by Jonah Lehrer
In this book, we’ll deconstruct the most alluring mysteries. We’ll look at how artists, magicians, musicians, teachers, and storytellers use the unknown and uncertain to capture our attention. We have all had the experience of lusting after a mystery, whether it’s binge-watching Law & Order or being moved by a poem we can’t explain. This book aims to provide a theory for why those experiences matter.
We’ll begin with the simplest form of mystery, which is the mystery box. In essence, it’s the generation of interest by hiding some crucial information from the audience, such as the identity of the murderer or the outcome of the slot machine. The technique helps explain the rules of baseball and the appeal of L.O.L. dolls. It’s been used to great effect by Steve Jobs and George Lucas. These boxes arrest us because we want to know what’s inside.
But mystery boxes aren’t the only way to hook the audience. The second strategy we’ll look at is the magic trick. This approach creates questions about the creative process. We see the object vanish, or the woman sawed in half—the mystery is how it happened. It’s a technique used by magicians, of course, but also by painters, directors, and architects. They like to make art whose making we can’t explain.
We’ll turn next to desirable difficulty, the strategy of creating mystery by subverting our expectations. Our culture is overstuffed with content that aims to please. But the stuff that lasts is more difficult, challenging us to make sense of forms we’ve never before seen. It doesn’t matter if it’s an Emily Dickinson poem or Goodnight Moon or an iconic car advertisement: the work remains interesting because it’s a struggle to understand.
And then there’s the mystery of a complicated character. From Hamlet to Tony Soprano, the Mona Lisa to Walter White—we are fascinated by those characters full of subtleties and contradictions. They are interesting because we can’t figure them out. What’s more, there’s compelling evidence that these imaginary characters teach us how to deal with the mysteries of real people.
The last technique we’ll explore is deliberate ambiguity. We’ll look at Beatles lyrics and medieval coded manuscripts, romantic sonnets and J. D. Salinger short stories. What these works have in common is the way they suggest multiple interpretations, captivating us with their exquisite uncertainty.
These strategies represent the different hooks of mystery. Although they can take on countless different forms, they share the same goal: hooking the audience with the unknown and unknowable, turning our prediction errors into immersive entertainment.
However, the best cultural mysteries combine these techniques, using multiple hooks to generate a lasting sense of wonder. They might start with a mystery box, but also rely on opaque characters and ambiguity. Or maybe they feature a magic trick and deliberate difficulty. Once this happens, the mystery stops being something we solve and becomes an infinite game, a work we can return to again and again. The mystery persists.
This ability to grapple with mystery is an essential human skill, a cognitive talent that sets the best thinkers apart. In this book, we’ll learn how such passionate curiosity can be taught. We’ll visit an inner-city school in Chicago that has dramatically improved its test scores by cultivating a sense of mystery in its students. We’ll meet a car mechanic who can solve every mechanical failure because he never stops asking questions. We’ll discover why difficult literature makes us more empathetic and playing with infinite games can make us more creative. In the twenty-first century, it’s not about what you know. It’s about knowing what you don’t.
John Keats, the Romantic poet, famously described Shakespeare’s greatest gift as “Negative Capability,” which he defined as the ability to live with “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”27 In Keats’s reading, Shakespeare had no interest in simple truths; he wasn’t concerned when his plots became confusing or his characters acted in unpredictable ways. Rather, he wanted to hook his audience with the hardest questions, creating whodunits that never reveal who did it. Shakespeare was one of those writers who, as Keats put it, embraced “the burden of the mystery” in his writing, which is why his plays still haunt us.
The success of such art is a kind of mirror: by giving us what we want, it shows us who we are. In this whole universe, we might be the only ones who like to create things we don’t understand.
I. When Agatha was first reported missing, the papers described her as “a woman novelist” and mistakenly described her most recent book as Who Killed Ackroyd?
II. The crime writer Dorothy L. Sayers, after reviewing the clues of the case, concluded that it was likely a “voluntary disappearance.…[It] may be so cleverly staged as to be exceedingly puzzling—especially, as here, we are concerned with a skillful writer of detective stories.”15 Sayers could recognize a good setup when she saw one. And this was a very good setup. Too good, perhaps.
III. Otto Penzler, the coauthor of Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection, says that Poe was “the first writer to invent the detective story in its pure form.… Although there are clearly elements of the detective story in other stories, such as ‘The Rifle’ by William Leggett, Poe was the first to condense it all and put it all together.”21
IV. Such are the ironies of natural selection: no matter how lofty our ideas get, you don’t have to look too far before it all comes back to sugar and orgasms.
CHAPTER 1 THE MYSTERY BOX
Nothing whets the intelligence more than a passionate suspicion, nothing develops all the faculties of an immature mind more than a trail running away into the dark.
—STEFAN ZWEIG1
Ryan was three years old when he began starring in videos about his toys. The clips are exactly what you’d expect: In his first video, Ryan picks out a LEGO Duplo train at the toy store. He opens the box and clicks the plastic pieces together. He pushes the toy back and forth on the carpet. Then he knocks it over. The video ends, about four minutes later, as Ryan’s boredom sets in.
The early archive of Ryan ToysReview is a testament to the fickle preferences of toddlers. There are some Thomas the Tank Engine scenes, messy Play-Doh moments, and assorted Pixar characters in the bath. The videos are shaky, barely edited, and have no narrative beyond the tragic arc of every new toy, which children love most before it’s opened.
If Ryan had stopped here, he’d be just another obscure toddler unboxing toys for strangers. (There are tens of thousands of “toy review” channels on YouTube.) But everything changed with Ryan’s thirty-third video, created four months after his parents started filming his playtime. For this clip, Ryan’s mother decided to do something a little different. The video begins with Ryan sleeping in his bed. His mom wakes him up to reveal a gigantic papier-mâché egg plastered with Disney stickers. Ryan tears open the egg and begins pulling out a random assortment of toys. There’s a Fisher-Price garage, dozens of die-cast cars, and a big yellow dump truck. Once the egg is emptied—this takes most of the seven minutes—Ryan briefly plays with the cars on his bedroom floor. It’s hyperconsumerism at its most inane.
But this short video is insanely popular. Since it was posted on July 1, 2015, the clip has attracted more than a billion views. I’ve watched it countless times with my young son, who eventually memorized the entire sequence of toys pulled from the egg. (“Next up is Mack the Truck!”) Ryan’s parents credit the surprise-egg video with launching Ryan ToysReview, one of the most viewed YouTube channels in the United States with nearly 27 million subscribers and more than 42.2 billion views. In 2017, Ryan ToysReview generated an estimated $26 million in income.2 Target and Walmart now sell Ryan’s World–branded surprise eggs.I
Success breeds imitation. The surprise-toy egg has become a leading category on YouTube Kids. (Because the app allows young children to choose their own videos, it can help us understand what kids want to watch.) There’s the “Giant Princess Surprise Egg by Disney Toys Review” (297 million views), the “Truck Car Toy Surprise Eggs” by ToyPudding (90 million views), and the “GIANT MY LITT
LE PONY Surprise Eggs Compilation Play Doh” (121 million views). Each video might feature a different assortment of the latest playthings, but they all rely on the same crude narrative hook: presents are hidden inside an egg. Nobody knows what toy will be pulled out next.
Why are egg videos so compulsively entertaining, at least for young children? The explanation is rooted in the appeal of mystery. The surprise egg, after all, is just a means of producing prediction errors. Will Ryan pull out Lightning McQueen next? Why is there a plane amid the mess of Hot Wheels?
In Hollywood, this is known as the mystery box technique. As defined by the writer and director J. J. Abrams—he’s best known for creating Lost and rebooting Star Trek and Star Wars—a mystery box is any contained secret that drives the story forward. It’s the meaning of Rosebud and the location of the groom in The Hangover; the look of the great white shark in Jaws—we don’t fully see the beast until eighty minutes into the movieII—and the identity of Keyser Söze in The Usual Suspects. And then there’s Star Wars: A New Hope, Abrams’s favorite example. “The droids meet the mysterious woman. Who’s that? We don’t know. Mystery box! Then you meet Luke Skywalker. He gets the droid, you see the holographic image. You learn, oh! It’s a message. She wants to find Obi-Wan Kenobi. He’s her only hope. But who the hell’s Obi-Wan Kenobi? Mystery box!”3 Abrams’s point is that Star Wars, like most suspenseful movies, lurches from one unknown to another, creating narrative moments in which information is intentionally withheld. The story is compelling because of what it hides.
Abrams first discovered the power of mystery boxes as a child, when his grandfather gave him Tannen’s Magic Mystery Box. “The premise behind the Mystery Magic Box was the following: fifteen dollars buys you fifty dollars’ worth of magic,” Abrams remembers in his TED Talk on the subject. “Which is a savings.” But Abrams has never opened the Magic Mystery Box. It still sits, in the original packaging, on a shelf in his Santa Monica office.
Why hasn’t Abrams opened the container of magic tricks? Because he grasps the hook of the mystery box. It’s like a surprise egg for grown-ups. “The thing [about the unopened box] is that it represents infinite possibility,” Abrams says. “It represents hope. It represents potential. And what I love about this box, and what I realize I sort of do in whatever it is that I do, is I find myself drawn to infinite possibility.”
Steve Jobs would understand. He used that same sense of possibility as a sales tool. In 2007, when he introduced the iPhone, Jobs could have begun his keynote with a glamour shot of the new product. Instead, he opened with a Jobsian riddle, announcing that he was introducing three new devices: a wide-screen iPod, a mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet interface. The catch was that the three features were all bundled in the same gadget. “Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone, and here it is,” Jobs said.4
But the new phone wasn’t there—Jobs still wasn’t ready to open the mystery box. (“Actually here it is,” Jobs said, coyly flashing a shiny phone to the crowd before hiding it in his pocket. “But we’re gonna leave it there for now.”) Jobs then launched into a detailed discussion of the competition. It was a classic stall tactic, building the anticipation by concealing what everyone wanted to see. Several minutes later, when Jobs finally displayed a picture of the iPhone, the crowd erupted, their faces filled with the same joyous anticipation as a toddler tearing open a surprise egg full of toys.
The deep appeal of mystery boxes is written into our basic software. When you show two-month-old babies a selection of items, they are far more interested in the unfamiliar ones; they keep staring at what they’ve never before seen. This pursuit of novelty quickly blossoms into a general interest in everything that seems mysterious. In one study, the psychologist Frank Lorimer followed around a four-year-old boy for several days.5 Lorimer kept track of every “why” question asked by the child. Lorimer ended up with pages of queries, almost all of which were delightfully random. Why, the boy asked, does the little chicken grow in the shell? Why does the watering pot have two handles? Why doesn’t his mother have a beard?III
The chronic curiosity of children can get wearisome. (In the long transcripts of those why questions, one can almost hear the tired sighs of the parents.) But it’s also an important reminder of our intellectual beginnings, those early instincts that define us as human beings. When children look out at the world, they don’t focus on what they know. They stare at what they don’t. And so they keep asking us Why? Why? Why?, their developing minds leaping from one mystery box to the next.
This turns out to be a crucial skill: those children most drawn to mystery also do much better in school. That’s the conclusion of a longitudinal study by researchers at the University of Michigan that analyzed data from sixty-two young students.7 They assessed the young subjects and interviewed their parents multiple times, beginning at nine months of age. They found that interest in the unknown strongly predicted academic performance, even after the researchers controlled for other psychological variables, such as the ability to focus in class. What’s more, the correlation was particularly strong among children from poorer families. While these students generally performed worse in school than their peers from wealthier families, this difference disappeared among low-income students with high levels of curiosity.
What explains this finding? One theory is that the enjoyment of mystery is a crucial advantage provided by higher socioeconomic status. If your parents have money, they can afford to encourage your curiosity, investing in piano lessons and museum memberships. They can get you all the mystery boxes you want. Over time, this cultivation of curiosity pays academic dividends—you learn how to learn—which is one of the reasons family wealth predicts classroom performance. However, if poor children can close the curiosity gap, the stubborn achievement gap also vanishes. Teaching children how to enjoy mystery, then, isn’t just a nice luxury—it’s an essential part of education.
You can see this process unfold in the brain. In a recent study, scientists at UC Davis looked at how states of curiosity change the way we learn.8 Researchers placed subjects inside an fMRI machine and asked dozens of trivia questions on topics ranging from history (“Who was president of the US when Uncle Sam got a beard?”) to language (“What does the term dinosaur actually mean?”). After rating their level of curiosity, subjects were flashed a picture of an unrelated face. Then, they received the answer to the trivia question (Franklin Pierce, terrible lizard). When the scanning session was over, the subjects took a test to measure their memory both for the trivia questions and the faces. Did they remember the answers? Could they recognize the faces?
The trend was clear: subjects were much better at remembering those questions that triggered their curiosity. That’s not particularly surprising. What was more unexpected, however, was that people were also much better at remembering the unrelated faces they saw during states of elevated curiosity. The fMRI data helped explain why. When subjects were more curious about the trivia, their brains displayed increased activity in the dopamine-rich circuits of the midbrain. These are the same areas that process rewards and respond to prediction errors; they’re turned on by all sorts of mystery boxes. But here’s the most interesting part: the dopamine surge of curiosity also led to a spike in activity in the hippocampus, a part of the brain that’s crucial for learning and memory.9 William James argued that curiosity began when a person experienced an “inconsistency or a gap in… knowledge, just as the musical brain responds to a discord in what it hears.”10 The lesson of this new research is that such a gap turns on our learning machinery. We aren’t just paying attention to the new information; we’re saving it in our hard drive. The toys we remember are the ones hidden inside the egg.
In many respects, mystery boxes are the simplest way to create mystery. They take some crucial information and hide it. Sometimes, this information is hidden inside a giant egg, or by a plot twist involving a princess and her droid. But these different methods share the same goal: to create some e
pistemic tension, depriving us of the secrets we seek.
However, not all mystery boxes are created equal. If you understand what the mind really wants, and if you’re ruthless about the consequences, it’s possible to design a mystery box so mesmerizing it can become addictive. People will give you all of their money to keep them in the dark.
The Case of the One-Armed Bandit
In 1982, an obscure Norwegian mathematician named Inge Telnaes filed a patent that would transform the gambling industry.11 That wasn’t his aim, though. Telnaes was trying to solve a marketing problem for casinos: their slot machines could only feature relatively small jackpots. The problem was rooted in the mechanical design of the machine, which usually featured three reels and twelve distinct symbols (sevens, cherries, etc.). As Telnaes pointed out in his patent application, the payout of a given machine was directly constrained by the number of symbols, so that a gambling device with twenty different symbols, three reels, and a $1 price to play couldn’t offer a jackpot bigger than $8,000 or the house would lose money.12IV Unfortunately, these smaller jackpots weren’t very alluring to gamblers. Why play slots when the roulette table offers much richer prizes?
To skirt this constraint, casinos experimented with larger slot machines offering extra symbols. Instead of the usual fruit and sevens, they might also include horseshoes, diamonds, and dollar signs. However, gamblers rightly sensed that these extra symbols diluted their odds. More pictures meant fewer chances to win.
Telnaes’s ingenious solution was to make the process virtual. While traditional slot machines relied on a tripping arm that locked into a groove on the slot gears—the ticking sound was genuine—Telnaes imagined a mystery box running on a random-number generator. There would still be reels and pictures of cherries—they would just be an abstract representation of the results spit out by a microchip. (The clicks were now an ersatz soundtrack.) As gaming expert John Robison notes, this innovation introduced an “intermediate step” between the pull of the slot arm and the outcome of the game, since the payout was no longer dictated by those whirring gears. “You can do all sorts of wonderful things in that intermediate step,” he wrote.13