Samah Karaki

Neuroscience Researcher (France & Lebanon) who took part in the conference 04: Storytelling: the Business of All?

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Samah Karaki is a French-Lebanese neuroscientist. She founded and heads the Social Brain Institute (SBI), an association that uses knowledge from cognitive science to manage environmental and social issues.

Her first book, “Le talent est une fiction” (Talent is a fiction), was published in 2023 on the label Nouveaux Jours, by Lattès (Le Livre de Poche, 2024). She deconstructs the mythology surrounding individual success stories.

— an interview by Vassili Silovic, Writer and Director of documentary films, recorded at Les Champs Libres (Rennes) in December 2023 in the framework of the serie “What stories for our time?”.

The narrative, with empathy.

« The creative act is actually to swim against my own current. »
Accept the complexity of the story to accept the other.

We are all storytellers and what I mean by that is that the minute we open our eyes to the world, we are perceiving and creating images and meanings. The difficulty is to perceive the world differently from what I already stored as perceptions. It’s easy for me to talk about the pains that I’ve experienced, to talk about the pains that are similar to the ones that I’ve experienced. What’s more difficult is to be able to get into the perspective of someone that I don’t know, of a group of people that I don’t know, that I don’t have shared experiences with.

The creative act is actually to swim against my own current, in a way, my own flow. And maybe, if I tell it this way, it sounds like something that comes with effort. But it could come from effort if I decide actively to look inside my thoughts and think: “What would you say? How would you behave? What would be the reasons that would make you behave the way that I am considering wrong?” And it could also come from the implicit knowledge that I can get through knowing you, through just the act of meeting and listening. And it comes with love, I should also love your story. It doesn’t sound like effort when we’re listening to loved ones. This is how I understand love: that I consider you as a complex person, I consider your story as complex as I could consider mine.

« Fiction can help me look at the external reasons that make people behave the way they do. And enlarges my empathy scale… »
The story: a shortcut to the existence and reality of the other.

I’m not doing it as a gift. I’m not living it as a gift. I’m doing it because I am sincerely open and interested in what you have to say. It doesn’t happen if I don’t meet you if I don’t ask you questions, if I don’t see you living around. And this can happen through literature, that I am delving into the reality of someone else. And the ability of fiction, actually, on us, that enlarges the perspective that we have of the world, because we kind of have a shortcut towards the existence and the reality of others.

The neuroscience and cognitive science, we have something called the fundamental attribution error. That when I behave, I see my behaviours with the external conditions. I explain my behaviours, putting them in the centre of conditions that led me to do stuff. But I have less compassion for others because I don’t see clearly the conditions, the external conditions. I attribute to their behaviour’s internal reasons, while I attribute to myself external ones.

Fiction can help me also look at the external reasons that make people behave the way they do. And enlarges my empathy scale to something that is larger than what I do usually for myself.

« I consider artists as people in the centre of life itself, and not at the corner of it. »
The art is political.

Artists are kind of engaged more than other people in this type of interaction with others. We have the idea of artists being narcissistic because they are delving continuously inside their own affects and their own feelings. But they actually are supposed to be sometimes getting out of their ego to be able to witness what also others around them experience. I think the art is political in the way that I should be able as an artist to go beyond my own experience and to see it situated somewhere. Even when I’m describing a family story, I’m placing this family inside its cultural and social network. That’s why it takes lots of knowledge to feel legitimate to talk about something. And this knowledge comes from life experiences themselves, from my openness and the openness of an artist to first accept that my perception is biased. And then to be humble enough to consider that anyone else than myself that didn’t have the same life as mine has something very interesting to teach me.

Tolstoï, who sometimes is a character somewhere in his book, but he works so hard to be able to, every time he gives the voice to another character, to completely shift the gaze to the young woman, to the child, to the man, to the military guy. And then he leaves a space for him to voice what he thinks about all of this. I kind of see it like as if Tolstoy said, “I want to say things. Okay, I’m going to put that voice inside the character so I don’t pollute the other gazes that should be around that character.” And that takes lots of humility, but it also takes lots of knowledge and lots of research. In order to create anything, we should also have a pool of experiences that cook somewhere, incubate, to call it incubation. And then we start experimenting because it doesn’t mean that I’m going to give this perception from nowhere. We experiment, we do trial and error, and then at some point I forget about myself. And at some point, I feel that this storytelling went beyond me. It takes lots of discipline.

« It takes lots of discipline, and it’s maybe in opposition to what we consider the sudden inspiration that comes from nowhere. »
Creating the story: a complex process.

It takes lots of discipline, and it’s maybe in opposition to what we consider the sudden inspiration that comes from nowhere. And it’s actually just the same exact process as building anything, as building any thought. Scientists do the same thing. It’s a process that is complex, and that of course relies on your past experiences and expertise. But it’s also following the same exact processes as building any material objects. Because you process, you do pilots of it, then you see if it works, if it fits.

The creative process, if you look at it in the brain, it’s not in the left or right brain. It’s actually engaging many circuits, executive circuits, that kind of make sense of what I’m doing, the default network that delves into my past experiences, and it’s what we call the imagination networks. But also, my salient network that is constantly reading information coming from the body and coming also from the environment around me. And they are interacting continuously with each other. If you’re looking at somebody painting for seven hours, it doesn’t have to be a creative process. It could be a technical, a technical autonomous process. Then from time to time, you look at that, you look at that, and you shift it in a way that makes more sense. And then the product of this is actually the result of a very complex process.

We like to see artistic talent as something that comes with a potential, and then the product kind of emerges from this potential. But the process in this is a very complex one. There is effort, but there’s also lots of pleasure.

There is desperation. There is sometimes the feeling that I am too stuck in my ability to look inside, to look from another perspective. And then you keep that, you go do something else, you get back to it, and you incubate again, and then you experiment again, and then you do essays and errors, and then something comes out. And this product is judged by others, it doesn’t belong to you anymore. The inspiration is kind of a collective. The process is in itself collective. But also, the appreciation of artistic product is also collective, because the making sense of it doesn’t belong to the artist anymore, once it’s put in front of the senses of other people.

Writing is a result of training. It doesn’t come from a sudden inspiration again. It’s a discipline, and then this exercise becomes easier with time.

And then also the processing of the negative emotion that comes from this being stuck, you train on it also and you go beyond it at some point. The way you read books, it’s also an exercise. You know, like how do you get inspired when you hear somebody telling you a story? How do you take notes of that? It’s all tactics that could be taught also, and that could be modelled by other people that they have their own ways of dealing with this writing expertise. It’s not something magical. It’s not something that comes from nowhere. It’s a process that we can use better tools to organize our thoughts.

«When I’m faced with uncertainty, my brain doesn’t like this void, and it will give me an answer. It will give me a story. »
To surrender to uncertainty to feed the story.

I don’t know who said that: choosing vs. excluding. It’s like, what do I choose to put my eye on? I’m excluding all the other visual perception that I can get, and this is going to be part of what I’m going to build my fiction around.

If you have a clear idea of where you want to go, then you’re not creating anymore. Just building something, and you know what you’re building at the end. This is what actually makes art, science, entrepreneurship, what we call the uncertainty fields. Because the condition for it to be interesting is that you are open for it to be uncertain. And this takes, again, energy. This takes energy to accept uncertainty.

When I’m faced with uncertainty, my brain doesn’t like this void, and it will give me an answer. It will give me a story. Doing good science, or really being in the creative potential, is to refuse that first story that comes to my mind, and say I’m going to keep this uncertainty going.

It needs for you to let go of the obsession, of the quality of the product itself. You can get back to that later, but you have to surrender to the uncertainty of what would this process right now give. Surrender to it, and then judge it later. We cannot be at the same time letting go to the uncertainty of the creation and judging what it could be at the end of the way.

« Acknowledging that it’s impossible for us to separate the impact of predispositions, from the impact of the opportunity that we had to cultivate this potential… »
Context = the impact of creation.

If I think: “I have a creative genius”, or if I think that: “I don’t have the creative genius”, when would I create better? Actually, the answer is that when I forget about this question, that when I’m not wondering whether I have it or not. Because the fixed idea of what creative potential and what intelligence is, this is what pollutes our process of our learning process, our creative process. It’s considering that they are fixed traits that we have or we don’t.

And then another reason, so of course, is to demystify the fact that we have a gene for something, or we have a part of the brain for something. We know that it’s complex, that we are genetically wired, biologically wired, to be shaped by our life experiences, to be shaped by our environments, by our encounters.

We are, by definition, plastic beings, and our brains and our body that could have this genius are not isolated from the rest of what we could get or not get. Acknowledging that it’s impossible for us to separate the impact of predispositions, from the impact of the opportunity that we had to cultivate this potential, makes it clear that we should stop being obsessed with the question of whether we have talent or not. Because anyway, who’s going to judge for the product of that talent?

It’s always responding for a historical moment where we…I always think about Lionel Messi and the Renaissance, like how would you describe his talent? Because he would not be useful at that time. And that everything that we consider genius, every time that we delve into the stories, the life stories of those people, we realize that they were just there at the right moment, surrounded by the right people. They did something out of this privilege, but they were at the centre of what would make them able to create something that is different. There is no solitary genius, nowhere in the history of science, of art. They are always situated in an ecosystem that represents and inspires and make the access to the creation easier.

« Collective story building is maybe more tiring, but it could end up more interesting – if there is an equal access to the parole, an equal access to the creation, and if there is no hierarchy in considering that a voice is more valuable than others. »
The collective construction of the narrative.

And what’s interesting for me, is this hierarchy that is the main reason for us to let go of the effort of building something. Because if I believe that you’re better than me, that idea will top me from forgetting about this comparison. So again, we cannot be at the same time accepting the uncertainty of the creation, and at the same time obsessed by the question of social competition.

Even athletic champions, when they are on the field, they forget about the competition. They are completely in the flow of the action. Maybe the second before I was in the competition, but the minute I started running, my brain is in the flow of the action. I’m just a body, and I’m not seeing. People around me are just shapes. This is what makes us go beyond ourselves. This is how kids play. When you see a baby playing with this rug, he’s not interested in any performance, but he’s completely in the flow of observing and exploring it. So, he is perceiving and creating something.

There’s something interesting that happens in the brain when I am thinking in the presence of others. We see higher activation because the social representation circuits are activated. And it actually brings a better quality to the arguments I’m giving. It makes me more demanding of myself. It has been tested in many circumstances. For example, jurors that are going to judge for an end, and we give them the opportunities to share their arguments. And we put diverse people there. They’re not belonging so we are not falling in the group-think bias. We see that the more diverse they are, the more information they will share, and the quality of information will get better. They’re tired after that. Because if I am building a story with you would not always agree with me. I will actually be more demanding for the quality of how to convince you that this is how it should go.

And when we listen to ourselves talking to others, we become more precise. If you’re trying to let somebody else understand your thoughts, you are getting it better. You are understanding your thoughts better. So that’s why collective story building is maybe more tiring, but it could end up more interesting. If there is an equal access to the parole, an equal access to the creation, and if there is no hierarchy in considering that a voice is more valuable than others. It’s not enough to be there creating together. I also have to make sure that everybody there is not wondering whether you have more talent than I do. We forgot about this obsession of diagnosis and of hierarchy, and we are in the process of creation. So, it becomes richer because I am delving into the pool of experience that I have, but it’s also getting inside yours.

« You perceive and create constantly, and have to accept that it doesn’t have to be perfect… »
Ideation & creation.

I think that it’s a very dangerous trap to believe that once I’m going to put something into a paragraph, it has to be perfect. Again, it’s a process. It’s the same when you want to quit the habit. You quit it one time and then you relapse and then you analyse why you relapsed, and you try to shape your environment differently. This is how it goes in the brain.

You perceive and create, perceive and create constantly. To accept that it doesn’t have to be perfect, takes away all the psycho-emotional pressure of making it the right paragraph. This comes also with this myth of innate talent and genius that they heard it somewhere. If we come to the Greek mythology, to the idea that we have it today, that I got it and I put it just through the night, the morning I printed my book and I sent it to the editor.

Your perception of your own product is subjective and is related to sometimes your affective states, sometimes to your physiological states. I find it a bit dangerous to separate the ideation from the creation.

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