by Jonah Lehrer
VI. The industrial designer Raymond Loewy referred to this discovery as the MAYA theory of aesthetics, with MAYA standing for Most Advanced Yet Acceptable design. As the creator of countless midcentury icons—from the Greyhound bus to the Studebaker Avanti to the Lucky Strike logo—Loewy was constantly tasked with navigating the razor’s edge of innovation. He needed to invent radically new things, but these new things couldn’t be too intimidating. “When resistance to the unfamiliar reaches the threshold of a shock-zone and resistance to buying sets in, the design in question has reached its MAYA stage,” Loewy wrote.20
VII. The main reason people in the humanities use more “filled pauses” than scientists is that their technical vocabulary is less precise. Those extra ums are a kind of indecisiveness, as their brains search for the best word to use. “Chemists don’t have this problem as frequently,” Christenfeld says. “Molecule has a very specific meaning.”
VIII. One of the reasons track and field has struggled to compete with other sports, such as soccer and football, is that the outcome is way too predictable. The sheer simplicity of the sport ensures that talent almost always prevails.
IX. As John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball, notes, given the distance to the plate, Amos Rusie in 1892 might have been, “from the batter’s perspective,” the fastest pitcher of all time.31
X. Slugging percentage is calculated by dividing the total bases (singles, doubles, triples, and home runs) by the total number of at bats.
XI. The biggest changes to baseball since 1893 have been the abolition of the spitball in 1921, the lowering of the mound in 1969, and the use of the designated hitter in the American League starting in 1973. Like the rule change of 1893, these revisions were also designed to reduce the dominance of pitchers.
XII. It’s worth noting the growing concern that pitchers are once again becoming too dominant, largely due to the rise in the velocity of the fastball. (Many relievers now regularly hit 100 mph.) In 2018, strikeouts exceeded hits for the first time ever. This trend has led some to argue that baseball should, once again, increase the distance between the mound and home plate. In 2019, the Atlantic League announced that it will begin experimenting with a mound that’s sixty-two feet six inches from home plate.
XIII. You can see the impact of this uncertainty on television ratings. A team of economists looked at how surprise and suspense shaped viewer interest during Wimbledon tennis matches. Not surprisingly, they found that matches higher in both variables—they were full of outcomes we didn’t expect, at least as measured by the betting odds—generated much higher ratings. People didn’t want beautiful tennis, or another Roger Federer win in straight sets. They wanted tiebreakers and upsets, a game with an unpredictable ending.
XIV. Michael’s fascination with attention is deeply practical, a side effect of his twenty-plus years in the entertainment industry. But it also comes from his father, Paul Chernuchin, an applied psychologist who left his son with a lasting interest in the habits of the human mind. One of Paul’s main academic contributions was the Chernuchin Pictograph, a test originally given to prisoners to predict the likelihood they would try to escape. “The test is just a piece of paper with five rectangles and you’re supposed to draw pictures,” Michael says. “Some people draw inside the boxes, some scribble all over the paper. My father showed that how you treat those rectangles says something interesting about you.” According to Michael, the test, which Paul would eventually turn into a test for corporate executives, would go on to inspire the phrase thinking outside the box.
XV. What makes Michael’s job even harder is the intrusion of commercials. It’s not enough to tell a good story—the show has to be so compelling that people are willing to watch eighteen minutes of ads for eczema medicine, home insurance, and family sedans. Netflix and other streaming services, he points out, don’t have this problem.
XVI. Evidence suggests that an interest in violent dramas, horror films, and “prepper movies” comes with psychological benefits. According to a research team led by Coltan Scrivner at the University of Chicago, fans of dark entertainment exhibited less psychological distress during the COVID-19 pandemic. One likely explanation is that exposure to scary mysteries allows people to “practice effective coping strategies that can be beneficial in real-world situations.” Their “morbid curiosity” teaches them how to cope with unknown risks and practice resilience; make-believe traumas can help protect us from real ones.36
Chapter 6: The Infinite Game
I. “There’s a line in The Brown Book by Wittgenstein that really shaped my thinking,” Carse remembers. “It goes something like ‘the meaning of the word is what comes of it, not what is defined for that word.’ I read that and realized that the consequences are quite dramatic. Because if the meaning of anything is what comes of it, then when the word is spoken, you don’t know what it means until there is a reaction to it, until you see how it plays out.” Language, in this analysis, is like a game.
II. Carse’s first draft of the book was dense and academic and ran to more than 350 pages. “As it happened, I had a sabbatical in Paris as I was finishing the manuscript,” Carse remembers. “I took the pages to my favorite café and somehow lost it. All of it. I was heartbroken.” Carse was ready to give up when he decided to write a summary of his lost text, just in case he wanted to return to it someday. “In about six weeks I ended up writing the book as it is,” he says. “Easiest book I ever wrote. Thank god I lost that other one.”
III. A similar technique is used by Marvel, the most successful movie franchise in history. The superhero genre is defined by its utter lack of narrative mystery: the good guys always win. (Avengers: Endgame was never going to end with the triumph of Thanos.) The triumph of Marvel is to create mystery boxes within its closed universe, thus ensuring our attention even when the plot is predictable.
The tradition began with a post-credits scene in Iron Man, as Tony Stark walks into his mansion and is greeted by Nick Fury. “You think you’re the only superhero in the world?” Nick asks. “You’ve become part of a bigger universe. You just don’t know it yet.” Subsequent credit scenes continued the tradition, implying even bigger universes. The after-credit sequence for Captain America: Civil War references Black Panther—a movie that wouldn’t be released for another two years—while the after-credits for Avengers: Infinity War anticipate Captain Marvel. Meanwhile, the Infinity Gauntlet, a weapon that plays a crucial role in a 2018 Marvel film, is first glimpsed in Thor, released in 2011. As the researchers Spencer Harrison, Arne Carlsen, and Miha Skerlavaj observe, in their analysis of Marvel’s success, these subtle references “provoke an intense interest in characters, plotlines and entirely new worlds. Its whole universe has the feel of a puzzle that anyone can engage with.”
IV. Harry Potter has also inspired near-infinite amounts of fan fiction, as readers seek new ways of continuing the game.
V. The philosophy professor Richard Greene, in his history of spoilers, writes that “spoiler alerts” are intertwined with technology. The first “spoiler alert”—a warning about the ending of a forgotten Star Trek film—happened in 1982 on a Usenet news group. However, Greene writes, “It wasn’t until 2000 that the term ‘spoiler alert’ became commonplace across the Internet,” a ubiquity that parallels the sprawling reach and speed of the internet.
VI. The scholar Allen Redmon, at Texas A&M University–Central Texas, argues that the concept of the spoiler is rooted in the myth of “a pure or virginal text.” We bring the same moralistic assumptions to the movies that we bring to sex, supposing that something is lost after the first time.
VII. Citizen Kane begins with a classic mystery box, as the tycoon Charles Foster Kane utters “Rosebud” with his last, dying breath. When we watch the movie for the first time, we are pulled along by our curiosity: What could Rosebud possibly mean? The answer, given away in the final shot, is that Rosebud was the name of the sled Kane played with as an eight-year-old. It’s an underwh
elming reveal, a seemingly random scrap of memory. But that’s also the point. When we rewatch the movie, the insignificance of Rosebud forces us to ponder the larger mystery of Kane. We might know the secret of his final word, but we understand even less about the man.
VIII. The psychological literature distinguishes between epistemic uncertainty (puzzles) and aleatory uncertainty (mysteries).
IX. Consider social media. Instead of bringing us closer together, the sharing platforms become a competition for likes and followers and retweets.
X. A good story is like that never-ending baseball game, bringing us together around a shared experience. In a series of studies, the Uri Hasson has looked at what happens to the brain when people are engrossed in complex narratives. He’s shown them Hitchcock scenes, Larry David sketches, and Sergio Leone westerns. His results are remarkable. Within seconds of the story beginning, the brains of the subjects start to converge on the same patterns of activity. Hasson refers to this process as “neural entrainment.” In his talks, he uses the example of five metronomes to show how the entrainment happens. At first, the metronomes are all ticking at different times, just like those individual brains before the story. But then he places the metronomes on a pair of vibrating cylinders. Within seconds, the external vibrations start to synchronize the metronomes, bending them all to the same beat. Stories work the same way. “There are so many things in life that exaggerate our differences,” Hasson says. “But the best stories give us an experience that we can share with strangers at a pretty fundamental level.”
XI. Other experiences that silence the default mode network include meditation, prayer, and various psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin.
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