The Things We Can’t Unsee

How we see the world depends significantly on what we believe we are looking at. To the ancient Greeks, for example, a lightning storm was evidence of Zeus’s anger. The storm therefore carried a meaning beyond weather, and that meaning affected how people understood and responded to it.

Of course, now we’re modern and educated. We don’t believe in silly gods. Science changed what lightning and other natural phenomena mean to us, modifying the explanations and, with them, our experience of reality. Once you understand that the Earth moves around the Sun, the night sky has not changed. But your experience of looking at it has, because you have changed.

“Stories can feed us ideas we might have been better off without.”

This same mechanism has a darker side. Copycat crimes show how an act, once represented, can enter the culture as a possibility available for repetition. School shootings are an obvious and disturbing example. Stories of these tragedies spread almost instantly through news and social media and sometimes draw imitators, not because no one had ever imagined such violence before, but because seeing that someone else actually did it can make the act seem more plausible. More real.

There is a biological analog for this. Hebbian learning is summarized by the phrase “neurons that fire together wire together.” When patterns of neural activity repeatedly occur together, the connections between them strengthen.

Experience, in other words, leaves physical brain structure behind. Neural traces. A story that repeatedly links an image, an emotion, a justification, and an action may do more than entertain us for a few minutes. It gives the mind a pattern it did not have before—and once that pattern exists, the next experience has something new to connect to.

Every story is a curation of reality. It selects from countless available facts and arranges them, giving us a pattern through which to see the world. Effective stories can do more than alter the perspective of an individual reader. They can become part of the culture itself. Cervantes gave us Don Quixote, and eventually quixotic became a way of understanding a particular kind of idealism in the real world. The story supplied a pattern, and the pattern outlived the story.

That is the true power of storytelling. Usually, we celebrate this effect. We call it empathy, estrangement, education. But the mechanism itself is morally indifferent. Stories can also give us brilliant insights. They can also feed us ideas we might have been better off without.

My new novel, What You Let In (take a sneak peek), begins there. At its center is a book—the Black Book—that passes from one reader to another, leaving something behind each time. Whether that something is supernatural is ultimately less interesting to me than the more ordinary possibility beneath it.

Once a story has given us a motive, a justification, a method, or simply a new way of arranging the facts, we possess that pattern. We may reject it. We may despise it. We may never act upon it. But we can’t say we have never seen it.

A story ends when we close the book. The way it teaches us to see the world—for good or ill—becomes part of us.