You Are Not Ordinary

Hidden Brain

This episode explores how humans naturally construct life stories using the 'hero's journey' framework—originating from Joseph Campbell’s monomyth and popularized in films like Star Wars and Harry Potter. Psychologist Be

Key takeaways

• Ben Rogers' research shows people who view their lives as hero’s journeys report significantly higher life meaning and lower depressive symptoms.

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the early days of Soviet cinema, a filmmaker conducted an experiment that would change our understanding of the human mind. Lev Kulishav showed an audience a short film featuring a famous actor. The footage of the actor was always the same, a single, unmoving, and entirely neutral expression. But the filmmaker intercut the shot with three different images. A bowl of hot soup, a child in a child. and a woman reclining on a sofa. Even though the actor's face never changed, the audience was mesmerized by his performance. When paired with the soup, they saw a man gripped by hunger. When paired with a coffin, they saw his face transformed by grief. They didn't see a sequence of unrelated pictures. They saw an integrated story. The human brain is wired to make connections like this. We want to see the frames as part of a narrative. narrative. And so we invent the connective tissue. We turn frame one and an unrelated frame two into a cohesive story. This psychological tendency also shapes how we see our own lives. We are the editors of our own personal documentaries, constantly splicing together random chaotic events into a narrative. Depending on our personalities and temperaments, our documentaries might be comedies or tragedies. They might be gripping tales or boring stories where nothing much happens. But all of this raises a question. If we are the one sitting in the editing room, are we making the best use of the footage? Are we choosing to tell the right stories? This week on Hidden Brain, and in a companion story on Hidden Brain Plus, the tales we tell about our lives and why some stories turn out to be better for us than others. When we turn on the TV or read a novel or buy a ticket to a movie, we're in search of a good story. A narrative that will capture our imagination, transport us to a different world, offer a satisfying resolution. The best stories create this magic. How do they do this? At Boston College, Benjamin Rogers studies how narratives generate meaning and significance in our minds and the implications of the stories we tell about our own lives. Ben Rogers, welcome to Hidden Brain. Hi, Shanker. It's great to be here. Ben, I understand that starting when you were a teenager, you've been interested in stories. In the books that you've read about the craft, especially when it comes to the craft of filmmaking, you learned that there was one storytelling framework that audiences find especially compelling. Now, this framework shows up in ancient literature and modern tales. I'm wondering if we can start with a story like Harry Potter. How does the Harry Potter story follow this storytelling framework? Sure, yeah. So it starts off with Harry at the time that you meet him. he's an orphan boy. He's living with his uncle, an aunt, and cousin, but he's just, you know, kind of put down upon, doesn't have anything special about him. But then mysterious things keep happening, and then he ends up having a moment of shift. And that's when a series of wizards and wizard-adjacent people tell him that he's actually, unbeknownst to him, a wizard, and he needs to go off to Hogwarts a school to learn how to craft magic and to take up the mantle by his parents that he didn't know a lot about. And so over the course of the first story and over the series, he learns, he faces a series of challenges in terms of facing monsters and people who want to hurt him and hurt his friends. But he learns magic and he ends up transformed and really embracing the idea that he's there to help others and become someone who can stand up to fight for the little guy. And this is one of those stories that both within an individual novel or a movie, but across the entire series, he follows the main elements of what we call the hero's journey. One of the things that you and others have pointed out is a hallmark of the hero's journey is not just about the plot and the events and the narrative and the things that the hero does, but an internal change that happens within the hero. Talk about this, that the internal change that happens within the person is as much the story of the hero's journey as much as the action of the plot, if you will. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's one of the secret powers of the hero's journey, or maybe one of the reasons it's such a popular framework, is this idea of it allows storywriters to make manifest an internal change via some sort of external, obvious, sometimes fantastical version. So in the case of Harry Potter, we see this boy who does not feel like he has any powers, is not important or interesting in any way, and he comes to realize that actually, there is something special about him. But that's not enough for the story. What needs to be more is he needs to learn what to do with that power, how he can make friends, how he can bring along people. And so the magic and his strength that he grows in that area ends up paralleling his internal transformation as he grows up into a young man and figures out how to be truly a hero both in terms of how he treats other people. But the story represents that in terms of the challenges he faces and the literal transformation he has in terms of his powers. You know, I'm thinking about the story now for the first time in a slightly different fashion because I've long known that the story of Harry Potter is a story of magic. It's a story about wizards and all kinds of magical spells. But as you're talking now, I'm realizing that part of what the magic really is about is about this internal realization, this transformation that happens within Harry. When he realizes the power that he has within himself, that's where the magic actually is. Absolutely. And you see this sort of on two tracks, but the main focus is that, you know, while it's exciting to watch someone like Harry Potter face magical, you know, face down dragons and face down monsters and Voldaort, but what really brings people back to the story time and time again is this idea that you're watching someone transform and learn and figure out how to be an adult, how to be someone who is worth wanting to model your life after. And the hero's journey is the way to represent. that psychological change on a broader, more adventurous, exciting way that people want to experience on both levels. In the 1940s ban, the mythologist Joseph Campbell looked at a variety of myths across different cultures. Tell me what he did and what he found. Yes, so Joseph Campbell was a professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College, and he worked in comparative mythology and religion. So he's looking at some of the most enduring ancient stories across. the globe, so not just in terms of the West, but looking at all these stories across various areas and various cultures. And what he found was when he was looking at all of these myths and looking at these enduring stories, that there seemed to be the same basic plot line. And he ended up calling this the monomyth, but that's what we call the hero's journey. And what he attributes this to is this idea of, you know, birth and death and separating from yourself in the past. and these stories are able to represent this really profound human condition in a way that replicates and shows up. So while the individual aspects of the story might vary, Campbell was able to say, look, look at these various stories from all these countries across the world. They actually follow the same plotline in a really interesting way, which he wrote in his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which is one of the most popular narrative psychology or narrative, maybe even philosophy books that exist today. And so if you look at a story like Homer's Odyssey or the Ramayana from India or the King Arthur story or even the Bible, Joseph Campbell would argue that in some ways, you know, perhaps some of these are religious texts and some of these are just stories, but they all follow the same basic arc, if you will. Absolutely. And if you ever read Hero with a Thousand Faces, I think what's most, what's really powerful about that book is it's told through examples from myths that you've heard. of and from myths that at least I had not heard of or had not learned while I was in school. And I think that speaks to the power of this, this idea that all of these stories, even stories you may not have ever imagined or may not ever heard of otherwise, actually are all speaking the same language or using the same underlying plot. I understand that Joseph Campbell's work has influenced generations of Hollywood screenwriters and directors, and that includes George Lucas, who made Star Wars? Yes, absolutely. George Lucas really attributes a lot of the success of Star Wars to Joseph Campbell, and I believe they became friends, or at least George Lucas saw Campbell as a mentor as he went along. And actually, there was a speech that I really loved that George Lucas gave, I think, in 85, in which he mentioned that he had been working on many, many drafts of Star Wars. And he just couldn't quite get it to work. There was something that wasn't clicking. and maybe in his struggles and trying to figure out how to improve the story, he actually came across the hero with a thousand faces, and suddenly it all clicked. And suddenly the story made sense. He knew how he needed to structure the plot and the overall arc of those first three films. And he even went so far as to call Joseph Campbell his Yoda, the mentor that he looked to in terms of how to tell a good story. When we come back, we'll use the example of Star Wars to unpack the discrete elements of the hero's journey. We'll also look at how this frame, work can shape the stories we tell about our own lives. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. From time immemorial, people have told stories in which a brave but uncertain figure sets out on a quest, heading into the unknown in search of treasures, both external and internal. At Boston College's Carroll School of Management, Ben Rogers studies the way people make meaning from their lives. He draws some of the inspiration. for this work from great books and movies that show us how characters make meaning from their journeys. Ben, according to Joseph Campbell's framework, the hero's journey has 17 elements. When you and your collaborator studied the phenomenon, you condense those elements into seven elements. The first is what you call the emergence of a protagonist. Let's use the Star Wars movies as an example. How does Luke Skywalker emerge as a protagonist of the story? So, yes, we begin with the idea of just someone having a clear and defined character and an identity. And specifically in a hero's journey, that often starts with the protagonist being relatively unknown, or at least not remarkable in any way that they might be aware of. And Luke Skywalker, to me, is one of the prototypical examples of the protagonist. And when we meet him in Star Wars, he's a, I believe he's a farmer on a moisture farm on Tatouine, a very set-aside planet. He does not have anything that seems remarkable or magic about him. And in fact, when we first see him, he's really just dealing with the struggles and the chores that he has to face. And it does not seem like he's destined for greatness in any meaningful way. I want to play your clip from that first Star Wars film called A New Hope. In this scene, the wise elder, Obi-Wan Kenobi and the young farm boy Luke Skywalker have just viewed a holographic message from a desperate Princess Leia pleading with them for help. You must learn the ways of the force if you're to come with me to Alderan. Alderan. I'm not going to Alderan. I'm going to get home. It's late. I'm in for it as it is. I need your help, Luke. She needs your help. I'm getting too old for this sort of thing. Can't get involved? I've got work to do. It's not that I like the empire. I hate it, but there's nothing I can do about it right now. Talk about the idea that in many of these accounts of the hero's journey, the hero is initially reluctant to get involved. man. Yes. So in Joseph Campbell's version, this is called Refusal of the Call. And while it's not explicitly in our version of the condensed hero's journey, it's still a very significant part of this initial moment of shift or change that the protagonist faces. And I think it's important because people are often dealing with how do we handle huge changes in our lives? And we know from psychological research, that's very difficult for people to do. And so I think that being such a part of the hero's journey is really important because it feels authentic to the audience members. If they were imagining how they might experience someone going, actually, you think you're a farmer, but you're destined for greatness, you might initially go, whoa, I don't know if that's quite true. And so I think that being part of the hero's journey is supposed to mimic the human experience of how do we actually deal with these massive changes when they're thrust upon us. I'm going to play another clip from A New Hope. In this scene, Luke Skywalker returns home to his aunt and uncle's farm, only to find the homestead destroyed and his relatives killed by imperial forces. Obi-Wan Kenobi consult him. There's nothing you could have done, Luke, had you been there? You'd have been killed, too, and the droids would now be in the hands of the empire. Come with you to Alderman. There's nothing for me here now. I want to learn the ways of the force and become a Jedi like my father. So this marks a moment where the reluctant hero is reluctant no longer ban. What's going on here in terms of the hero's journey? What's going on here is Luke, in this case, is finally being pushed beyond his refusal of the call. At a certain point, while he might be reluctant to embrace what has been thrust upon him in terms of potentially becoming a Jedi, now that his aunt and uncle have been killed and he has to figure out what to do next, his past life is no longer tenable. There's no way he can go back to what. And, you know, he wanted to, so he no longer is really able to refuse that call. And in a sense, this makes his quest very simple. In terms of what he should do, he wants to avenge the murder of his aunt and uncle and become powerful and be able to do that. He's using this finally kick out the door in order of, I can't go back, but now I need to really embrace and grow and learn and eventually transform. And I think you see this again and again in different versions of the hero's story. protagonist reaches effectively a point of no return. You know, there's no going back to the earlier life. That door has been closed. The only way to move now is forward. Yes. While all of us would like to think that when we presented with a great opportunity, that we wouldn't sort of shirk our duties and try to live on our current lives, often what happens in the real world and what's mirrored in our narratives is that we do need that push out the door. We need to be able to not go back and have the courage, or at least the lack of fear, to start facing the challenges. I think that's one of the things that's represented in the hero's journey that, like the refusal of the call, is really very authentic to the human experience. We talked earlier about how Star Wars was explicitly modeled on the hero's journey, as described by the mythologist Joseph Campbell. Another classic hero's journey is found in the Lord of the Rings, the series of novels by J.R.R. Tolkien. In this tale, the protagonist, as Frodo Baggins, undergoes a shift and sets out on a quest, but he doesn't go alone. He finds allies. Set up the premise of the story for us, Ben, and explain why finding allies is an important part of the hero's journey. Sure. So in the telling of Lord of the Rings, and I'll make sure I try to represent it as accurately as I can, so Frodo is living at the Shire. He's living a pretty idyllic life, not really facing any monumental challenges or that many interesting stories. He is thrust upon him this challenge by Gandalf, who's a wizard, and he's told that he needs to help on this big quest to help destroy the one ring to rule them all. Evil is stirring in Mordor. The ring has awoken. It's heard its master's call. But he was destroyed. Sauron was destroyed. No, fraud. The spirit of Sauron endured. And Frodo obviously doesn't want to do that. He has enjoyed his life and has continuing to enjoy it, but he is pushed out by Gandalf. And along the way, he ends up making a series of other allies, Samwise Gamji, Mary and Pip, then he meets others like Aragon, Legalis, Gimley, and lots of other people. And so this is representing this idea of allies is, while we might think of the hero as like a solitary hero on a journey, what actually is an intimate part of the hero's journey is that the hero's journey is that. This is idea that no hero walks alone. They often only reach the distances that they're trying to reach when they're helped along by other people. And in particular, that help can sometimes be kind support, but can also be sort of being pushed out the door towards greatness. Now, along the way, Frodo encounters innumerable challenges. And of course, this is an essential component of the hero's journey. Absolutely. Facing challenges is both representative of the human life, but it's also what makes a really interesting story. I have a young four-year-old daughter, and we read lots of stories at night, and while the stories are fun and clever, they often don't have a lot of challenges or stakes about them, and so they're not stories that I'm always jumping to repeat. But Heroes' Journeys, on the other hands, are these stories filled with monsters and nemeses and all of these different things that people are trying to overcome, and it gives it a sense of excitement, but also a sense of things could go wrong. We're riding a knife's edge here, and I think that's what makes a really powerful story. Talk about the idea that as the protagonist faces these challenges, the protagonist undergoes personal transformations. And in some ways, that is key to the hero's journey. So it'd be one thing to face challenges and just immediately win them. And that might be a satisfying story on some level, but that wouldn't be a story that people might come back to. What we really like to see in our protagonist is this idea that we face challenges, we face things that we don't know if we can overcome, and we realize that as a result of facing those challenges, we become transformed. Now, in a lot of stories, that's a literal transformation. So you might gain magical powers, gain superpowers in various superhero films, but that often parallels or goes along with a personal transformation of realizing maybe you're stronger than you thought you were or realizing some sort of depth of character that might not have ever been apparent had you not had to face these challenges and figure out, can you face them down on your own? And this is true for Frodo in The Lord of the Rings. He starts out being, you know, small and inexperienced and sheltered, and he eventually discovers, in some ways, the hero within. It's one of the things I love most about Lord of the Rings is the idea that Frodo, as a hobbit, you know, is both sort of unknown and unremarkable in terms of his character at the start, but he's also pretty unremarkable in terms of his stature. The hobbits are literally small. And what's great about the Lord of the Rings and the journey that he goes on is Frodo and some of the other hobbits as well end up being some of the most heroic characters. They're the ones who stand up to take the ring to try to destroy it at the end when other people are too nervous. So both in terms of their stature, but also in terms of their character, more importantly, they go through this transformation and end up being the ones that people really remember and identify with. So in the stories that we've talked about so far, you can see the similarities. You know, Harry Potter starts out as this orphan kid who basically has been ignored and discarded by society. Luke Skywalker starts off as this farm boy. Frodo Baggins is this unremarkable hobbit. And you can start to see now why these stories appeal to so many people, because people feel, you know, I am unremarkable, I am ordinary. And what these stories are telling you is, you are not. Absolutely. I think there is a strong degree of identification. And the most powerful stories are the ones that, while it might be circumstances that we never actually find ourselves in, it's really enjoyable to imagine what would I do in that case. And the hero's journey kind of takes you from this unremarkable baseline protagonist, farmer, orphan, etc., to something more powerful. And if you follow along in that journey as the reader, you're also going on that journey. journey yourself, where while you might not be the one who's literally gaining magical powers or superpowers, but you're in the perspective of the reader, and it feels like you're developing some deep personal insight by following the steps of this journey. The seventh and final element of a hero's journey that you've identified involves leaving a legacy. What is this idea, Ben? Yes, the legacy is this idea of making some sort of positive impact. And in a lot of heroes journeys, people might think that it ends where they become transformed, they gain some magical superpowers and they defeat their enemy, but most of those stories don't end right there. They actually go on a little bit longer to show how the hero goes back to their home community to share either literal or metaphorical treasures with those around them. They often repair relationships that they had. They help people with, whether that's the new depth of character or their new powers, they're able to give back in a really profound way to show that, yes, you've transformed personally, but that also can transform the communities around us. Does that happen with Frodo and the Lord of the Rings? Yes, so in the books, Frodo ends up going back and helping to restore the Shire. So as a result of the events that transpire in the story, the Shire is destroyed or at least put in terms of really bad circumstances. And so Frodo actually returns back to his homeland at the end to help restore his homeland and sort of rescue his fellow hobbits. Just as screenwriters and directors make choices about how