Читать книгу Figure It Out - Stephen P. Anderson - Страница 38

Using the incoming sensory information (deemed relevant and worth giving attention to), your brain constructs an experience of reality. The brain tries to make sense of this relevant, incoming information. While we’d like to believe we’re rational beings, good at objectively evaluating things, study after study has shown otherwise. With only the incoming sensory information to go off of, prior concepts to refer to, and the need to reconcile things quickly, our brains can reach some rather curious conclusions. Take this humorous newspaper cover shown in Figure 3.1 as an example.

We see a photo that, while intended to go with the headline, does so in an unintended way. The headline “Violent crime duo caught on video” suggests that the two whimsical characters are the crime duo being referred to. This is humorous precisely because our brain is trying to force a connection where none was intended.

FIGURE 3.1 The humor of the newspaper front page comes from our brain trying to reconcile the headline “Violent crime duo caught on video” with the photo of two whimsical children’s characters.

This juxtaposition of image and headline is what fuels mediums like comedy, comic books, and film. Comics and graphic novels rely on the brain to fill in the gap between multiple panels. In film, edits and cuts ask the brain to piece scenes together into a cohesive story. To test how powerful this can be, grab any two or three photos from a magazine, put them together, and your brain will begin to construct a story that links these randomly grabbed objects together (see Figure 3.2).

FIGURE 3.2 Three images—a spilled wine glass, a cat looking up, and a person unlocking a door—grabbed at random. What story do you construct after looking at these three images?

Withholding or adding sensory information then determines what “pieces” the brain has to work with and reconcile. As with working a puzzle, the brain tries to “make sense” of things by identifying a sensible pattern.

Stated another way: The brain is an associative, pattern-matching organ. But the associations aren’t based solely on the incoming, external stimuli. The brain also brings to mind prior experiences that help fast-forward the pattern-matching process.