Mystery
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27 Ray Didinger, The New Eagles Encyclopedia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014), 7.
28 John Eisenberg, The League (New York: Basic Books, 2018), 118.
29 Ibid. 122.
30 Ira Boudway and Eben Novy-Williams, “The NFL’s Very Profitable Existential Crisis,” Bloomberg Businessweek, September 13, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-09-13/nfl-makes-more-money-than-ever-and-things-have-never-been-worse.
31 Cade Massey and Richard H. Thaler, “The Loser’s Curse: Decision Making and Market Efficiency in the National Football League Draft,” Management Science 59, no. 7 (2013): 1479–95.
32 D. Koz et al., “Accuracy of Professional Sports Drafts in Predicting Career Potential,” Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports 22, no. 4 (2012): e64–e69; Bobby Hubley, “Signing Bonuses & Subsequent Productivity: Predicting Success in the MLB Draft,” Diss. 2012; Barry Staw and Ha Hoang, “Sunk Costs in the NBA: Why Draft Order Affects Playing Time and Survival in Professional Basketball,” Administrative Science Quarterly (1995): 474–94; and Alexander Greene, “The Success of NBA Draft Picks: Can College Careers Predict NBA Winners?,” Culminating Projects in Applied Statistics 4 (2015).
33 Sigmund Freud, Sexuality and the Psychology of Love (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 48.
34 Uwe Hartmann, “Sigmund Freud and His Impact on Our Understanding of Male Sexual Dysfunction,” Journal of Sexual Medicine 6, no. 8 (2009): 2332–39.
35 Henry Feldman et al., “Impotence and its Medical and Psychosocial Correlates: Results of the Massachusetts Male Aging Study,” Journal of Urology 151, no. 1 (1994): 54–61.
36 Anais Mialon et al., “Sexual Dysfunctions Among Young Men: Prevalence and Associated Factors,” Journal of Adolescent Health 51, no. 1 (2012): 25–31.
37 Emily A. Impett et al., “Maintaining Sexual Desire in Intimate Relationships: The Importance of Approach Goals,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 94, no. 5 (2008): 808; and Eli J. Finkel, Jeffry A. Simpson, and Paul W. Eastwick, “The Psychology of Close Relationships: Fourteen Core Principles,” Annual Review of Psychology 68 (2017): 383–411.
38 Stephen Mitchell, Can Love Last? (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 78–79.
39 Ibid., 192.
40 Arthur Aron et. al., “The Self-Expansion Model of Motivation and Cognition in Close Relationships,” Oxford Handbook of Close Relationships (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), 95–96; Charlotte Reissman, Arthur Aron, and Merlynn R. Bergen, “Shared Activities and Marital Satisfaction: Causal Direction and Self-Expansion Versus Boredom,” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 10, no. 2 (1993): 243–54.
41 Amy Muise et al., “Broadening Your Horizons: Self-Expanding Activities Promote Desire and Satisfaction in Established Romantic Relationships,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 116, no. 2 (2019): 237.
Chapter 5: The Duck-Rabbit
1 Raymond Ed Clemens, The Voynich Manuscript (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016).
2 Josephine Livingstone, “The Unsolvable Mysteries of the Voynich Manuscript,” New Yorker, November 30, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-unsolvable-mysteries-of-the-voynich-manuscript.
3 Lawrence Goldstone and Nancy Goldstone, The Friar and the Cipher: Roger Bacon and the Unsolved Mystery of the Most Unusual Manuscript in the World (New York: Doubleday, 2005), 8.
4 As cited in A. C. Grayling, The History of Philosophy (New York: Penguin Press, 2019), 158.
5 M. D’Imperio, The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma (National Security Agency, 1978).
6 Knox College Office of Communications, “Knox Professor Reveals Unlikely Hero in War of Secret Coders,” May 4, 2016, https://www.knox.edu/news/knox-college-professor-john-dooley-book-on-codebreakers.
7 Goldstone and Goldstone, Friar and the Cipher, 259.
8 Gordon Rugg and Gavin Taylor, “Hoaxing Statistical Features of the Voynich Manuscript,” Cryptologia 41, no. 3 (2016): 1–22; and Andreas Schinner, “The Voynich Manuscript: Evidence of the Hoax Hypothesis,” Cryptologia 31, no. 2 (2007): 95–107.
9 Daniel Ellsberg, “Risk, Ambiguity, and the Savage Axioms,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 75, no. 4 (1961): 643–69.
10 Ming Hsu et al., “Neural Systems Responding to Degrees of Uncertainty in Human Decision-Making,” Science 310, no. 5754 (2005): 1680–83; and Benedetto De Martino, Colin F. Camerer, and Ralph Adolphs, “Amygdala Damage Eliminates Monetary Loss Aversion,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 8 (2010): 3788–92.
11 Stephen G. Dimmock et al., “Ambiguity Aversion and Household Portfolio Choice Puzzles: Empirical Evidence,” Journal of Financial Economics 119, no. 3 (2016): 559–77.
12 Uzi Segal and Alex Stein, “Ambiguity Aversion and the Criminal Process,” Notre Dame Law Review 81 (2005): 1495.
13 Dominic Smith, “Salinger’s Nine Stories: Fifty Years Later,” Antioch Review 61, no. 4 (2003): 639–49, www.jstor.org/stable/4614550.
14 Yaara Yeshurun et al., “Same Story, Different Story: The Neural Representation of Interpretive Frameworks,” Psychological Science 28, no. 3 (2017): 307–19.
15 Uri Hasson et al., “Intersubject Synchronization of Cortical Activity during Natural Vision,” Science 303, no. 5664 (2004): 1634–40; Uri Hasson et al., “Brain-to-Brain Coupling: A Mechanism for Creating and Sharing a Social World,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 16, no. 2 (2012): 114–21; and Uri Hasson et al., “Neurocinematics: The Neuroscience of Film,” Projections 2, no. 1 (2008): 1–26.
16 Interview with Uri Hasson, December 6, 2018.
17 John J. Ross, Reading Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: A Beginner’s Guide (Washington, DC: Lexington Books, 2009), 146; and L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. J. Schulte, trans. P. M. S. Hacker (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 206.
18 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 1966).
19 Ibid., 133.
20 Jay-Z, Decoded (New York: Random House, 2010), 26.
21 Eugen Wassiliwizky et al., “The Emotional Power of Poetry: Neural Circuitry, Psychophysiology, Compositional Principles,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 12, no. 8 (2017), 1229–40.
22 Benjamin P. Gold et al., “Musical Reward Prediction Errors Engage the Nucleus Accumbens and Motivate Learning,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 8 (2019): 3310–15.
23 Emily VanDerWerff, “David Chase Responds to Our Sopranos Piece,” Vox, August 27, 2014, https://www.vox.com/2014/8/27/6076621/david-chase-responds-to-our-sopranos-piece.
24 Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall, “Does Tony Live or Die at the End of The Sopranos?” Vulture, January 9, 2019, https://www.vulture.com/2019/01/the-sopranos-ending-does-tony-die.html.
25 Andru J. Reeve, Turn Me On, Dead Man (AuthorHouse Press, 2004), 12–13.
26 Donald A. Bird, Stephen C. Holder, and Diane Sears, “Walrus Is Greek for Corpse: Rumor and the Death of Paul McCartney,” Journal of Popular Culture 10, no. 1 (1976): 110.
27 Reeve, Turn Me On, Dead Man, 35.
28 Ibid., 59.
29 Philippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon, All the Songs: The Story behind Every Beatles Release (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2014), 428.
30 Ben Zimmer, “The Delights of Parsing the Beatles’ Most Nonsensical Song,” Atlantic, November 24, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/11/i-am-the-walrus-50-years-later/546698/o.
31 David Sheff, All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000), 184.
32 Zimmer, “Delights of Parsing.”
33 Hunter Davies, ed., The Beatles Lyrics (New York: Little, Brown, 2014), 239.
Chapter 6: The Infinite Game
1 Interview with James Carse, September 26, 2018.
2 James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games (New York: Free Press, 2013), 9.
3 Interview with Jason Hallock, March 6, 2018.
4 Michael Ondaatje and Walter Murch, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film (New York: Knopf, 2002), 121.
5 Ibid., 122.
6 “New Interview with J.K. Rowling for Release of Dutch Edition of ‘Deathly Hallows,’ ” TheLeakyCauldron.org, November 19, 2007, http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/2007/11/19/new-interview-with-j-k-rowling-for-release-of-dutch-edition-of-deathly-hallows/; and Wilma De Rek, De Volkskrant, November 19, 2007.
7 Shira Wolosky, The Riddles of Harry Potter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 2.
8 Wolosky, Riddles of Harry Potter, 2.
9 Jonathan D. Leavitt and Nicholas J. S. Christenfeld, “Story Spoilers Don’t Spoil Stories,” Psychological Science 22, no. 9 (2011): 1152–54.
10 Donald Goddard, “From ‘American Graffiti’ to Outer Space,” New York Times, September 12, 1976, https://www.nytimes.com/1976/09/12/archives/from-american-graffiti-to-outer-space.html?searchResultPosition=2.
11 Henry James, The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories (London: Penguin UK, 1986).
12 Gregory Treverton, Intelligence for an Age of Terror (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 4–5; and Gregory Treverton, “Risks and Riddles,” Smithsonian, June 2007.
13 Treverton, “Risks and Riddles.”
14 Treverton, Intelligence for an Age of Terror, 3.
15 Rebecca Leung, “The Man Who Knew: Ex-Powell Aide Says Saddam-Weapons Threat Was Overstated,” CBSNews, October 14, 2003, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-man-who-knew-14-10-2003/.
16 Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction (New York: Crown, 2015).
17 Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner, “Who’s Good at Forecasts?,” Economist, November 18, 2013.
18 Dacher Keltner, “Why Awe Is Such an Important Emotion,” filmed June 2016 at Greater Good Science Center, UC Berkeley, video, 29:41.
19 Joerg Fingerhut and Jesse J. Prinz, “Wonder, Appreciation, and the Value of Art,” Progress in Brain Research 237 (2018): 107–28; and Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, “Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion,” Cognition and Emotion 17, no. 2 (2003): 297–314.
20 Ryota Takano and Michio Nomura, “Neural Representations of Awe: Distinguishing Common and Distinct Neural Mechanisms,” Emotion (2020), PMID: 32496077.
21 Craig Laurence Anderson, “The Relationship between the D4 Dopamine Receptor Gene (DRD4) and the Emotion of Awe” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2016).
22 Chuansheng Chen et al., “Population Migration and the Variation of Dopamine D4 Receptor (DRD4) Allele Frequencies around the Globe,” Evolution and Human Behavior 20, no. 5 (1999): 309–24; and Luke J. Matthews and Paul M. Butler, “Novelty-Seeking DRD4 Polymorphisms Are Associated with Human Migration Distance Out-of-Africa after Controlling for Neutral Population Gene Structure,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 145, no. 3 (2011): 382–89.
Chapter 7: The Harkness Method
1 Guy Williams, “Harkness Learning: Principles of a Radical American Pedagogy,” Journal of Pedagogic Development 4, no. 1 (2014).
2 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson (New York: Penguin, 1977), 256.
3 Lincoln Caplan, “Chicago Hope,” American Scholar, September 6, 2016, https://theamericanscholar.org/chicago-hope/.
4 Chicago Public Schools, “Nobel – Academy HS,” https://www.cps.edu/schools/schoolprofiles/400170.
5 Nobel Academy, “School History,” https://nobleschools.org/nobleacademy/school-history/.
6 K. Bisra et al., “Inducing Self-Explanation: A Meta-Analysis,” Educational Psychology Review 30, no. 3 (September 2018): 703–25.
7 Bethany Rittle-Johnson, “Promoting Transfer: Effects of Self-Explanation and Direct Instruction,” Child Development 77, no. 1 (2006): 1–15.
8 K. Bisra, “Inducing Self-Explanation,” 703–25.
9 Louis Deslauriers et al., “Measuring Actual Learning versus Feeling of Learning in Response to Being Actively Engaged in the Classroom,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 39 (2019): 19251–57.
10 I. V. S. Mullis et al., “TIMSS 2015 International Results in Mathematics,” 2016, retrieved from Boston College, TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center; and M. O. Martin et al., “TIMSS 2015 International Results in Science,” 2016, retrieved from Boston College, TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center.
11 James Hiebert, Teaching Mathematics in Seven Countries: Results from the TIMSS 1999 Video Study (Collingdale, PA: Diane Publishing, 2003), 100–105.
12 David Epstein, Range (New York: Riverhead Books, 2019), 103.
13 D. F. Wallace, The Pale King (New York: Little, Brown, 2011), 390.
14 Erin Westgate, “Why Boredom Is Interesting,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 29, no. 1 (2019): 33–40, https://www.erinwestgate.com/uploads/7/6/4/1/7641726/westgate.2019.currentdirections.pdf.
15 Elizabeth J. Krumrei-Mancuso et al., “Links between Intellectual Humility and Acquiring Knowledge,” Journal of Positive Psychology, 2019: 1–16; D. Whitcomb, H. Battaly, J. Baerh, and D. Howard-Snyder, “Intellectual Humility: Owning Our Limitations,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94, no. 3 (2017): 509–39; and T. Porter and K. Schumann, “Intellectual Humility and Openness to the Opposing View,” Self and Identity 17 (2018): 139–62.
16 Mark R. Leary et al., “Cognitive and Interpersonal Features of Intellectual Humility,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 43, no. 6 (2017): 793–813.
17 Email from Angela Duckworth, March 10, 2019.
Coda: The Mechanic as Detective
1 Interview with Jeff Haugland, December 4, 2018.
2 Lea Winerman, “ ‘A Machine for Jumping to Conclusions,’ ” Monitor on Psychology, February 2012, https://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/02/conclusions.
3 B. Schwartz, “Reinforcement-Induced Behavioral Stereotypy: How Not to Teach People to Discover Rules,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 111, no. 1 (1982): 23–59.
4 Ellen J. Langer, Arthur Blank, and Benzion Chanowitz, “The Mindlessness of Ostensibly Thoughtful Action: The Role of ‘Placebic’ Information in Interpersonal Interaction,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36, no. 6 (1978): 635; and Ellen Langer, On Becoming an Artist (New York: Ballantine Books, 2005), xvii.
5 Ellen Langer, “The Illusion of Control,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32, no. 2 (1975): 311–28.
6 Ibid.
7 Interview with Ellen Langer, January 24, 2019.
8 John I. Yellott, “Probability Learning with Noncontingent Success,” Journal of Mathematical Psychology 6, no. 3 (1969): 541–75.
9 Richard J. Herrnstein and Donald H. Loveland, “Maximizing and Matching on Concurrent Ratio Schedules,” Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 24, no. 1 (1975): 107–16; and George Wolford, Michael B. Miller, and Michael Gazzaniga, “The Left Hemisphere’s Role in Hypothesis Formation,” Journal of Neuroscience 20, no. 6 (2000): 1–4.
10 Kenneth J. Arrow, “Utilities, Attitudes, Choices: A Review Note,” Econometrica: Journal of the Econometric Society 26, no. 1 (1958): 1–23.
11 Ellen J. Langer, Benzion Chanowitz, and Arthur Blank, “Mindlessness-Mindfulness in Perspective: A Reply to Valerie Folkes,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 48, no. 3 (1965): 605–607.
12 Cara Feinberg, “The Mindfulness Chronicles: On ‘The Psychology of Possibility,’ ” Harvard, September–October 2010, http://harvardmagazine.com/2010/09/the-mindfulness-chronicles?page=all.
13 Ellen J. Langer and Alison I. Piper, “The Prevention of Mindlessness,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 53, no. 2 (1987): 280.
14 Toru Ishikawa et al., “Wayfinding with a GPS-Based Mobile Navigation System: A Comparison with Maps and Direct Experience,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 28, no. 1 (2008): 74–82.
15 Jeremy Adelman, Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 20
13), 117.
16 Michele Alacevich, “Visualizing Uncertainties, or How Albert Hirschman and the World Bank Disagreed on Project Appraisal and What This Says about the End of ‘High Development Theory,’ ” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 36, no. 2 (2014): 137–68.
17 Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 107.
18 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), 161.
Chapter 1: The Mystery Box
I. In recent years, “reveal toys” have become a staple of the toy aisle. From L.O.L. Surprise! dolls, which feature a hidden figurine beneath seven layers of plastic packaging, to Disney “mystery packs,” which hide surprise collectibles inside an opaque, shrink-wrapped box, these toys take advantage of our innate curiosity. We buy the packaging just to find out what’s inside. From a rational perspective, these reveal toys make no sense, since consumers can’t choose their favorites and often get stuck with duplicates. But we’re willing to sacrifice the utility in exchange for the delight of surprise.
II. Sometimes, the best mystery boxes are accidents. For instance, the shark in Jaws is hidden for so long because the robotic fish kept malfunctioning. (The crew nicknamed the movie Flaws due to the frequent delays in filming.) But Spielberg realized that we are most scared of what we can’t see and turned the broken great white into the most terrifying mystery box.
III. More recently, a study by Michelle Chouinard and colleagues found that one group of young children asked their caregivers an average of 76.8 information-seeking questions per hour.6
IV. The math is straightforward: 20 x 20 x 20 is 8000. Given taxes and operational costs, casinos generally had to set their payouts 2 to 15 percent below the maximum payout.
V. There is something clearly deceptive about this technique. Bally, one of the largest manufacturers of slot machines, was initially concerned that virtual reel mapping was too misleading. In testimony before the Nevada Gaming Control Board in 1983, Bally’s president put it this way: “One of the reasons reel-spinning slot machines have been so successful throughout their history is that players can visually see during the course of several handle pulls all of the symbols on all of the reels as they spin.… It would appear to us that if a mechanical reel on a slot machine possesses four sevens and it is electronically playing as if there were one seven, the player is being visually misled.”14