Excerpt From The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr.

Beneath the level of consciousness we’re a riotous democracy of mini-selves which, writes the neuroscientist Professor David Eagleman, are ‘locked in chronic battle’ for dominion. Our behaviour is ‘simply the end result of the battles’. All the while our confabulating narrator ‘works around the clock to stitch together a pattern of logic to our daily lives: what just happened and what was my role in it?’ Fabrication of stories, he adds, ‘is one of the key businesses in which our brain engages. Brains do this with the single minded goal of getting the multifaceted actions of the democracy to make sense.’ …

Our multiplicity is revealed whenever we become emotional. When we’re angry, we’re like a “different person with different values and goals in a different reality than when we feel nostalgic, depressed or excited. As adults, we’re used to such weird shifts in selfhood and learn to experience them as natural and fluid and organised. But for children, the experience of transforming from one person to another, without any sense of personal volition, can be deeply disturbing. It’s as if a wicked witch has cast an evil spell, magicking us from princess to witch.