The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

by Gottschall, Jonathan

  While these examples are extreme, most memoirs are strewn with unhidden falsehood. Crack open the average memoir, and you will find the story of a person’s life. The story will be told in a clear story grammar, complete with problem structure and good-guy, bad-guy dynamics. The dramatic arcs are suspiciously familiar; the tales of falling down and rising up, suspiciously formulaic. Amazing things—dramatic, emotional—happen to memoirists with amazing frequency. Memoirists can recall scenes and conversations from their childhoods in unbelievably (that is, “not believable”) piquant detail.

  Some critics argue that most memoirs, not just the brazenly fraudulent ones, should be shelved in the fiction section of bookstores. Memoirists don’t tell true stories; they tell “truthy” ones. Like a film that dramatizes historical events, all memoirs should come with a standard disclaimer: “This book is based on a true story.”

  Every time there is a new memoir scandal, we huff about being tricked. We moan that the writer has betrayed a sacred trust, and we brand the writer as a cheat, a liar, a scoundrel. And then many of us rush out to buy the next grippingly truthy memoir of tribulation and overcoming, of sexual abuse, alcoholism, anal sex enthusiasm (Toni Bentley’s The Surrender, 2004), or whatever.

  But before we stone memoirists for the way they tell their stories, we should look more closely at the way we tell our own. We spend our lives crafting stories that make us the noble—if flawed—protagonists of first-person dramas. A life story is a “personal myth” about who we are deep down—where we come from, how we got this way, and what it all means. Our life stories are who we are. They are our identity. A life story is not, however, an objective account. A life story is a carefully shaped narrative that is replete with strategic forgetting and skillfully spun meanings.

  Like any published memoir, our own life stories should also come with a disclaimer: “This story that I tell about myself is only based on a true story. I am in large part a figment of my own yearning imagination.” And it’s a good thing, too. As we will see, a life story is an intensely useful fiction.

  “MEMORY, OF COURSE, IS NEVER TRUE”

  Scientific history was made in 1889, in the small French town of Nancy, when sixteen-year-old Marie G. reported a terrible crime. She was walking down the hall in her boarding house when she heard sounds of furniture squeaking and banging, along with muffled whimpers, grunts, and moans. Marie stopped outside the room of an old bachelor. She looked to her left and her right, and, seeing no one in the dim hallway, she stooped and pressed her eye to the bright keyhole in the old man’s door. The terrible image was seared into her memory: an old man raping a young girl; the girl’s wide eyes; the blood; the girl crying out through the gag in her mouth. Wringing her hands, Marie fled down the corridor to her room.

  The magistrate listened carefully, but skeptically, to Marie, then told her that he would not be referring the case to the police. Marie was distraught; she told the magistrate that she would stand up in court and swear to her story “before God and man.” The magistrate shook his head. He had made up his mind before Marie had even entered the room.

  In 1977, the psychologists Roger Brown and James Kulik coined the term “flashbulb memories” to describe photo-perfect recollections of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. People vividly remembered where they were, what they were doing, and who they were with when they heard the awful news. Subsequent research on flashbulb memory has shown that Brown and Kulik were both right and wrong. We really do vividly remember the big and traumatic moments of our lives, but the details of these memories can’t be trusted.

  A crowd outside a New York City radio shop waits for news on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963.

  For example, the day after the space shuttle Challenger exploded in January 1986, researchers asked people how they had heard about the disaster, how they had felt, and what they had been doing. The researchers then returned to the same people two and a half years later and asked them exactly the same questions. As the psychologist Lauren French and her colleagues later put it, “For a quarter of the people, not one detail was consistent between the two reports. On average, fewer than half of the details reported in the follow-up questionnaire matched those reported in the original questionnaire. Not one person was completely consistent. What is even more interesting is that two and a half years later, most people were highly confident about the accuracy of their memories.”

  The signature flashbulb moment of our age is 9/11, which led to a bonanza of false-memory research. The research shows two things: that people are extremely sure of their 9/11 memories and that upward of 70 percent of us misremember key aspects of the attacks. For example, on the morning of September 11, 2001, do you remember when you saw footage of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center? President George W. Bush did. On December 4, 2001, he described learning about the attacks:

  I was in Florida. And my chief of staff, Andy Card—actually I was in a classroom talking about a reading program that works. And I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower—the TV was obviously on, and I use[d] to fly myself, and I said, “There’s one terrible pilot.” And I said, “It must have been a horrible accident.” But I was whisked off there—I didn’t have much time to think about it, and I was sitting in the classroom, and Andy Card, my chief who was sitting over here walked in and said, “A second plane has hit the tower. America’s under attack.”

  For the conspiracy theorists of the so-called 9/11 Truth movement, Bush’s statement was a smoking gun. On the morning of the attacks, there was no footage available of the first plane hitting the tower. Therefore, by Truther logic, Bush must have been watching film shot by the government operatives who actually brought the towers down. The headline at FreeWorldAlliance.com screamed, “Bush Slip Reveals Total 9/11 Complicity.”

  But Bush wasn’t alone in falsely remembering seeing the first plane hit the tower on 9/11. In one study, 73 percent of research subjects confidently misremembered watching, horrified, as the first plane plowed into the North Tower on the morning of September 11.

  Similarly, according to the psychologist James Ost, many British people recall seeing nonexistent footage of the Paris car crash that killed Princess Diana, and four out of ten Brits remember seeing terrible images of London’s 7/7 bombings that simply don’t exist. In short, flashbulb memory research shows that some of the most confident memories in our heads are sheer invention.

  Which brings us back to Marie G. When she reported the rape, the skeptical magistrate walked her not to the police station to file charges, but to the psychiatric office of Hippolyte Bernheim, just as Bernheim had asked him to. With the magistrate looking on, Bernheim had Marie lie down on his consulting couch, whereupon Marie repeated the whole grisly tale. Bernheim asked Marie several questions. Are you sure of what you saw? Are you sure you weren’t dreaming or hallucinating? When Marie answered yes to these questions, Bernheim was ready with one more: was Marie sure that Bernheim hadn’t planted a fake rape memory in her mind?

  Marie was Bernheim’s patient. She was, in his words, “an intelligent woman,” gainfully employed as a shoemaker. Bernheim was supposed to be treating Marie for sleepwalking and nervous symptoms, but he promptly began running experiments on her as well. He wanted to see if he could create a “retroactive hallucination”—a fraudulent memory that Marie could not distinguish from the real events of her life. Bernheim started relatively small. For example, he made Marie believe that, during one of their sessions, she had suffered an acute bout of diarrhea and had to keep rushing off to the bathroom. He made her believe that she had recently bumped her nose so hard that blood gushed from her nostrils like water from a tap.

  Satisfied that he could plant relatively mundane memories, Bernheim decided to test himself. In a stroke that may yet earn Bernheim a plaque in the mad scientist hall of fame, the psychiatrist decided to burden Marie with the memory of a hideous child rape. Even afterward, when
Bernheim told Marie that the memory was fake, she would not believe him. Marie’s memory of the crime was so vivid that it was, for her, an “incontestable reality.”

  Bernheim used hypnosis to plant memories in Marie’s mind. As a result, his claims were met with a lot of skepticism. Memory continued to be seen as a trustworthy system. Memory was fact.

  Hippolyte Bernheim (1840–1919).

  Then came “the great sex panic of the 1990s.” Across the country, psychiatrists, hypnotherapists, and other healers were “recovering” repressed memories of childhood abuse in adult subjects. But many argued that the healers were inadvertently creating false memories, not excavating real ones. For skeptics of recovered memory, the main difference between Bernheim’s techniques and those of modern therapists was that Bernheim knew what he was doing, while most modern therapists did not.

  The controversy raged, and psychologists set out to settle the issue scientifically, probing the memory system for weaknesses like hackers attacking a computer system. They found that memory was much less trustworthy than anyone had previously suspected.

  In a classic experiment, Elizabeth Loftus and her colleagues gathered information from independent sources about undergraduate students’ childhoods. The psychologists then brought students into the lab and went over lists of actual events in their lives. The lists were Trojan horses that hid a single lie: When the student was five years old, the psychologists claimed, he wandered away from his parents in a mall. His parents were frightened, and so was he. Eventually an old man reunited him with his parents. At first, the students had no memory of this fictional event. But when they were later called back to the lab and asked about the mall episode, 25 percent of them said they remembered it. These students not only recalled the bare events that the researchers had supplied, but they also added many vivid details of their own.

  This study was among the first of many to show how shockingly vulnerable the memory system is to contamination by suggestion. In lab settings, psychologists were able to plant clear childhood memories of meeting Bugs Bunny at Disneyland (even though Bugs is not a Disney character), of horsing around at a wedding and spilling a whole bowl of punch on the bride’s parents, of taking a ride in a hot-air balloon, of being hospitalized after being attacked by dogs or other children, and of seeing a cargo plane crash into a Dutch apartment building.

  This research is profoundly unsettling. If we can’t trust our memories about the big things in life—9/11, sexual abuse, being hospitalized after a dog attack—how can we trust it about the small things? How can we believe that anything in our lives was as we remember it, especially since we are every bit as confident in our false memories—our “retroactive hallucinations”—as we are in our true ones?

  Sure enough, ordinary memory is failing us all the time, even without the meddling of psychologists. It’s not just that we forget things. It’s that what we remember is inaccurate, sometimes grossly so. For example, in one study men were interviewed right after high school graduation and again decades later. In the first interview, 33 percent of them reported receiving corporal punishment in high school. When the same men were interviewed thirty years later, 90 percent said they had experienced such punishment. In other words, nearly 60 percent of the men had fabricated authentic-seeming memories of being physically beaten by school authorities.

  Memory researchers caution that these results shouldn’t be pushed too far. They point out that memory obviously does a pretty good job of preserving the basic contours of our lives. My name really is Jonathan Gottschall. I really went to Plattsburgh High School. I really was raised by Marcia and Jon. One fateful day in the mid-1980s, I really did sock my little brother, Robert, in the back of the skull as he innocently fished in the deep freeze for a bean and cheese burrito. (Or did I? Yes, I did. Robert confirms it. But he thinks he may have been after Toaster Strudel.) Yet the research shows that our memories are not what we think they are. Most of us believe that they are filled with reliable information that we can access whenever we want to. But it’s not quite so simple. Like the amnesiac lead character in the 2000 film Memento, we all go through life tattooed with indelible memories that didn’t happen the way we remember them.

  That childhood memory of crashing your new bike on your birthday may get blended together with memories of other accidents and other birthdays. When we recall something from the past, we don’t access a file that says “Bike Accident, Eight Years Old.” Pieces of that memory are scattered through the brain. Memories for sight, sound, taste, and smell are stored in different locations. When we recall the bike accident, we don’t queue up a videotape; we recall bits of data from all around the brain. This data is then sent forward to the storytelling mind—our little storytelling Holmes—who stitches and pastes the scraps and fragments into a coherent and plausible re-creation of what might have occurred, taking his usual poetic license.

  Put differently, the past, like the future, does not really exist. They are both fantasies created in our minds. The future is a probabilistic simulation we run in our heads in order to help shape the world we want to live in. The past, unlike the future, has actually happened. But the past, as represented in our minds, is a mental simulation, too. Our memories are not precise records of what actually happened. They are reconstructions of what happened, and many of the details—small and large—are unreliable.

  Memory isn’t an outright fiction; it is merely a fictionalization.

  HEROES OF OUR OWN EPICS

  In view of memory’s frailties, omissions, and inventions, some researchers have concluded that it just doesn’t work very well. But, as the psychologist Jerome Bruner observes, memory may “serve many masters aside from truth.” If the purpose of memory is to provide a photo-perfect record of the past, then memory is deeply flawed. But if the purpose of memory is to allow us to live better lives, then the plasticity of memory may actually be useful. Memory may be faulty by design.

  As the psychologists Carol Tavris and Eliot Aronson put it, memory is an “unreliable, self-serving historian . . . Memories are often pruned and shaped by an ego-enhancing bias that blurs the edges of past events, softens culpability, and distorts what really happened.” Put differently, we misremember the past in a way that allows us to maintain protagonist status in the stories of our own lives.

  Even truly awful people usually don’t know that they are antagonists. Hitler, for example, thought he was a brave knight who would vanquish evil and bring on a thousand years of paradise on earth. What Stephen King wrote about the villain in his novel Misery applies to real villains as well: “Annie Wilkes, the nurse who holds Paul Sheldon prisoner in Misery, may seem psychopathic to us, but it’s important to remember that she seems perfectly sane and reasonable to herself—heroic, in fact, a beleaguered woman trying to survive in a hostile world filled with cockadoodie brats.” Studies show that when ordinary people do something wrong—break a promise, commit a murder—they usually fold it into a narrative that denies or at least diminishes their guilt. This self-exculpatory tendency is so powerful in human life that Steven Pinker calls it the “Great Hypocrisy.”

  After raping and murdering thirty-three boys in the 1970s, John Wayne Gacy said, “I see myself more as a victim than as a perpetrator . . . I was cheated out of my childhood.” He complained that the news media were treating him like a bad guy—like “an asshole and a scapegoat.”

  This need to see ourselves as the striving heroes of our own epics warps our sense of self. After all, it’s not easy to be a plausible protagonist. Fiction protagonists tend to be young, attractive, smart, and brave—all of the things that most of us aren’t. Fiction protagonists usually live interesting lives that are marked by intense conflict and drama. We don’t. Average Americans work retail or cubicle jobs and spend their nights watching protagonists do interesting things on television, while they eat pork rinds dipped in Miracle Whip.

  But on some level, we want to be more like the heroes of fiction, and this means deludin
g ourselves about who we are and how we got this way. Have you ever seen a photograph of yourself and been rocked by the gap between how you think you look and how fat or saggy or wrinkly or bony you really are? Many people can’t understand why they seem to look less attractive in photographs than they do in mirrors. This may be partly about photographic distortion, but it is mainly about the way we unconsciously pose in mirrors—lifting our jaws to stretch away extra chins, raising our eyebrows to smooth away wrinkles and bags—until our best selves appear. We arrange ourselves in the mirror until it tells a flattering lie. This is a good metaphor for what we are doing all the time: building a self-image that improves on the real deal.

  When ordinary people are asked to describe themselves, they list many positive qualities and few, if any, negative ones. For example, Thomas Gilovich’s book How We Know What Isn’t So reports that of one million high school seniors surveyed, “70% thought they were above average in leadership ability, and only 2% thought they were below average. In terms of ability to get along with others, nearly all students thought they were above average, 60% thought they were in the top 10%, and 25% thought they were in the top 1%!” These self-assessments are obviously wildly out of step with the facts: it is impossible for a quarter of students to squeeze into the top 1 percent.

  We can’t blame such outrageous overestimations on the arrogance of youth. We all do it. For example, 90 percent of us think we are above-average drivers, and 94 percent of university professors think they are better than average at their jobs. (I’m honestly surprised that the figure is so low.) College students generally believe that they are more likely than their peers to graduate at the top of their class, earn a big salary, enjoy their work, win awards, and spawn gifted children. College students also believe that they are less likely than others to get fired, get divorced, behave unethically, have cancer, suffer from depression, or have a heart attack.