Shankar Vedantam

And in fact, when we look back over our lives, it's often the big moments that stick around.

But the story that I just told you is really all chronology.

There's not much more to it than that.

But stories actually play a huge number of roles in our lives at the level of the individual, the level of the interpersonal relationship, but also at the broad cultural level.

So in my field, we're especially focused on the ways stories provide us with a sense of unity and meaning.

So stories integrate us, they make us feel like we're the same person across time and across situations, and they help turn the messy flow of life into something meaningful.

But stories are also a vital tool for connection with other people and with communities.

And stories play a huge role in both maintaining and changing culture.

One of your main findings is that the way we tell stories can be just as important as the content of our stories.

For example, there's a lot of significance in where we start our stories and where we end our stories.

You call these the chapter breaks in our stories?

Yeah, yeah.

It's important to remember that we have two roles to play with respect to our life story.

We are both the main character, but we're also the narrator.

So while we only have so much control over the things that happen to us, we have somewhat more control over how we parse those experiences.

And shifting the chapter breaks of our lives means reframing the beginnings and endings of our experiences.

So while we're living our lives, it's hard to know whether we're towards the beginning of some experience versus towards the end of it.

But in retrospect, we can sort of make some decisions about how to chunk our lives into episodes and simply moving the beginning or ending of episodes can really recast its meaning.

You describe two kinds of stories that you call contamination stories and redemption stories.

And both these stories have to do with how we are arranging the chapter breaks of our lives.