by Jonah Lehrer
Casting took nearly a year. Another month was spent scouting locations. Then they had to get the camera equipment—a Hi8 from Circuit City, which they returned after the shoot—and gear for camping, since they would be spending eight days in the woods. Instead of working directly with the actors, Dan and Eduardo gave them a GPS unit programmed with directions to various hideouts containing their daily instructions. They made the actors hike in the rain and camp in a soggy tent and slowly decreased their food intake during the shoot. The actors had a safe word—if things got too gnarly, they were supposed to say “bulldozer”—but mostly they stayed in character. They were scared kids in the woods pretending to be scared kids in the woods.
When Dan and Eduardo began filming, they assumed the found footage would only be a small part of a larger fake documentary. “We thought we’d also have expert interviews, stuff on the curse, backstory on how the footage was found, things like that,” Dan says. “Maybe twenty minutes or so of material with the actors, but we didn’t think there was any way you could get away with more than that.”
The first review of the raw footage from the woods wasn’t promising. “It was rough, rougher than anything I’d ever seen in a movie theater, and it most definitely broke every rule you learn in film school,” Dan says. The camerawork wasn’t just shaky—it bordered on incoherence, especially when the actors were filming themselves at night. The dialogue was often mumbled and inaudible; most of the scenes lacked structure. At times, the footage was hard to watch. “I mean, there’s a reason people write scripts,” Dan says. “There’s a reason the actors don’t normally hold the cameras.”
And yet, the subversive insight of Dan and Eduardo was that these same lo-fi “flaws” could make for a terrifying horror film. Before long, they decided to make the entire movie out of that found footage from the woods. “What we discovered is that it’s so much scarier to do it this way than to have some slick well-lit forest scene with a bogeyman,” Dan says. “You’ve never seen a horror movie like this before. You have no idea who’s going to live or die or what’s coming next.”
The desire to make a new kind of horror movie even extended to the final scene. In the original cut, two of the students race into an abandoned cabin, desperate to save their missing friend, whose screams they can still hear. They run down the stairs, cameras on. But when they get there, we don’t get a glimpse of the witch, or even their tortured friend. Instead, we see one of the students standing in the corner. The last shot of the movie is sideways, as the camera drops to the floor. It’s not murder, but the terrifying moment before.
The studio, however, insisted on a less ambiguous ending. So Dan and Eduardo returned to the woods to shoot several alternative takes. They were all more obvious and more gruesome: there was one with a noose, and one with a bloody wound, and one with a student nailed to a wooden stick man. “We hated them,” Dan says. “They all felt so conventional.” Although the studio executives warned Dan and Eduardo that ending the movie with so much uncertainty would cost them millions at the box office, the young filmmakers insisted on preserving the mysterious ending.
On July 14, 1999, they released “The Woods Movie” in theaters as The Blair Witch Project. The movie was an instant hit and went on to gross nearly $250 million around the world. (Dan and Eduardo originally made the film for around $25,000, making it one of the most profitable movies ever made.) It helped that the marketing leaned into the mystery. The distributor didn’t want to invest in conventional television spots, so Dan and Eduardo built out their website instead, telling the story of the myth along with additional information about the missing filmmakers. They included archival photos, missing persons signs, and elaborate historical time lines. The result was a fiction that felt real. After the movie came out, the families of the actors received condolence cards.
Blair Witch has since inspired two sequels and countless imitators; found footage is now a common trope of the horror genre, from the Paranormal Activity franchise to Cloverfield. “There’s something ironic about our style becoming so popular,” Dan says. “We did it because we had to, because we had no money and we didn’t think scary movies were scary anymore. But what we unlearned is now its own tradition.” Such is the destiny of successful art: it gets copied until it becomes a cliché.
Our culture is full of content that aims to please. It tries to amuse and entertain and pass the time. But the art that changes the world is subversive, designed to unsettle and confuse. We’ve been trained to expect X, so it serves up Y and Z instead. This strategy can produce material that’s strange and disorienting, just like The Blair Witch Project.
This chapter is about the subversive hook. It’s about the unexpected benefits of difficult art, which improves our attention and enhances our thinking. We might not enjoy this kind of hook, at least not at first. We probably wish we were watching a more conventional horror movie, with Freddy Krueger and a predictable ending. But our discomfort isn’t a sign of failure. It’s proof that the mystery hook is working.
Desirable Difficulties
You will remember this sentence.
To understand why, it helps to know about the work of psychologist Daniel Oppenheimer. A decade ago, he led a study at a public high school in Chesterland, Ohio.3 The scientists asked teachers to submit their written classroom materials, such as PowerPoint decks and worksheets. Then, the researchers changed the fonts on the material, transforming the text with a variety of so-called disfluent fonts, such as Monotype Corsiva and Comic Sans italicized. What makes these fonts disfluent is that they’re used less frequently: When was the last time you read a book in Comic Sans? Because all of the teachers included in the study taught at least two sections of the same class, the psychologists could conduct a controlled experiment. One group of students received the classroom materials with the disfluent fonts, while the other group was taught with more typical fonts, like Helvetica and Arial.
After several weeks of instruction, the students were tested on their retention of the material. In nearly every class, the students in the disfluent condition performed significantly better. Comic Sans led to higher grades. Ugly fonts improved their recall.
And it’s not just the classroom: the benefits of disfluent fonts apply in many domains. Consider a series of recent experiments led by Adam Alter, a psychologist at NYU, and done in collaboration with Oppenheimer. In his research, Alter relied on a well-known assessment called the Cognitive Reflection Test, or CRT.4 The short test is designed to measure the extent to which an individual relies on mental shortcuts and quick instincts, giving subjects tricky questions in which their initial hunch is almost always incorrect. Here’s a classic question from the CRT: “If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?” The intuitive response is that it will take the machines 100 minutes. That, however, is incorrect: it will still only take the machines 5 minutes. When Alter gave people the CRT in a disfluent font—he used a tiny print in a light gray—they were much less likely to get the wrong answer. While 90 percent of subjects in an easy-to-read font got at least one of the CRT questions wrong, only 35 percent did so in the disfluent group. The perceptual struggle made them more reflective and thoughtful.
Think, for a moment, about the strange implications of this research. The primary goal of typography is to create legible text. This is especially true in the digital age. Amazon, for instance, brags that Bookerly, its custom font for the Kindle, makes reading easier on the eyes, allowing us “to read faster with less eyestrain.” Company logos, meanwhile, are designed to maximize fluency, which is why American Airlines, Jeep, Target, Nestlé, and Toyota all rely on versions of Helvetica. The irony is that the research suggests that the effortless processing might lead to less attention and retention. Easy in, easy out.
Why does disfluency help us learn more and think better? The explanation begins with the natural laziness of the human mind, which is always trying to save energy by not thinking.
(Your brain requires only about three hundred calories per day for consciousness, or the amount of energy in a candy bar.)5 This need for efficiency means that we often rely on mental shortcuts, whether it’s our shoddy assessments of probabilities or instant judgments of other people. These shortcuts aren’t a faster form of thinking. They’re a way of skipping thought altogether.
And that brings us back to these ugly fonts. Because their shapes are unfamiliar, because they are less legible, they make the mind work a little harder; the slight frisson of Comic Sans wakes us up or at least prevents us from leaning on the usual efficiencies. “The complex fonts… function like an alarm,” Alter writes. They signal “that we need to recruit additional mental resources to overcome that sense of difficulty.”6
You can see this extra activity in the brain. Stanislas Dehaene, a neuroscientist at the Collège de France in Paris, has helped illuminate the neural anatomy of reading.7 It turns out that the literate brain contains two distinct pathways for making sense of words. One pathway is known as the ventral route, and it’s fast and efficient. The process goes like this: We see a group of letters, convert those letters into a word, then grasp the word’s semantic meaning. According to Dehaene, this ventral pathway is activated by writing in a “familiar format” and relies on a bit of cortex known as visual word form area (VWFA). When you are reading a straightforward sentence, you’re almost certainly relying on this speedy neural highway.8 As a result, reading seems effortless and easy. We don’t have to think about those symbols on the page.
But the ventral route is not the only way to read. The second reading pathway—the dorsal stream—comes on whenever we’re forced to pay conscious attention to a sentence, perhaps because of an obscure word or unfamiliar font.9 (In his experiments, Dehaene activates this pathway in a variety of ways, such as rotating the letters or filling the prose with errant commas and semicolons.) Although scientists had previously assumed that the dorsal route ceased to be active once we became literate, Dehaene’s research demonstrates that disfluent and unfamiliar writing can change the way we read. We’re suddenly hyperaware of the words on the page, forced to work harder to make sense of the text. The difficulty demands our focus.
In 1917, the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky wrote an influential essay about the aesthetic benefits of disfluency. He began by observing the natural negligence of the human mind, which is good at not noticing things. The function of art, Shklovsky said, is to push back against this tendency, restoring our attention by defamiliarizing reality.I Here’s Shklovsky:
“Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things; to make the stone stony.… The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception.”10
Look at poetry, an art form dependent on disfluency and defamiliarization. A poem is writing that often breaks the ordinary rules of writing; the only requirement is that the language feel different. (As the poet and critic Jane Hirshfield writes, poetry reminds us “of the usefulness of the useless.”)11 It’s always been this way. The Odyssey, one of the oldest works of literature, is an epic poem composed in a six-beat line, and its sentences, in a strict rhythm, are distinct from everyday speech. The Odyssey also featured a bizarre vocabulary. “The language contains a strange mixture of words from different periods of time, and from Greek dialects associated with different regions,” writes the translator Emily Wilson. “The syntax is relatively simple, but the words and phrases, in these combinations, are unlike the way that anybody ever actually spoke.”12
All this strangeness can make poetry feel abstract and obscure—who has time for such a disfluent art? But it also means that the best poetry can rescue language from our indifference, allowing us to look at old words in new ways. Here’s Marianne Moore, in “Poetry”:
I too, dislike it: there are things that are
important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt
for it, one
discovers that there is in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Moore is reminding us that these glimpses of the genuine are bound up with the fiddle of the art; it is the disfluency of the poem that compels our concentration, forcing the brain to read with that demanding dorsal route. The weirdness of the words slows us down, giving us a chance to notice the “genuine” we normally overlook.
Perhaps no poet made better use of disfluency than Emily Dickinson. Writing in a time of highly metered poetry, Dickinson resisted every structure and tradition.II She rebelled against the conventions of grammar—she used em dashes like commas and plus signs like ellipses—and deployed words and metaphors in the most unexpected ways. (“Pain has an element of blank,” to take a line almost at random.)
This strangeness didn’t make her popular. Dickinson only published ten poems in her lifetime, all with an anonymous byline. When one of her poems appeared in the Springfield Daily Republican in February 1866, Dickinson complained that the editors had ruined her verse by taking away the disfluency, stripping away her dashes and math symbols. The published poem, Dickinson wrote, was “robbed of me—defeated… by the punctuation.”13 The edits reminded her why she “did not print.” Publication required conformity and she refused to conform.
To understand the eccentricities of Dickinson’s poetic style, consider the envelope poems, a trove of literary fragments composed on scraps of scavenged paper. (Dickinson had access to lined paper, she just preferred drafting on these carefully unfolded envelopes.) Here are some lines from piece A316.14
Oh sumptuous
moment
Slower go
That I
May gloat on
Thee—
’Twill never
Be the same
To starve
Now I abundance
see15
It’s a short poem about the shortness of life. Dickinson wants to slow experience down, to “gloat” on the moment, but time keeps rushing on.
Here’s Dickinson’s genius: the disfluency of her poem also provides the solution, encouraging us to savor the “sumptuous / moment” of her words. By making the form of her poem so unfamiliar, Dickinson teaches us how to “gloat,” how to read carefully, how to be mindful of the marks on the page. (She creates her own “abundance.”) All it takes is a style we’ve never before seen.
Dickinson celebrated strangeness. For Dickinson, disfluency wasn’t just an aesthetic choice—it echoed her great theme. She wanted her poetry to be difficult because the world was difficult to understand; if her writing was mysterious, it’s because everything was mysterious, at least if you looked at it properly. We learn to ignore these mysteries—we are too busy for awe—but she wanted to return us to them. As Dickinson writes in one of her most canonized poems:
But nature is a stranger yet;
The ones that cite her most
Have never passed her haunted house,
Nor simplified her ghost.
It’s sometimes said that Dickinson was a writer born in the wrong century. She was a female poet writing modernist poems during the Civil War; she broke with poetic traditions that would remain entrenched for another fifty years. In many respects, we’re still catching up to her, trying to transcribe and understand those verses she wrote down on envelopes, chocolate wrappers, and scattered notebook pages. Because what Dickinson said about the mysteries of nature is also true of her art:
Those who know her, know her less
The nearer her they get.
Goodnight Nobody
In October 1934, Gertrude Stein embarked on a thirty-seven-city tour of America. She’d recently published The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, her first bestseller, and eager crowds hoped to glimpse this expat intellectual. An electric ticker in Times Square announced Stein’s arrival by steamer;16 journalists clamored for interviews; the Ti
mes described the “simplicity of her garb,” which was “almost like a Nun’s.”17
One of Stein’s first public appearances was sold-out, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. One of the people in the audience that evening was a struggling young writer named Margaret Brown. A charming rebel, with a pile of messy curls and a closet full of slacks, Brown was enthralled by Stein’s criticisms of grammar and punctuation, which the famous writer said got in the way of true understanding.III (In college, Brown had struggled in her English composition class due to her own grammatical failings.)18 Stein wanted her writing to reveal the limitations of all writing, compelling her readers to notice the confining conventions of language. This made her work baffling and pugnacious, but it also expanded the possibilities of art. “When you make a thing,” Stein wrote in The Autobiography, “it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those that do it after you they don’t have to worry about making it and they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when the others make it.”
Unfortunately, Margaret Brown soon had to abandon her dream of becoming the next Gertrude Stein. After years of writing short stories, Brown still hadn’t sold a single piece. Nevertheless, she’d had enough of the suburban life on Long Island and moved to Manhattan, where she applied to Bank Street, a progressive teaching college founded by Lucy Sprague Mitchell. The mission of Bank Street was to create a new kind of education modeled on the philosophy of John Dewey. While traditional pedagogy emphasized rote memorization, Dewey argued that real learning was a by-product of doing, and that the classroom should be a hub of verbs. The best way to learn chemistry was by cooking lunch; geometry could be a carpentry lesson; civics should be a student vote. Rather than present knowledge as a static, settled lesson, teachers should emphasize exploration and experimentation.