We are our narratives has become a popular slogan

"We are our narratives" has become a popular slogan. “We” refers to our selves, in the full-blooded person constituting sense. “Narratives” refers to the stories we tell about our -selves and our exploits in settings as trivial as cocktail parties and as serious as intimate discussions with loved ones. We express some in speech. Others we tell silently to ourselves, in that constant little inner voice. The full collection of one’s internal and external narratives generates the self we are intimately acquainted with. Our narrative selves continually unfold.

State-of-the-art neuro-imaging and cognitive neuropsychology both upholds the idea that we create our “selves” through narrative. Based on a half-century’s research on “split-brain” patients, neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga argues that the human brain’s left hemisphere is specialised for intelligent behaviour and hypothesis formation. It also possesses the unique capacity to interpret - that is, narrate - behaviours and emotional states initiated by either hemisphere. Not surprisingly, the left hemisphere is also the language hemisphere, with specialised cortical regions for producing, interpreting and understanding speech. It is also the hemisphere that produces narratives.

Gazzaniga also thinks that this left-hemisphere “interpreter” creates the unified feeling of an autobiographical, personal, unique self. “The interpreter sustains a running narrative of our actions, emotions, thoughts, and dreams. The interpreter is the glue that keeps our story unified, and creates our sense of being a coherent, rational agent. To our bag of individual instincts it brings theories about our lives. These narratives of our past behaviour seep into our awareness and give us an autobiography,” he writes. The language areas of the left hemisphere are well placed to carry out these tasks. They draw on information in memory (amygdalohippocampal circuits, dorsolateral prefrontal cortices) and planning regions (orbitofrontal cortices). As neurologist Jeffrey Saver has shown, damage to these regions disrupts narration in a variety of ways, ranging from unbounded narration, in which a person generates narratives unconstrained by reality, to denarration, the inability to generate any narratives, external or internal.

How does Gazzaniga’s interpreter produce a narrative self? In 2003, one of us (Bickle) suggested that our “little inner voice” is the key. The inner voice may be produced by ongoing activity in language regions of the left hemisphere, both when the products of that activity are broadcast via external speech and when they are silently expressed through inner speech.

One compelling study used PET imaging to watch what is going on in the brain during inner speech. As expected, this showed activity in the classic speech production area known as Broca’s area. But also active was Wernicke’s area, the brain region for language comprehension, suggesting that not only do the brain’s speech areas produce silent inner speech, but that our inner voice is understood and interpreted by the comprehension areas. The result of all this activity, I suggested, is the narrative self.

1. What does the phrase "we are our narratives" mean?

  1. We construct an idea of ourselves through stories which we communicate in certain ways.
  2. We are known by the stories we tell others.
  3. Our narratives are the true reflections of our identities.
  4. Our inner voice keeps us well informed about ourselves.

2. What does the author mean by the term "narrative self".

  1. It is the interpreter that sustains a running narrative of our actions, emotions, thoughts, and dreams.
  2. The narrative self is the inner voice broadcast via external speech and actions.
  3. The 'narrative self' is a collection of the narratives about our past behaviour, which seep into our awareness and give us an autobiography.
  4. The narrative self is our inner voice that is generated and interpreted by certain areas of the brain.

3. From the views presented in the passage we can infer that

  1. our narrative selves are like alter egos, which are heard and comprehended by us.
  2. the ‘narrative self’ is the glue that keeps our stories unified and makes us rational beings.
  3. narratives are mostly in first person because of the strong "inner voice".
  4. our narratives of the past help create a sense of who we are.

Answers

  1. A
  2. D
  3. D