Cast an objective eye back over our lives, and, if we are brutally honest, it's a whole set of random events that brought us to where we are today. Yet if you ask someone, or even yourself, about that life we get a coherent story of cause and effect - the holiday that led to a career as a ski instructor, the missed train that got you talking to your future spouse or the serendipitous meeting outside a pub that kick started your career as a radio journalist.

We need to tell stories to survive, the argument goes, to make sense of the terrifying confusion that is our existence. So how deeply is this embedded in our psychology - can we design experiments to explore and explain our ability to make sense out of chaos?

In this week's Human Zoo, Michael Blastland delves into our storytelling brains - the story of our stories.

Producer: Toby Murcott
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4. Show less