Tonight is a big topic.

There's so many different ways to move into it.

I suppose I'll just start by saying that

human beings are storytelling beings.

We are beings that connect very well with each other. That's what gave us our great survival advantage, the fact that we can develop secure connections,

but also what we can do is we can in language, narrate the stories of our

lives, which creates a sense of a self and identity.

And the ability to construct an ongoing

coherent story of life is very much at the heart of what allows us to bond with each other to make sense of our lives, to plot out a purpose for our existence, and to make sense of why we're here. We are beings that know that we live in the shadow of death,

that we're going to die.

And so we also are burdened with the idea of how we establish a purpose

for our existence beyond merely survival of the species.

And we do that, we create that purpose in language

and the stories we tell, especially the stories we construct of our lives.

Now our lives are, of course, as there are 365 days a year with 24 hours and each of them, there are far more

events in our lives than we can possibly use in the narratives of our lives that we tell.

So we pick and we choose. We do a lot of editing and in fact while it's tempting to want to believe that that

editing is done consciously. In fact, the editing that constructs your identity, the story

you tell about yourself that gives you the sense of continual identity as you go through changes in life.

A lot of that is actually those decisions

are being made behind the scenes.

In fact, there's one little, one region of the brain called the hippocampus,

...