5 min summary of: The Story of Your Life | Hidden Brain | 23rd March 2021
For other podcast summaries, search 'podcast summaries' in any podcast apps. Or if you're on Apple Podcasts: http://bit.ly/5-min-summaries Key ideas: How stories can be a safe place for our thoughts, the value of reaction fiction stories & why everyone should journal or write. 1 quote: "We are the only animals that can cooperate with numerous strangers because only we can invent fictional stories, spread them around, and have people believe in them. As long as everybody believes in the same stories, we can follow the same rules and cooperate effectively." Idea 1: Stories provide us with a safe space to be able to interact with difficult things such as trauma and repressed feelings. In our stories, we can do things that we can't do in real life, on a page, we can rewrite stories from our past, we can reframe them, invent new characters, in our stories, we can control what happens. Idea 2: It seems like the brain regions we employ when we we're understanding stories is the same as the brain regions we employ when we're understanding other people. By reading or consuming fiction content, we're using the same network of brain regions that we do in the real world to understand people. Allowing us to better understand and empathize with people in reality by reading fictional stories. Everyone has a story of their life playing in their head, the better we can understand others stories, the better we can interact and connect with these people in real life. Idea 3: Writing and journalling, is a way to have a conversation with yourself, to better handle and grasp something. You gain clarity by speaking to someone about something, the same is with speaking to yourself, and writing is a way to have a more in depth conversation with yourself because not everything has to be in your mind at the same time. 1 question: Can you think of something where writing down your thoughts can be a helpful way to have a conversation with yourself? Other topics in the episode: First hand account of someone who lost their partner to suicide and how vengeful thoughts were handled through journalling and writing. First hand accounts of a doctor that lost his brother in a car accident right in front of his eyes and how altering a story in his imagination helped with his reality.