>> reporter: as it happens, jack hitt learned a lot of things growing in charleston. most of all, well, yes. the art of spinning stories from the mundane and sometimes bizarre reality around him. he's done it successfully in books, magazines and on the radio as a regular contributor to "this american life." all leading the "atlantic" magazine to dub him "one of america's best storytellers." >> when i was 15 i was sent away to a small rural town in tennessee, a reform school, actually. but that's another story. >> reporter: and now he's doing it in a one-man show that not only tells true and sometimes astonishing tales but also examines the latest brain science that tries to explain what makes him and each of us a story-telling animal. it's called "making up the truth." "making up the truth." now you don't mean literally, you don't mean it like lying, right? >> it's more like pre-lying. what i discovered when i was doing some research a few fear years ago about storytelling and how the brain narrates stories in our head, is that a great deal of sort of pre-editing happ

. >> jack hitt is next on booktv. he recounts america's many amateur inventors and tankers from benjamin frankel's experiment with electricity to mark zuckerberg's social media website. induorot o tchens, basements, and garages. this is about 45 minutes. [inaudible] >> so when i hit the age we start askingourselwho i wh ih17, all my friends could claim to be, you kno descendents of robert e. lee, or charles holdsworth pinkney or something like tha i didn't hear around the family house we h manfms mo a etok my mother grew exhausted with my testing in sydney to see mary pringle, an ancient cousin and amateur genealogists, primed onotraiosity i rd afte me re t ias esd a large sheet of paper bearing a set of concentric circles. in the center, mary wrote my name. and in the immediate out a circle divided path, she wrote anexleictoo my two a. rcheroth ae y four grandparents. we filled out as far as we could in every direction. in that area where her family and mine converged, a seemingly unfounded wedge flew backwards to sc