Davies - Riveted--The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry, and Religion Makes Us Feel One with the Universe

Riveted

Riveted

The Science of
Why Jokes Make Us Laugh,
Movies Make Us Cry, and
Religion Makes Us Feel
One with the Universe

Jim Davies

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Contents

Introduction

I n my first year of graduate school I worked in a condemned building. Sitting in my office was a woman I was trying to impress. We were talking about dance music. She liked club music and techno; I liked rap. I put on an acid jazz album in the compact disc player.

How can you dance to this? she asked.

How can you not dance to this? I replied, and then demonstrated the irresistibility of the track. For the most part, I only want to listen to music that makes me want to dance. Sorry, John Denver.

When I was young I was fascinated with psychic powers. I read every book in the libraries of both my elementary and high school on the subject, and was convinced that people had untapped mental abilities. All these books in the nonfiction section of my schools library told me that people could move things with their minds, scry with crystal balls, and predict the future. We used only 10 percent of our brains, right? What else could that 90 percent possibly be for?

I was absolutely captivated by this idea and convinced of it, until I read Susan Blackmores sobering In Search of the Light: Adventures of a Parapsychologist in college. It was the first skeptical book Id encountered and it scorched and salted the lush landscape of my paranormal beliefs. First Santa Claus and now this? Ideas can be beautiful and we dont want to let go of them even when we know theyre wrong.

There are things in this world that deeply resonate with us. We seek them out. They hold our attention. They feel right. I want to dance to hip-hop. I feel moved by sad, uplifting stories. I want to believe that people can move things just by willing it to happen.

You are struck by a beautiful view from a mountain cabin. You hear that everyone gets the afterlife that they imagined theyd have, and the idea is so beautiful, and feels so right, that you smile in spite of yourself. You hear a story of some terrible thing that happened to a child that gives you chills and haunts you for days. You find yourself glued to the screen, watching a close basketball game. You hear a great joke and cant wait to tell it to your friends.

With the huge variety of things we find compelling, it seems natural that a huge variety of qualities would make them compelling. There cant be anything similar about whats good about a pop song on the radio and whats moving when someone recounts their near-death experience, can there?

Yes, there can. Strange as it might seem, compelling things share many similarities. My purpose in this book is to tie together research from many fields. Ill do something that has never been done before and show how all these phenomena can be explained with the foundations of compellingness. I will show you that, like art and other sensory experiences, beliefs and explanations have aesthetic qualities that make us more or less likely to believe them. The same qualities appear again and again in riveting things, be they jokes, paintings, quotations, paranormal beliefs, religions, sports, video games, news, music, or gossip. The qualities that are common to all these things fit like a key in a lock with our psychological proclivities. I call it the compellingness foundations theory.

* * *

Understanding compellingness and how it works requires some understanding of our brains and how they were shaped by evolution. Our brains are a mix of old and newer processes that evolved at different times. They sometimes disagree on the meaning, importance, and value of things, and often we are clueless as to how we got our opinions. Often we are attracted to something or repelled by it and dont know why, and the reasons we dredge up are confabulations, mere guesses about our underlying psychologies.

The old brain is evolutionarily older. Its located near the top of the brain stem and the back of the head. We share much of its anatomy with other animals. Its a Rube Goldberg contraption, with special rules for this and not for that, all evolved, rather haphazardly, to help us survive and reproduce. It consists of a hodgepodge of specialized systems.

In the front of our head is the new brain, which is a general-purpose learning and reasoning machine and a system that tries to control the impulses of the older brain. Its a slow, deliberate planner and imaginer. Jazz improvisers quiet this part of their brain before performing. This part of the brain is not built to do specific jobs; rather its built to learn to do, well, just about anything. Where the old brain looks different depending on where you look, the new brain (particularly the cerebral cortex), looks remarkably similar no matter where you look. We have an old brain for the same reasons all animals do. We have the new brain because our ancestors got into an intelligence arms race with each other.

Because the old and new brains think with different rules, care about different things, and might even use different stores of knowledge, they often come up with different evaluations of the same situations. For example, there is a famous moral-reasoning experiment run by psychologist Joshua Greene that asks whether or not it is morally acceptable to pull a switch that will cause a train to kill one person rather than five (this is a version of a problem first proposed by Philippa Foot in 1967). Most people answer yes, such an action is acceptable, which indicates relatively high activation in the newer, more frontal areas. More emotionally salient problems, such as a version of the same problem that would require the pushing of a single person onto a track to save five people, show activation in the emotional, older parts of the brain. In this kind of scenario, where there is direct physical contact involved, people often report that doing so is morally unacceptable.

When the new brain pulls in the opposite direction from the old, you can literally be of two minds about something. For example, your new brain can know that prepackaged cupcakes are unhealthful, but your old brain can be quite insistent that they should be devoured. Many of them. With a cold glass of milk, please. The old brain knows that sugar and fat are scarce and should always be eaten when the opportunity arises. Thousands of years of evolution taught it that. It doesnt know that fat, sugar, and salt are now plentiful and contributing to an obesity problem in the industrialized world. In contrast, the new brain knows that too much sugar isnt good for you. But who are you going to listen to? (While were asking, who are you?)

The new brain knows things because it learned them. In this case, each one of us has to learn things that run counter to what the old brain knows from evolution. Such is the source of many internal mental conflicts. The old and new have a tug of war. The new brain thinks more logically, in a step-by-step way. The old brain is not deliberative; it is intuitive. Sometimes we can get a strong, immediate sense that something is immoral. This is the old brains influence. Then, when asked to explain it, we must engage our new brains, which struggle, often unsuccessfully, to apply what we believe about morality to justify the feeling. This is what moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt called moral dumbfounding. Similarly, when choosing an immediate versus a delayed reward, the emotional part of the brainthe old brainis active when thinking about the immediate reward, as are the frontal areasthe new brainfor the delayed reward. It could be that because we have some control over the activity of our frontal areas, we can use it to override the emotional areas when we need to. The everyday term for this would be resisting temptation.