The Overlap between Storytelling and Critical Thinking

When the facts do not always speak for themselves

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It’s often said that we don’t see the world as it is — we see the world as we are. 

Author Anaïs Nin is frequently quoted, but she isn’t the only one. Across psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience, the same idea keeps resurfacing: we don’t encounter reality directly. We interact with it through a filtered lens — perception.

Our perception isn’t neutral.

It’s shaped by what we believe, the assumptions we carry, the stories we’ve inherited, our memories, emotions, culture, identity, and ego. I find this both fascinating and unsettling. It suggests an uncomfortable truth: we’re not walking around in objective reality. We’re navigating a version, filtered and edited, moment by moment.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth, writing in The New Scientist and elsewhere, describes perception as a form of “controlled hallucination.” The brain isn’t passively receiving the world; it’s actively predicting it, updating those predictions only when necessary. Long before conscious reasoning kicks in, the story is already being drafted.

Daniel Kahneman’s work reinforces this. His research shows how heuristics — mental shortcuts — and cognitive biases shape our judgment automatically. We feel first. We decide quickly. We rationalise later.

Why This Matters More Than Ever?

When I sit with all of this, two things feel essential for navigating the modern world.

First, an awareness of the stories we live inside — and the ones we tell ourselves. Second, our ability to think critically within those stories.

By critical thinking, I don’t mean eliminating bias or becoming perfectly objective. That’s a myth. Bias isn’t a bug we can remove; it’s part of how human cognition works. What is possible is recognising that bias exists, noticing how it operates, and slowing our thinking down enough to question it.

Critical thinking, then, isn’t about purity. It’s about reflecting on our thinking and processes.

Critical thinking is thinking about your thinking while you’re thinking in order to make your thinking better. — Dr Richard Paul

Critical Thinking as Narrative Literacy

I’ve started to think of critical thinking as narrative literacy.

An operating system of sorts. A way of noticing the stories we inherit and allow to run quietly in the background.

When I consider critical thinking in relation to storytelling, I realise storytelling isn’t just something we do for entertainment or persuasion. It’s how we organise meaning. It’s how we make sense of ambiguity and uncertainty. 

When people say, “Everything happens for a reason,” what they’re often doing is story-making — stitching events together so the world feels coherent, manageable, survivable.

Uncertainty is guaranteed. Meaning is not, and I think we would do well to recognise sometimes we manufacture it.

That’s not necessarily a flaw. It’s human.

The Questions That Slow Us Down

If we accept we are story-generating machines, then critical thinking becomes the ability to pause and ask better questions about the stories we’re inhabiting.

Stories that affect how we organise through our politics, how we show up in our relationships, with love, empathy and compassion, how we choose to spend our time, energy and resources. 

If stories are the engine behind what we give our attention to, then perhaps the questions we should consider are:

• Who benefits from this story?

• Who plays the role of the protagonist?

• What’s being framed as normal, inevitable, or beyond question?

• What alternative story could also fit the same facts and figures?

Facts and figures matter, of course. But on their own, they rarely persuade. Stories organise facts into meaning. Stories decide what gets emphasised, what gets ignored, and what feels emotionally true.

We often think of stories as having a start, middle and end, but stories don’t exist in isolation. They overlap, sometimes start and stop mid-sentence. They’re inherited, challenged, revised, and abandoned.

A Question to Sit With

So here’s something I’ve been thinking about and intend to do more of over the next few days.

What’s one story you once believed — about yourself, about others, about how the world works — that you’ve since changed your mind on? What caused that shift?