Stories and Realities

I loved to listen to stories. Any story.
For example the one about the two sisters that went to pick mushroom in the field.
While the younger was picking them on the rails, the train approached.
Will she be saved?
How?
Oh, gosh, wise it was of her to duck down and wait for the train to pass.
I would have probably done the same.

Or, the famous story of Cinderella.
The prince went looking for her, trying her glass shoe on all the young women in the kingdom, but they fit only the feet of Cinderella.
How can this be?
Can a pair of shoes only fit one person in the whole country?
In the shoe-store one pair fits the feet of many many girls, so what was it about those glass shoes? (and while we are at it, these shoes must have been made from a very thick glass, otherwise they would have been broken by the weight of Cinderella when she walked in them).

There must be some explanation for this somewhere, but even as it is, the story is very very nice.

If you asked me whether Cinderella really existed, or the fairy who made it all possible for her, I would have probably said that they didn't – after a certain age.
But while listening to the story, the reality of it is overwhelming and is experienced as reality.
That is – if we are experienced in the process of inhibiting a reality-check initiated by the brain.

But reality check knows not to push itself forward too much. After all, it restricts itself on a daily basis, when we, for example, believe that there is a real person at the end of the chain telling us the news on television (after all, there is a bunch of jumping colored dots to prove it), or that Steve Jobs, even though dead now, created an economic empire by inventing first the Apple computer, and then a whole industry of electronics (after all, I have an Apple computer under my fingertips to prove his [past] existence*).

So things that are perceived by the senses here and now and recognized as reality, are in fact, being contested by realities that reside in our brain, in our memory.

How are brain-realities created? stories, in the very wide sense of the word, are one of the most common ways.

* Actually, it is a Toshiba, but Apple fit better in the story.