Chapter 1: The Deal for Connection

“Humans live in two realities at once. Like all other living things, we live in the reality of ‘survival’ – food, shelter and procreation. But we spend most of our mental time living in a second one: the ‘story realm.’”

Chapter 2: Umwelt

“Our brains can only pick up that which is essential to our human experience of consciousness. We can only see a narrow band of reality – and that’s referred to as our particular umwelt.”

Chapter 3: Superorganism

“The core function of storytelling is to create a sense of shared reality. Humans are these highly cooperative apes – we’re almost part ape, part ant. Story is a persuasive technology that sucks individual minds into it and persuades them to become a functional member of a human group.”

Chapter 4: Active Belief and Status

“Active belief is how we as protagonists, acting out the story of our lives, become heroic. We have to be earning status. That’s how all human groups work.”

Chapter 5: Storybeing and Leadership

“Storybeing simply recognises that a story isn’t something that we just tell; story is what we do. Every day, we act out the story of our lives. We want to follow heroes, we want to keep away from villains. Other people can persuade us by appearing to us as certain characters in the story of our lives.”

Chapter 6: Identity and Morality

“In the human story world, we’re not a machine of flesh and blood; we are an identity – a set of ideas about who we ought to be and how the world should work. That identity, our sense of morals, is of massive importance to us. People will often die on behalf of it.”

Chapter 7: How to Be a Better Storyteller

“I often get asked how I can tell a better story, and there are 3 iron principles: (1) start with unexpected change, (2) share a moral lesson, and (3) overcome obstacles.”