Narratives We Live By - Self, Society, and Cosmos in Human Cognition

The aim of this book is to study the place of narratives in human cognition. It searches for the motivation for creating narratives, and the type of cognition that narratives both create and represent. Narrating reality is a way of presenting people with a meaningful self and a meaningful environment. There are other ways of representing reality, other types of cognition which makes the environment meaningful, but the narrative one bears a certain character which makes it unique; the uniqueness of narrative cognition is in its use of anthropomorphism, its use of the person, anthropos, human, as a focal point, around whom events are happening, and thus presenting reality in 'human size', so to speak.

In the first stage we will study why humans tell stories, to recognize which problem is solved by telling stories. I will then seek the neural and cognitive mechanisms which enable the representing of reality as a story. The major part of the book is dedicated to looking at major narrative humans live by, narratives about self, society, and the cosmos, both ancient and modern.