by Jonah Lehrer
8 Matthias J. Gruber, Bernard D. Gelman, and Charan Ranganath, “States of Curiosity Modulate Hippocampus-Dependent Learning via the Dopaminergic Circuit,” Neuron 84, no. 2 (2014): 486–96.
9 Lynn Nadel and Morris Moscovitch, “Memory Consolidation, Retrograde Amnesia and the Hippocampal Complex,” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 7, no. 2 (1997): 217–27.
10 George Loewenstein, “The Psychology of Curiosity: A Review and Reinterpretation,” Psychological Bulletin 116, no. 1 (1994): 75.
11 “Electronic Gaming Device Utilizing a Random Number Generator for Selecting the Reel Stop Positions,” United States Patent, US4448419A, May 15, 1984, https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/10/ac/5f/f72c55579aaabe/US4448419.pdf.
12 Ibid.
13 John Robison, “Casino Random Number Generators,” Casino City Times, July 28, 2000.
14 Natasha Dow SchuÃàll, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 91.
15 Schüll, Addiction by Design.
16 Luke Clark et al., “Gambling Near-Misses Enhance Motivation to Gamble and Recruit Win-Related Brain Circuitry,” Neuron 61, no. 3 (2009): 481–90.
17 Dave Hickey, Air Guitar (New York: Art Issues Press, 1997), 23.
18 D. E. Berlyne, Aesthetics and Psychobiology (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1971).
19 D. E. Berlyne, “Novelty, Complexity, and Hedonic Value,” Perception & Psychophysics 8, no. 5 (1970): 279–86.
20 Raymond Loewy, Never Leave Well Enough Alone (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 280.
21 “The Year in Sports Media Report: 2015,” Nielsen, February 3, 2016, http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/reports/2016/the-year-in-sports-media-report-2015.html.
22 Pedro Dionisio, Carmo Leal, and Luiz Moutinho, “Fandom Affiliation and Tribal Behaviour: A Sports Marketing Application,” Qualitative Market Research 11, no. 1 (2008): 17–39; Marieke de Groot and Tom Robinson, “Sport Fan Attachment and the Psychological Continuum Model: A Case Study of an Australian Football League Fan,” Leisure/Loisir 32, no. 1 (2008): 117–38; and Marco Iacoboni, Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).
23 Nicholas Christenfeld, “What Makes a Good Sport?,” Nature 383 (1996): 662.
24 Stanley Schachter et al., “Speech Disfluency and the Structure of Knowledge,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60, no. 3 (1991): 362–63.
25 Nicholas Christenfeld, “Choices from Identical Options,” Psychological Science 6, no. 1 (1995): 50–55.
26 Michael M. Roy and Nicholas J. S. Christenfeld, “Do Dogs Resemble Their Owners?,” Psychological Science 15, no. 5 (2004): 361–63.
27 Christine R. Harris and Nicholas Christenfeld, “Can a Machine Tickle?,” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 6, no. 3 (1999): 504–10.
28 Nicholas Christenfeld, David P. Phillips, and Laura M. Glynn, “What’s in a Name: Mortality and the Power of Symbols,” Journal of Psychosomatic Research 47, no. 3 (1999): 241–54.
29 A. Clauset, M. Kogan, and S. Redner, “Safe Leads and Lead Changes in Competitive Team Sports,” Physical Review E 91, no. 6 (2015): 062815.
30 “1892 NL Team Statistics,” Baseball Reference, http://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/NL/1892.shtml.
31 John Thorn, “Who Were the Fastest Pitchers?” Our Game, February 18, 2014, https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/who-were-the-fastest-pitchers-c453890d0516.
32 Leonard Koppett, Koppett’s Concise History of Major League Baseball (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), 72–74.
33 Bill Deane, Baseball Myths (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012), 10.
34 Rodney J. Paul, Yoav Wachsman, and Andrew P. Weinbach, “The Role of Uncertainty of Outcome and Scoring in the Determination of Fan Satisfaction in the NFL,” Journal of Sports Economics 12, no. 2 (2011): 213–21.
35 Interview, Studio City, December 28, 2017.
36 Coltan Scrivner et al., “Pandemic Practice: Horror Fans and Morbidly Curious Individuals Are More Psychologically Resilient during the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Personality and Individual Differences 168, no.110397 (2020).
Chapter 2: The Magic Gasp
1 “Do Lotteries Do More Harm than Good?” Chicago Booth Review, January 30, 2020, https://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2020/article/do-lotteries-do-more-harm-good.
2 Thank you to Mohan Srivastava for supplying the image of the lottery tickets.
3 Jonah Lehrer, “Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code,” Wired, January 31, 2011, https://www.wired.com/2011/01/ff-lottery/.
4 A. H. Danek et al., “An fMRI Investigation of Expectation Violation in Magic Tricks,” Frontiers in Psychology 6 (2015): 84–85.
5 Sian Beilock, “Why a Broken Heart Really Hurts,” Guardian, September 13, 2015.
6 Anne-Marike Schiffer and Ricarda I. Schubotz, “Caudate Nucleus Signals for Breaches of Expectation in a Movement Observation Paradigm,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 5 (2011): 38.
7 Jessica A. Grahn, John A. Parkinson, and Adrian M. Owen, “The Cognitive Functions of the Caudate Nucleus,” Progress in Neurobiology 86, no. 3 (2008): 141–55.
8 Gustav Kuhn, Experiencing the Impossible: The Science of Magic (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019), 19–20.
9 Karl Duncker, “On Problem-Solving,” Psychological Monographs 58, no. 5 (1945): 1–113.
10 Tim P. German and Margaret Anne Defeyter, “Immunity to Functional Fixedness in Young Children,” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 7, no. 4 (2000): 707–12.
11 Jim Steinmeyer, Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible, (New York: Random House, 2005).
12 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (New York: Verso, 2005), 222.
13 Stephen Kaplan, “Perception and Landscape: Conceptions and Misconceptions,” USDA Forest Sevice, General Technical Report PSW-GTR-35 (Berkeley, CA: Pacific Southwest Forest Range Experiment Station, 1979), 241–8, https://www.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/pubs/27585.
14 Ross King, Brunelleschi’s Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture (New York: Bloomsbury, 2000), 35–37.
15 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin UK, 1972), 16.
16 David Hockney, “Through the Looking Glass: David Hockney Explains How a Question about Some Ingres Drawings Led to a Whole New Theory of Western Art,” History Today, November 2011.
17 Lawrence Weschler, True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008), 117.
18 “Robert Hughes Quotes: On Caravaggio, Warhol, and Hirst,” Telegraph, August 7, 2012, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-news/9458192/Robert-Hughes-quotes-on-Caravaggio-Warhol-and-Hirst.html.
19 David Hockney, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (New York: Viking Studio, 2006), 262.
20 Weschler, True to Life, 180.
21 Hockney, Secret Knowledge, 14.
22 D. H. Younger, “William Thomas Tutte: 14 May 1917–2 May 2002,” Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 58 (2012): 283–97.
23 Michael Smith, The Secrets of Station X: How the Bletchley Park Codebreakers Helped Win the War (London: Biteback, 2011), location 2067.
24 Roy Jenkins, A Life at the Center: Memoirs of a Radical Reformer (New York: Random House, 1991), 53.
25 Smith, Secrets of Station X, Chapter 10.
26 W. T. Tutte, “FISH and I,” University of Waterloo, https://uwaterloo.ca/combinatorics-and-optimization/sites/ca.combinatorics-and-optimization/files/uploads/files/corr98-39.pdf.
27 Captain Jerry Roberts, Lorenz: Breaking Hitler’s Top Secret Code (Cheltenham, UK: History Press, 2017), 78–79.
28 J. J. O’Connor and E. F. Robertson, “William Thomas Tutte,” MacTutor, http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Tutte.html.
29 Tutte, “FISH and I.”
30 Roberts, Lorenz, 89.
31 Ibid., 134.
32 Ibid., 74.
33 Central Intelligence Agency, “The Enigma of Alan Turing,” April 10, 2015, https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2015-featured-story-archive/the-enigma-of-alan-turing.html.
34 Richard Fletcher, “How Bill Tutte Won the War (Or at Least Helped to Shorten It by Two Years),” Bill Tutte Memorial Fund, Issue 1, May 2014, http://billtuttememorial.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/How-Bill-Tutte-Won-the-War.pdf.
35 Lisa Grimm and Nicholas Spanola, “Influence of Need for Cognition and Cognitive Closure on Magic Perceptions,” Cognitive Science, 2016; and Joshua Jay, “What Do Audiences Really Think?,” Magic, September 2016.
36 Mike Weatherford, “Las Vegas has become ‘Caveman’ Central,” Las Vegas Review Journal, May 16, 2003, https://www.reviewjournal.com/entertainment/entertainment-columns/mike-weatherford/las-vegas-has-become-caveman-central/.
37 Kuhn, Experiencing the Impossible, 9.
38 Jonah Lehrer, “Magic and the Brain: Teller Reveals the Neuroscience of Illusion,” Wired, April 20, 2009, https://www.wired.com/2009/04/ff-neuroscienceofmagic/.
Chapter 3: The Power of Comic Sans
1 Interview with Dan Myrick, January 10, 2018.
2 Emalie Marthe, “ ‘They Wished I Was Dead’: How ‘The Blair Witch Project’ Still Haunts Its Cast,” Vice, September 14, 2016, https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/gyxxg3/they-wished-i-was-dead-how-the-blair-witch-project-still-haunts-its-cast.
3 Connor Diemand-Yauman, Daniel M. Oppenheimer, and Erikka B. Vaughan, “Fortune Favors the Bold (and the Italicized): Effects of Disfluency on Educational Outcomes,” Cognition 118, no. 1 (2011): 111–15.
4 Shane Frederick, “Cognitive Reflection and Decision Making,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 4 (2005): 25–42.
5 Ferris Jabr, “Does Thinking Really Hard Burn More Calories?” Scientific American, July 18, 2012, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thinking-hard-calories/.
6 Adam Alter, Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave (New York: Penguin, 2014), 195.
7 Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read (New York: Penguin, 2009).
8 Stanislas Dehaene and Laurent Cohen, “The Unique Role of the Visual Word Form Area in Reading,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15, no. 6 (2011): 254–62.
9 Laurent Cohen et al., “Reading Normal and Degraded Words: Contribution of the Dorsal and Ventral Visual Pathways,” Neuroimage 40, no. 1 (2008): 353–66.
10 Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” 1917, in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2017), 8–15.
11 Jane Hirshfield, Ten Windows (New York: Knopf, 2015), 207.
12 Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Emily Wilson, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), 1–2.
13 Helen Vendler, Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries (New York: Harvard University Press, 2010), 399.
14 Emily Dickinson, Envelope Poems (New York: New Directions Publishing, 2016).
15 Thank you to Harvard University Press for granting permission to reproduce the poem. Thomas H. Johnson, ed., The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955).
16 R. Morris Jr., Gertrude Stein Has Arrived: The Homecoming of a Literary Legend (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), 5; Joseph Bradshaw, “This Week in BAM History: Gertrude Stein’s American Lectures,” BAM Blog, November 8, 2011, https://blog.bam.org/2011/11/this-week-in-bam-history-gertrude.html.
17 “Miss Stein Speaks to Bewildered 500,” New York Times, November 2, 1934, https://nyti.ms/2CbMQeK.
18 Leonard S. Marcus, Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 41.
19 Anne Fernald, “In the Great Green Room: Margaret Wise Brown and Modernism,” Public Books, November 17, 2015, https://www.publicbooks.org/in-the-great-green-room-margaret-wise-brown-and-modernism/.
20 Aimee Bender, “What Writers Can Learn from ‘Goodnight Moon,’ ” New York Times, July 19, 2014, https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/19/what-writers-can-learn-from-good-night-moon.
21 Dan Kois, “How One Librarian Tried to Squash Goodnight Moon,” Slate, January 13, 2020, https://slate.com/culture/2020/01/goodnight-moon-nypl-10-most-checked-out-books.html.
22 Bob Levenson, Bill Bernbach’s Book (New York: Villard, 1987), xvi.
23 “William Bernbach,” AdAge, March 29, 1999, http://adage.com/article/special-report-the-advertising-century/william-bernbach/140180/; and Mark Hamilton, “The Ad That Changed Advertising: The Story Behind Volkswagen’s Think Small Campaign,” Medium, March 20, 2015, https://medium.com/theagency/the-ad-that-changed-advertising-18291a67488c.
24 Chip Bayers, “Bill Bernbach: Creative Revolutionary,” Adweek, August 8, 2011, http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/bill-bernbach-creative-revolutionary-133901.
25 Levenson, Bill Bernbach’s Book, 17.
26 Alfredo Marcantonio, David Abbott, and John O’Driscoll, Remember Those Great Volkswagen Ads? (London: Merrell, 2014), 11.
27 The Volkswagen Beetle image by Steven Verbruggen (@minorissues on Flickr) is licensed under Creative Commons.
28 Levenson, Bill Bernbach’s Book, 25.
29 Ivan Hernandez and Jesse Lee Preston, “Disfluency Disrupts the Confirmation Bias,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 49, no. 1 (2013): 178–82.
30 Levenson, Bill Bernbach’s Book, 27.
31 Noah Callahan-Bever, “Kanye West: Project Runaway,” Complex, January 2010, https://www.complex.com/music/kanye-west-interview-2010-cover-story.
32 Daniel Isenberg, “Emile Tells All: The Stories Behind His Classic Records,” Complex, October 28, 2011, https://www.complex.com/music/2011/10/emile-tells-all-the-stories-behind-his-classic-records/kanye-west-pusha-t-runaway.
33 Cole Cuchna, “Runaway by Kanye West (Part 1 & 2),” Dissect, October 2017, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/runaway-by-kanye-west-part-2/id1143845868?i=1000393935936.
34 Taylor Beck, “When the Beat Goes Off: Errors in Rhythm Flow Pattern, Physicists Find,” The Harvard Gazette, July 19, 2012, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2012/07/when-the-beat-goes-off/.
35 Jon Caramanica, “Into the Wild with Kanye West,” New York Times, June 25, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/arts/music/kanye-west-ye-interview.html.
36 Leonard B. Meyer, “Some Remarks on Value and Greatness in Music,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 17, no. 4 (1959): 486–500.
37 Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 28.
38 Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (New York: Da Capo Press, 1988), 21.
39 Valorie N. Salimpoor et al., “Anatomically Distinct Dopamine Release during Anticipation and Experience of Peak Emotion to Music,” Nature Neuroscience 14, no. 2 (2011): 257.
40 Yi-Fang Hsu et al., “Distinctive Representation of Mispredicted and Unpredicted Prediction Errors in Human Electroencephalography,” Journal of Neuroscience 35, no. 43 (2015): 14653–60.
Chapter 4: Strategic Opacity
1 Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 293.
2 Harold Bloom and Brett Foster, eds., Hamlet (Langhorne, PA: Chelsea House, 2008), 41; and Harold Bloom, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (New York: Riverhead, 2003).
3 Greenblatt, Will in the World, 294.
4 James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of Shakespeare (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 285–86.
5 Greenblatt, Will in the World, 324.
6 Jack Miles, God: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1995), 6.
7 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Thought, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), 11.
8 Thomas McDermott, Filled with All the Fullness of God: An Introduction to Catholic Spirituality (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 15.
9 Donald Prezios
i, ed., The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, Oxford History of Art (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009), 22.
10 Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (New York: Random House, 2006), 227.
11 Ibid., 238
12 Margaret Livingstone, Vision and Art (New York: Harry Abrams, 2014), 73.
13 Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 66.
14 Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, 1 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 203.
15 Obrad Savić, ed., The Politics of Human Rights (New York: Verso, 1999), 67–83.
16 David Kidd and Emanuele Castano, “Different Stories: How Levels of Familiarity with Literary and Genre Fiction Relate to Mentalizing,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 11, no. 4 (2017): 474.
17 David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind,” Science 342, no. 6156 (2013): 377–80.
18 Edward Morgan Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Penguin Classics, 2005).
19 “Penzler’s Mystery Books on the Block,” Tribeca Citizen, March 4, 2019, https://tribecacitizen.com/2019/03/04/penzlers-mystery-books-on-the-block/.
20 Kidd and Castano, “Different Stories,” 474.
21 Cecilia Heyes, Cognitive Gadgets (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2018), 168.
22 Walter Mischel et al., Introduction to Personality: Toward an Integrative Science of the Person (New York: Wiley, 2007), 37; and Jonah Lehrer, “Don’t!: The Secret of Self-Control,” New Yorker, May 18, 2009, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/05/18/dont-2.
23 Walter Mischel, Personality and Assessment (Abingdon, UK: Psychology Press, 2013).
24 Walter Mischel and Yuichi Shoda, “A Cognitive-Affective System Theory of Personality: Reconceptualizing Situations, Dispositions, Dynamics, and Invariance in Personality Structure,” Psychological Review 102, no. 2 (1995): 246.
25 Todd Rose, The End of Average (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 106.
26 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xvi.