Hijacking Your Brain

Why Compelling Narrative Storytelling is Irresistable

What is your reaction if I tell you I am a professional hijacker? I earn a living through hijacking, but not in a criminal sense. I hijack through the creation of therapeutic narratives. Stories, or what is called narrative storytelling, hijacks the human brain and mind. The narratives I craft in collaboration with my clients are designed to help them escape the confines or prisons of the story they’ve adopted about their lives, the basis for their pain and suffering, and gives them access to their innate and unrecognized potential for positive change. Let’s look at what creates the hijacking process and how we can channel it for people’s betterment. We will do that in a three-part series.

In Part 1, I open a window into the nature of storytelling as a hugely important process by which people (and life in general) evolved to practice adapting and adjusting to change. In Part 2, we explore the underlying neurochemistry of storytelling. This section helps us appreciate how powerfully our brain and body use microdoses of irresistable neurochemicals to survive and thrive in an often unpredictable and even dangerous world. Finally, in Part 3, we delve into the dangers and potential rewards of being so susceptible to the power of narrative storytelling. If story can be the curse, it can also be the blessing that frees individuals, communities, and ultimately nations to grow and flourish in an interconnected world. So…here we go.

Part 1: Becoming a Professional Hijacker

As a psychologist, trained in neuropsychology (the relationship between brain function and behavior), health psychology (the relationship between the body, the mind, and our health), and clinical hypnosis (how to utilize the relationship between conscious and non-conscious influences on thought and behavior), the role of narrative storytelling in our daily lives has long been an interest of mine.

Through this Substack channel, I hope to give us all pause when we find ourselves in a reactive, angry, rejecting, offended, and perhaps self-righteous state of mind in response to someone else expressing a view or taking a position on a topic that is very much at odds with our own view. I suspect we’ve all been there. Maybe you are even there right now.

Here are common examples of situation where the “power of narrative” is present. Are any of them familiar?

Have you ever recognized how often, in these highly charged and polarized times, our attachments to our own perspectives can alienate others and intensify our feelings of loneliness?

Have you sensed that your passion for your position and your equally impassioned and simultaneous rejection of the position of “the other” fans the flames of interpersonal conflict?

Can your allegiance to beliefs rooted in your conviction that you are on the right side of truth generates levels of self-righteousness that pits you against “the other” and undermines for a sense of a shared community despite the differences?

All of these scenarios reveal the grip of narrative storytelling on our minds and brains.

Your Brain on Story

The power exercised by narrative on emotional responses, our thoughts, and even on our physiology – our bodily reactions – operates largely outside of our conscious awareness. Nevertheless, we are drawn, often irresistibly, to situations that generate those responses like moths to a flame. How many people crave the terror, the arousal, the rage, and the other forms of mental hijacking we experience when sitting in a seat in a darkened theater, absorbed by the actions on the screen and immersed in the sounds of that action that surround us, and forgetting for a while that we are actually merely an audience member watching a movie. Just last week, while watching the final episode of a tense thriller series on Netflix, I impulsively yelled, Yes!, when the murderous, heartless, and ruthless villain finally received his just reward. When is the last time you experienced something similar? Author Jonathan Gottschall, in The Storytelling Animal, said, “Human minds yield helplessly to the suction of story. No matter how hard we concentrate, no matter how deep we dig in our heels, we just can’t resist the gravity of alternate worlds” .

Why is that, and what are the implications of this for living in as fractured a world as we seem to be today? Research increasingly reveals that the roots of our response to narrative are hardwired into our neurology. The consensus is that the precursors to that wiring date back millions of years to even before Hominids first appeared on the planet, an evolutionary arrival that eventually brought forward what we recognize today as human language.

Angus Fletcher, in his book, Storythinking, presents the case that the earliest foundations for what became our irresistible attachment to stories and storytelling lay in the need for creative adaptation to changes in our surroundings. Living creatures could no longer passively float in the planet’s early oceans, absorbing nutrients that just randomly happened along. Instead, early forms of life had to take action to increase the odds of their survival. Sometimes that meant chasing food sources. At other times, it meant avoiding becoming a food source for another form of life.

By becoming able to adapt to rapidly changing environmental conditions, the capacity to generate trial-and-error efforts emerged: rather than remain at the mercy of the environment, life exhibited the capacity to modify itself by exploring other options that might result in a life better suited to take fuller advantage of the external world. As a result, early life forms developed the ability to exhibit variable response patterns. Some of those patterns favored survival for those members of a species that possessed that pattern. In turn, those reproducible response patterns, encoded into that creature’s DNA, enabled those creatures to be more likely to genetically pass that advantageous structure, behavior, or characteristic along to the next generation via the process of natural selection. that response.

And here we sit today. Endowed with the inheritance of adaptive flexibility. We are not prisoners of our beliefs nor of our environments. Nevertheless, as a mind-body oriented psychologist, I interacted with thousands of people who perceive themselves to be imprisoned, with often sad consequences for them, their lives, and others in their lives. They have lived according to the gospel of often unconscious narratives that are neither written in stone nor incapable of major re-scripting.

In the second part of this series, we will look at the underlying neurochemistry that operates to strengthen narrative attachments, for better or worse.