Will Storr > Quotes

“One of the dictums that defines our culture is that we can be anything we want to be – to win the neoliberal game we just have to dream, to put our minds to it, to want it badly enough. This message leaks out to us from seemingly everywhere in our environment: at the cinema, in heart-warming and inspiring stories we read in the news and social media, in advertising, in self-help books, in the classroom, on television. We internalize it, incorporating it into our sense of self. But it’s not true. It is, in fact, the dark lie at the heart of the age of perfectionism. It’s the cause, I believe, of an incalculable quotient of misery. Here’s the truth that no million-selling self-help book, famous motivational speaker, happiness guru or blockbusting Hollywood screenwriter seems to want you to know. You’re limited. Imperfect. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”
― Will Storr, Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us

“We typically have a bias that tells us we are less susceptible to bias than everyone else.”
― Will Storr, The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

“By the time you have reached adulthood, your brain has decided how the world works–how a table looks and feels, how liquids and authority figures behave, how scary are rats. It has made countless billions of little insights and decisions. It has made its mind up. From then on in, its treatment of any new information that runs counter to those views can sometimes be brutal. Your brain is surprisingly reluctant to change its mind. Rather than going through the difficulties involved in rearranging itself to reflect the truth, it often prefers to fool you. So it distorts. It forgets. It projects. It lies.”
― Will Storr, The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

“This is where low self-esteem gets built into the core of the machine. For Aristotle, a person had innate potential and was naturally moving towards perfection. But for the Christians, a person was born in a state of sin and falling towards hell. God, not the individual, was where perfection lay. This meant that a person wanting to become more perfect would have to engage in a constant war with themselves – a war, not with forces out in the world, but with their own soul, their conscience, their mind and thoughts. And because perfection only existed outside the human realm, that struggle would always be hopeless. The Christians had given the Western self a soul, and then begun to torture it.”
― Will Storr, Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us

“Western culture prefers us not to believe we're defined or limited. It wants us to buy the fiction that the self is open, free, nothing but pure, bright possibility; that we're all born with the same suite of potential abilities, as neural 'blank slates', as if all human brains come off the production line at Foxconn. This seduces us into accepting the cultural lie that says we can do anything we set our minds to, that we can be whoever we want to be. This false idea is of immense value to our neoliberal economy. The game it compels us to play can best be justified morally if all the contestants start out with an equal shot at winning. Moreover, if we believe we're all the same, this legitimizes calls for deregulated corporation and smaller government: it means that men and women who lose simply didn't want it badly enough, that they just didn't believe - in which case, why should anyone else catch their fall?”
― Will Storr, Selfie: How the West Became Self-Obsessed

“I know that I am not right about everything, and yet I am simultaneously convinced that I am. I believe these two things completely, and yet they are in catastrophic logical opposition to each other.”
― Will Storr, The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

“Locked inside the black vault of our skulls, stuck forever in the solitude of our own hallucinated universe, story is a portal, a hallucination within the hallucination, the closest we'll ever really come to escape.”
― Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling

“The world we experience as ‘out there’ is actually a reconstruction of reality that is built inside our heads. It’s an act of creation by the storytelling brain. This is how it works. You walk into a room. Your brain predicts what the scene should look and sound and feel like, then it generates a hallucination based on these predictions. It’s this hallucination that you experience as the world around you. It’s this hallucination you exist at the centre of, every minute of every day. You’ll never experience actual reality because you have no direct access to it.”
― Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling

“Intelligence is no protection against strange beliefs.”
― Will Storr, The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

“Exposure to a mixed body of evidence made both sides even more convinced of the fundamental soundness of their original beliefs.' Confirmation bias is profoundly human and it is appalling. When new information leads to an increase in ignorance, it is the opposite of learning, the death of wisdom.”
― Will Storr, The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

“Already, every day, millions of us are needled and outraged by the hysterically stated views of those with whom we don’t agree. Our irritation pushes us into a place of fiercer opposition. The more emotional we become, the less rational we become, the less able to properly reason. In an attempt to quieten the stress, we begin muting, blocking, de-friending and unfollowing. And we’re in an echo chamber now, shielded from diverse perspectives that might otherwise have made us wiser and more empathetic and open. Safe in the digital cocoon we’ve constructed, surrounded by voices who flatter us with agreement, we become yet more convinced of our essential rightness, and so pushed even further away from our opponents, who by now seem practically evil in their bloody-minded wrongness”
― Will Storr, Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us

“The gift of story is wisdom”
― Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling

“Whilst we play life as a game, our conscious experience of it takes the form of a story.”
― Will Storr, The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It

“It might weigh little over a kilogram but, taken on its own scale, the brain is unimaginably vast. One cubic millimetre contains between twenty and twenty-five thousand neurons. It has eighty-six billion of these cells, and each one is complex as a city and is in contact with ten thousand other neurons just like it. Within just one cubic centimetre of brain tissue, there is the same number of connections as there are stars in the Milky Way. Your brain contains a hundred trillion of them. Information in the form of electricity and chemicals flows around these paths in great forking trails and in circuits and feedback loops and fantastical storms of activity tat bloom to life speeds of up to a hundred and twenty metres per second. According to the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, 'The number of permutations and combinations of activity that are theoretically possible exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe.' And yet, he continues, 'We know so little about it that even a child's questions should be seriously entertained.”
― Will Storr, The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

“We build our understanding of the emotional world through the myths and legends of our culture. We are all, in part, made of fairy tales.”
― Will Storr

“Unpredictable humans. This is the stuff of story.”
― Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling

“we go through our social lives convinced that everything we are saying, doing and feeling is being closely examined by those around us even though, in reality, they are all preoccupied with themselves, equally convinced the spotlight is on them.”
― Will Storr, The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

“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 is what brain does. It is a ‘story processor’, writes the psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt, ‘not a logic processor’. Story emerges from human minds as naturally as breath emerges from between human lips.”
― Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better

“Researchers find our reward systems are activated most when we achieve relative rather than absolute rewards; we’re designed to feel best not when we get more, but when we get more than those around us.”
― Will Storr, The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It

“Haven’t we all done this? Hardened a particular position, not as a response to superior information, but because of anger?”
― Will Storr, The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

“But once more, here I am - confronted with the counter-intuitive notion that intelligence is no protection against strange beliefs.”
― Will Storr, The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

“I was aware and increasingly suspicious of the separation between the things i felt and the voice that interpreted those feelings. We really are, as people sometimes glibly say, a mystery to ourselves.

we really are”
― Will Storr, Selfie: How the West Became Self-Obsessed

“People say, “I wouldn’t have done that.” But they haven’t been exposed to any of the things, culturally, that might have made them do it. And the warning I take is that the number of people in a group who will stand out against these cultural forces are much smaller than you think, and you’re probably not one of them. In fact, I think you can probably tell if you are because you’re pretty bolshie already. If you’ve got a good career, and you’re pretty sociable and you’re going up the hierarchy and all the rest of it, where are you going to get your sudden revolutionary spurt from?”
― Will Storr, The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

“When we behave badly, it is usually because we were put in an unhappy situation. Circumstance has conspired against us. Really, I had no choice. When others do wrong, it is because of their character flaws.”
― Will Storr, The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

“... and a motto in a frame: sometimes i feel like giving up but then i remember of a lot of motherfuckers to prove wrong”
― Will Storr, Selfie: How the West Became Self-Obsessed

“story, are often badly led astray by this inner voice, which is generated by word and speech-making circuitry that is mostly located in the brain’s left hemisphere. This voice is not to be trusted. This isn’t simply because it’s relaying all those flattering hero-making half-truths to us. The narrator can’t be trusted because it has no direct access to the truth of who we really are. It feels as if that voice is the thing that’s in control of us. It feels as if that voice is us. But it’s not. ‘We’ are our neural models. Our narrator is just observing what’s happening in the controlled hallucination in our skulls – including our own behaviour – and explaining it. It’s tying all the events together into a coherent tale that tells us who we are, why we’re doing what we’re doing and feeling what we’re feeling. It’s helping us feel in control of our thrilling neural show. And it’s not lying, exactly. It’s confabulating.”
― Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling

“... for now though our investigation into how future enters and then changes us must return to the idea of the self as a storyteller. In doing so we will realize just how porous the boundary is really is between the stories that surround us and the story that is us.”
― Will Storr, Selfie: How the West Became Self-Obsessed

“The Ancient Greeks had this idea that being physically beautiful was the same as being ethically good and, likewise, being physically ugly was the same as being ethically bad.’ They had a word for this: kalokagathia, which came from kalos, meaning beautiful, kai, meaning ‘and’, and agathos, meaning ‘good’. ‘This idea, that the bodily form is inherently important for understanding who someone is, is very much still with us,’ he said. The scholar Professor Werner Jaeger has written of kalokagathia’s roots in early Greek aristocracy, describing it as their ‘ideal of human perfection, an ideal towards which the elite of the race was constantly trained’. Just as John Pridmore’s self snatched core ideas of who he was and who he ought to be from his culture, so does mine.”
― Will Storr, Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us

“In the memorable words of Professor Roy Baumeister, ‘Life is change that yearns for stability”
― Will Storr, Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us

“The only thing we’ll ever really know are those electrical pulses that are sent up by our senses.”
― Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better