"I knew it was special, but it didn't fit neatly with the regular narrative I had created about me, my choices, or my chances. I also learned later that the meaning I assigned to the experience was very different from the one others had. Same experience, different significance. As I tried to make sense of it, I realized something: our lives resemble a film with an unfinished script."
"We don't control what the camera captures, but we have complete editorial power over the story we tell. We can choose which scenes matter, how to frame each moment, which details to emphasize, and which to discard. Our film is always in the making, assembling what life brings regardless of the scripts we thought we'd written. That makes our film truly ours, irrespective of the events."
"Because of my neurobiological obsession, I realized the whole thing by remembering that the brain is fundamentally a prediction machine. Every moment, it asks: what comes next? These predictions are built on what we've stored from the past-not objective facts, but the memories we've decided matter. Yet which experiences does the brain select? The answer is deceptively simple- emotion. It's how we feel-the emotional charge attached to each moment-that determines whether and how deeply an experience gets encoded."
Lives can be shaped like films with unfinished scripts in which individuals select which moments to highlight, frame, or discard. Editorial choices determine personal narratives independently of captured events. The brain operates as a prediction machine that uses stored memories—not objective facts—to forecast the future. Emotion serves as the primary filter determining which experiences get encoded and how strongly. Identical events can hold different significance because of differing emotional charges. Consciously assigning different emotional weight to moments and deliberately celebrating positive experiences can override survival-biased memories and rewire neural predictions toward better outcomes.
Read at Psychology Today
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