, so you’re telling me that Game of Thrones is just really, really fancy gossip? Michelle: In a way, yes! Stories are the original social monitoring system. They are how we track who is behaving in ways that benefit the tribe and who isn't. Who is a hero—someone who is selfless and sacrifices for the group? And who is a villain—someone who is selfish and acts as a defector? Our brains are exquisitely tuned to this dynamic. Mark: So when we watch a movie, we’re subconsciously running a tribal diagnostic? 'Is this person an asset or a threat?' Michelle: Exactly. And it triggers deep, primal emotions. When a character acts selfishly, we feel a jolt of moral outrage. We want to see them punished. When they act selflessly, we feel admiration and want to see them rewarded. Storr cites these incredible studies from Yale where even pre-verbal babies were shown puppet shows. In one, a 'helper' puppet pushed a ball up a hill. In another, a 'hinderer' puppet pushed it down. Afterwards, when offered the puppets, the babies almost universally reached for the helper. Mark: That's wild. So our sense of justice is basically our inner caveman trying to figure out who to trust and who to kick out of the tribe. It’s baked into our hardware. Michelle: It is. And it explains our obsession with status, too. We’re wired to get along with people, but also to get ahead of them. We constantly monitor our own status and the status of others. It’s why we feel a secret pleasure—a little spike in our brain's reward system—when a high-status person suffers a misfortune. It’s our tribal brain at work. Mark: I know some readers have had issues with this 'tribal' framing, though. They feel it oversimplifies complex real-world conflicts, like struggles against systemic oppression, and just reduces them to a simple 'us vs. them' instinct. Michelle: That’s a very fair and important critique. Storr’s focus is on the deep psychological machinery, which can feel reductive when you apply it to nuanced social and political realities. I think his point isn't that oppression is just a tribal squabble, but that the primal 'us vs. them' hardware is the psychological mechanism that gets exploited by those in power to create and justify those systems. The function of a story—whether it's a national myth or a Hollywood blockbuster—is to create a 'hero-maker' narrative for our tribe, which by definition casts the other side as the villain. Mark: So it’s a powerful tool that can be used for good or for ill. It can create empathy, but it can also be used to justify prejudice. Michelle: Precisely. Story is a form of technology, and like any technology, it’s morally neutral. It’s all about how it’s used.

Michelle: So when you put all the pieces together, Storr's argument is incredibly elegant and powerful. It starts with the individual brain, which doesn't see reality but creates a flawed, heroic story about itself. Great writers, whether they know it or not, tap directly into this by creating characters with their own 'Sacred Flaws.' Mark: And we, the audience, get completely hooked. We're captivated because these stories of flawed heroes navigating a chaotic world trigger our ancient, tribal need to see social order tested, to see villains punished and heroes rewarded. Michelle: It completely reframes the purpose of story. The lesson isn't about being perfect or always being right. It's about the struggle of a flawed person trying to correct their broken model of the world. The real drama is the journey of realizing how you're wrong. Mark: And that’s so much more hopeful, in a way. It means change is possible. It’s not about being a flawless hero from the start, but about having the courage to face your flaws and fix them. Michelle: Exactly. And Storr leaves us with this beautiful, paradoxical idea. He says story is both tribal propaganda—the thing that blinds us, that reinforces our biases and makes us see the world in terms of 'us' and 'them'… Mark: But it’s also the cure. Michelle: It’s also the cure. Because when a story is told well, it transports us. It allows us to live inside the 'controlled hallucination' of another person's mind. And for a brief time, it reminds us that beneath all our different sacred flaws and tribal narratives, we are all beasts of one species. Mark: That’s a fantastic thought to end on. It actually makes me want to ask our listeners: what's a story—a book, a film, anything—that completely changed your model of the world? A story that made you see your own 'sacred flaw'? Let us know on our social channels. We’d love to hear about it. Michelle: This is Aibrary, signing off.