Humans are restless interpreters who transform raw sensory data into coherent worlds. Explore the cognitive mechanisms, cultural frameworks, and belief systems that drive our fundamental quest for meaning.
Dan P. McAdams examines the “redemptive self” as a central narrative identity in American culture, where suffering is transformed into personal growth and social legacy. The work explores how cultural scripts shape personal storytelling and the psychological drive for generativity.
A call for a cultural psychology that moves beyond computational models to focus on narrative and meaning. Bruner explores how humans use stories and ‘folk psychology’ to navigate their social and cultural worlds.
A collection of seven narrative case studies examining neurological difference not as a set of deficits, but as alternative ways of inhabiting the world and constructing personal identity.
Collective memory is not a literal, biological storehouse shared across brains, but rather a symbolic process by which a society reconstructs its past to make sense of its present and ensure its future continuity. This article explores how these shared narratives are formed, maintained, and adapted across generations to provide a sense of belonging and purpose.
Belief is the fundamental architecture of the human experience, serving as the internal map through which individuals navigate an overwhelmingly complex reality. These mental constructs are rarely the result of purely objective analysis, instead woven from cognitive shortcuts, social inheritances, and emotional needs. To understand how these frameworks are built and why they are so resistant to change, we must look at the intersection of evolutionary psychology, social dynamics, and the brain’s inherent drive for meaning-making.
At its core, human experience is an active process of constructing meaning from chaotic sensory data, a fundamental cognitive drive known as sense-making. This process reduces uncertainty, helps us navigate the world, and shapes our individual reality through interpretation.
The universal human drive for meaning is fulfilled through existential interpretation, a process deeply embedded in cultural systems of symbols and myths that structure our understanding of reality.
Symbolic thinking is the unique human cognitive ability to construct a secondary landscape of meaning from our physical reality. This fundamental process allows us to represent abstract ideas, share complex concepts, and build the cultural frameworks that define human understanding.
Mental models are internal representations that help humans interpret complex sensory input into a coherent reality. These cognitive frameworks simplify existence, allowing us to anticipate outcomes and make sense of our surroundings, shaping our individual understanding of the world.
