I speak or write often, here, in comments on other sites, and on Quora of the brain's preference for narrative over facts. I don't think I had taken it to this extreme, but I think there is a great deal to this. It offers some better explanation for why schizophrenics cannot revert to the reality of the rest of us, even given a huge assemblage of facts.
Update: It came to me afterward that this is similar to CS Lewis's idea in Meditation in a Toolshed.
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I was just reading "Meditation in a Toolshed" this afternoon, and thinking that I haven't shared that one with my kids yet.
I'm sure you've seen the BBC documentary "Century of the Self." If you haven't, you can find it here. It's long, but fascinating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s
Essentially the overarching theme is how deeply disturbing Freud's theories were, because they convinced governments worldwide that human beings were monsters driven by irrational, un- or sub-conscious drives they could never fully understand. Wild and vicious programs were carried out by various governments, including our own, to try to figure out how to deal with this.
Now this guy proposes that, actually, there's no subconscious at all. There's just the top-level story in your head, and that's it. All that fuss and nonsense was for nothing.
It occurs to me that there is still something more to be said, though. Philosophically, the story in your head can be good or bad as measured by its effect on your health and happiness. Psychologically, there may be no reason to prefer one to another.
Pragmatically, however, we can see that some are in fact better to have -- or if you like they are valuable, and other ones are costly.
I used to talk about patriotism as being like this. Your nation may have done great things, or bad ones, but just as you need to forgive your parents and love them you need to forgive and love your country. This is for the same reason: this is what produced you, and if it's damned and unforgivable, there's no way you can come out whole and clean yourself.
Lots of these stories people carry in their heads can be judged in this way. Oddly enough, it is a kind of psychotherapy: stop telling yourself the bad stories, and learn to tell yourself the healthy ones. Also we return to a kind of human nature, then, because it is something about us that makes certain kind of stories reliably helpful or harmful.
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