Professor Jim Davies’ fascinating and highly accessible book, Riveted: The Sc
ience of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry, and Religion Makes Us Feel One with the Universe
, reveals the evolutionary underpinnings of why we find things compelling, from art to religion and from sports to superstition.
Incongruity often generates a desire to comprehend
In spite of what you might think of your fellow human beings on a day-to-day basis, we are the most intelligent and intellectually curious species around. The main reason we’ve come to dominate the planet as we have is because we’ve outsmarted the other species we compete with. Primates in general are curious, but humand take curiosity to the limit.
Incongruity is the flip side of our desire to find patterns. Too little order is confusing, too much order is boring. The sweet spot is that area where tantalizing contradictions are visible, but the stimulus gives us and inkling of a hidden order that can be figured out. The notion that there’s a hidden order draws people in. Repetition is related to complexity–an increase in repetition means a decrease in complexity. We like to look at things we can make sense of, but we also like to be challenged.
In fantasy and science fiction, good storytellers tend to stick to the relatively, but not overly, familiar
Filmmaker James Cameron reflected this aesthetic when describing his film Avatar:
If you’re oulandish all the time, you’ve got no place to hang your hat. People have to feel connections to things that they recognize, even down to the design of the Na’vi. There’s no plausible justification–unless you go to some really arcane explanation–for the Na’vi to look that human. It’s just that science fiction is not made for a galactic audience. It’s made by human beings for human beings.
In film, there is a style of editing called continuity editing that is designed to make the film easily comprehensible. One of its rules is called “match on action.” It involves placing a cut where a character is doing some physical action, such as sitting down. Seeing the beginning of the action in one cut and the action finished in the other helps make the cuts appear more continuous.
The relationship between order and incongruity is a fascinating tension
Personal discoveries of order and meaning are more compelling than order that is obvious from the outset.
It has been suggested that the discovery of an object or pattern is more pleasing when it takes some effort. To disvoer order means that i is not obvious at first. This means that there is an initial impression of either neutrality or incongruity. The discovery makes the stimulus feel deep and meaningful. The perceiver feels proud to have found hidden depths.
The exploration of uncertainty and the resolution is something that can unfold over time
This is obvious with music and narrative, but it hapens with painting and sculpture too. One cannot focus on every aspect of a painting all at once. As we experience a work of art, we see new patterns. Great works of art afford new insights with repeated exposure and study. The arts stays the same; we’re the ones who change.
Some arts are immediatly pleasing to anyone, but for many kinds of art we have to earn appreciation–as familiarity grows, we learn more patterns. As we have seen above, connooisseurs’ ability to see more patterns. As we have seen above, connoisseur’ ability to see more patters makes simpler works more boring to them, but they have a greater ability to appreciate complex works. They can see patterns that laypeople cannot.
Turning from art to activities, the concept of flow, pioneered by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, is a feeling one gets while engaging in certain activities, characterized by absorption in the activity, forgetting the self, and positive emotions. Some get it surfing, some drawing, some bartending. What makes his theory relevant to the sweet spot I’m describing is that getting to it requires a bit of challenge but not too much.
