Hidden Brain - Why We Love Surprises

Episode Date: December 24, 2019

Why do we fall for surprise endings? It turns out that our capacity to be easily fooled in books and movies is made possible by a handful of predictable mental shortcuts. In this 2018 conversation, we talk with Vera Tobin, one of the world's first cognitive scientists to study plot twists. She says storytellers have been exploiting narrative twists and turns for millennia — and that studying these sleights of hand can give us a better understanding of the contours of the mind.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantan. We all love a good surprise. In movies, we love the moment when the rug is pulled out from under us. When everything we thought we knew, turns out to be totally wrong. We love these moments so much, we even get a kick out of watching other people being surprised. WHAAAA! My God! Oh my God! In fact, there's an entire mini genre on YouTube of parents filming their children with them as they watch one of the greatest surprise scenes in movie history.

Spoiler alert, this is the showdown between our tribe's Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker in Star Wars the Empire Strikes Back. Video after video shows cute little kids peeking out from under blankets, their eyes wide as they discover the secret that the rest of the world already knows. I am your father. What? Does there is this father? Daddy is that true?

It's totally true. What? That just plays as father. This week we'll find out why our tendency to be easily fooled in movies can reveal something important about the way our minds work outside the movie theater. Stories do what happens to us as we make our way through the world all the time. We're making inferences, we're trying to make sense of the world and understand what other people think, what other people know, what's going on, and what stories do is they

play on these tendencies and they exploit them to produce really piratechnic effects. We'll talk to Vera Tobin, a cognitive scientist at Case Western Reserve University. She's the author of Elements of Surprise, our mental limits and the satisfaction of plot. We're going to look at two movies from the 1990s, the sixth sense and the usual suspects. If you haven't seen those movies yet, fair warning, more spoilers are coming your way. What do you think? We think what? Do you think that's crazy?

Yeah. Storytellers are not neuroscientists, but they intuitively know what neuroscientists know. All of us have blind spots in the way we assess the world. We overlook key details. We forget how we know things. We see patterns that aren't there. Because these blind spots are wired into the brain, they act in ways that are predictable. So predictable that storytellers from Sophocles to M. Night Shyamalan have used them against us to lead us astray. In recent years, some scientists have begun to ask, can stories serve as a kind of brains can?

If a surprise ending works by exploiting our biases and mental shortcuts, can observing the mechanics of a good story reveal something important about the contours of the mind? As we make our way through the world, our brains are assembling very fragmented, jagged bits of information into a coherent story for us, and what stories, films, and novels, and so on are doing is capitalizing on these features, and because they're doing that, it provides a wonderful sort of laboratory in the wild, you might say, for identifying where people are making those inferences, what kinds of predictable sorts of projections they make to fill in those gaps because the stories are exposing them.

If the idea of using movies as a brain scan seems far-fetched, think about what scientists have learned in recent years by studying magic tricks. So, you're going to be holding the coin like this, boom. This is a popular YouTube magician known as the Russian Genius. For this I will be showing you a coin, Venice, which looks something like this. In this clip, which we've altered a bit for clarity, he puts a coin in his left hand, gives it a dramatic squeeze, boom, and opens his hand.

And then it just disappears just like that. In fact, the coin is whisked away by the magician's other hand when we're not looking. But at this point, our minds have already filled in the gaps about cause and effect. That little squeeze of the hand, boom, it seems like it made the coin actually disappear. In this way a good magician exploits gaps in our attention and our tendency to draw rapid but flawed inferences.

In fact there's a whole thriving sub-area of cognitive science that has realized that magic tricks are this really fertile ground for discovering things about limitations in our visual perception and aspects of our attention that magicians have capitalized on for decades and centuries even. And the kinds of tricks that brilliant filmmakers and novelists, and short story writers, and playwrights use are themselves also magic tricks that also take advantage of these features in the way that people work. So when we dissect them, we can discover very, very reliable aspects of those tricks turn out to be very important clues about the way that people think. Now, there are many kinds of surprises in narratives, and at the most basic level, you can have someone jump out from behind a wall and scream at you, and that's one kind of surprise, and it's scary. But in some ways, you are focused on a different kind of surprise, a more sophisticated

kind of surprise. What kind of surprise is that? Yes, so I'm especially looking in this study at surprises where what you thought was happening, what you thought was going on, what you thought the circumstances were in a story turn out to be something different and that you're convinced by the story that it was something different all along. So that it's this retrospective surprise where the rug is pulled out from under you, the tables are turned, you, instead of thinking that the story has told you one thing and now it's telling you something different, what is going on here. You believe that you were mistaken and that now you have a new understanding of what was going on

before. So we're going to take a look at two movies both of which in some ways are these finely executed plots with these as you call it these finely oiled traps that are embedded inside them. And the first one is M. Knight-Charmelon's The Sixth Sense. A dedicated psychologist, Malcolm Crowe, is working with a troubled child named Cole. And after much effort, the psychologist finally gets Cole to open up about what's bothering him. Let's listen to a clip.

I want to tell you my secret now. OK. I see dead people. I'm gonna tell you my secret now. I see dead people. In your dreams? While you're awake? Dead people like engraves and coffins. Walking around like regular people. They don't see each other. They only see what they want to see.

They don't know they're dead. Vera, tell us about the surprise that follows. Yes, well, so as I expect most people at this point, no. What happens is that the psychologist who's helping this boy who can see dead people come to grips with his gift and so on is himself one of these dead people who can't see the other dead people who doesn't know he's dead that's his reality. And of course this movie has long been held up as a power gone of the surprise ending for

precisely the reasons you just laid out which which is as you watch the movie, you are taken in and at the point at which the surprises reveal to you, you look back and you see the numerous clues that was scattered throughout the movie, including in this last clip by the way, where a cold the child says, you know, they're everywhere I see them all the time. And of course, Cole is actually talking and seeing someone who actually is dead. That's exactly right. And part of what happens is, you know, in all kinds of stories, having characters with different kinds of information about what's going on gives the story a justification for leading the viewer to pay attention to certain things and not pay attention to other things.

And we're inclined to forget or lose track of possible discrepancies between characters' perspectives. So in the sixth sense, we lose track of the fact that Cole knows things that other characters may not know and he sees things that other characters may not see and that we're seeing what he sees. I wanna spend some time exploring different elements

of this plot and how they might reveal things about our minds. We actually had Danny Coniman on Hidden Brain recently and he talked to me about the availability bias, things that spring more readily to mind are seen as more plausible than things that spring less readily to mind. Now most of us find it easier to bring to mind a psychologist who's dealing with a patient

who's suffering from hallucinations rather than a scenario where a kid can talk to dead people. So one scenario seems more likely, the availability bias fools us into ignoring the less likely scenario. That's right. And of course also the fact that these scenarios that are more available to us are also made more available to us by also made more available to us by the film itself because we have a character there, the psychologist who is

absolutely operating on the assumption that he's not a dead person, he is a living psychologist, he's helping this child with things. As pathologies more severe than initially assessed, suffering from visual hallucinations, paranoia, school AIDS, schizophrenia. And this hypothesis about what's going on is very available to us because it's presented to us directly on screen as well. There's another moment in the movie that takes advantage of a powerful limitation in our thinking. Malcolm Crow, the dead psychologist played by Bruce Willis, is sitting across the room

from the troubled child's mother. They're in the living room and we assume they've just had a difficult, private conversation. The mother is looking down, she never looks at the psychologist. She doesn't even acknowledge he's there, which turns out to be a very significant detail, but we don't know that just yet. Then, her son enters the room. She gets up to see him. Hey, baby. How was he today? Now all that went by really fast, but let's return to this detail that the mother never

looked at Malcolm Crow. We think she didn't look at him because she was distraught about a conversation they'd had, but really, the mother can't see him because he's a ghost. As a dead guy, the psychologist doesn't notice anything strange either. According to the internal logic of his character, he just sits there, seeing whatever he wants to see. They only see what they want to see. They don't know they're dead. Here's the thing, we don't notice anything strange ourselves.

Relief to a conclusion about what's going on, and we assume that the characters in the movie are seeing and hearing and thinking what we see and hear and think. As far as Vera is concerned, this blind spot, imagining that other people think like we think, this is the mother of all blind spots. Cognitive scientists call it the curse of knowledge. So the things that we know, we find it very difficult, you know, essentially impossible to fully suppress that knowledge when we're thinking about what other people might know.

It seeps in and colors and influences our speculation about the perspective of other people. So when we first encounter this scene, we have an understanding of what it probably means and we readily project that understanding onto our speculation about what both of the characters in this scene think and know and understand and this affects how we interpret their actions. You know, one of the other things I found really lovely about the movie in the context of reading your book is that it plays on how we draw implicit conclusions about the world. So in the opening scenes of the movie, don't you remember your own patients?

We see the psychologist get shot by a former patient. You found me! You just give be a chance. Ah! Ah! When we see him walking around sometime later, my name is Dr. Malcolm Crowe. We're supposed to meet today, but I missed our appointment.

We assume he's recovered when in fact he's a ghost. Now, no one tells us he survived. We don't even think about it consciously. The information is powerful because it's actually implicit. We simply don't notice how our minds are constantly and consistently leaping to conclusions outside of our conscious awareness. That's right, and that's, of course, how we navigate the world all the time. It's how we make sense of stories that we tell one another.

We leave lots of material implicit for other people to fill in. We don't feel like we have to be labor over every point of connection and make these things abundantly clear, but it's also true as we make our way through the world all the time we have only partial information about what we're encountering, what kind of situation we're in, what other people think or know or intend, and part of the essence of being a person and moving fluently through the world is conjuring up all of these inferences to bridge the gaps between what we know for certain. There's one final idea I want to explore in connection with the sixth sense. You know we all think that we understand

information or we understand the world by carefully amassing and processing all the evidence. But in reality, we start with some piece of information, and then we build on it. But this initial information acts in some ways like an anchor. It influences everything else we learn afterwards. Tell me about the anchoring effect and the role it plays in the sixth sense. Well, yes. So actually, you refer to this initial scene, right, where he shot,

but it immediately followed by a cut to him walking around afterwards. So you have this moment of inference that you make indeed, as you say, without probably even noticing that it was an inference at all. It seems as if the film has showed you something. And it does this initially, and then it does it repeatedly over the course of the early scenes of the film, where you're given the psychologists understanding of what's going on over and over again. And with anchoring, even if you're skeptical about this framing, the fact that you got it right away will tend to constrain the directions in which your imagination goes. But your inclination is to have that initial framing of the circumstances that he sets forth as your anchor and then to adjust away from it and try to say, well, maybe it's not quite like that,

but not to throw it away altogether. And so that's what makes the anchor so powerful, which is we think that we are open to re-evaluating it, to throwing it aside, tossing it aside. But in fact, even when we're willing to do that, the anchor still exerts some kind of influence over us and prevents us from drifting too far away. That's right. And this is, of course, the essence of red herrings in general. It's even if a red herring, even if you see that it's a red herring, even if you are completely not taken

in by the line of speculation that that red herring suggests, it still will exert a sort of gravitational pull on the kinds of speculation that will come readily to mind that will be available to you. When we come back, we look at another movie from the 1990s that's also famous for its jaw-dropping plot twist. The usual suspects. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. Today I'm talking to Vera Tobin, one of the world's first cognitive scientists, to study how plot twists can offer a window into the workings of the human mind. As part of her research, she spent a lot of time watching movies, looking for a particular kind of surprise.

Surprises where they come climatically at the end of a film and they overturn everything that went before, so you know big plot twists. She calls these kinds of twists, rug pullers. In this segment, we're going to examine one of the greatest rug pullers in modern cinema. The usual suspects from 1995. Tell me you got the cripple in there from New York. Did he mention Kaiser Soze? Who?

In the movie, the police are looking for a mysterious criminal named Kaiser Soze. Nearly everything we know about Soze is filtered through the movie's narrator, a limping small-time crook named Verbal. He's played by Kevin Spacey. In the scene, Verbal tells an investigator about the legend of Kaiser Soze. He's supposed to be Turkish. Some say his father was German. Nobody ever believed he was real. Nobody ever knew him or so anybody that ever worked directly for him.

But to hear Kobayashi tell it anybody could have worked for Susie. You never knew. That was his power. So the plot twist is verbal is Kairzor Sosa. And the other part of the plot twist is that the whole unfolding story that we've seen as Verbal tells his account of what happened that appeared to be a sort of straightforward flashback to the mysterious events of the past. McManus came to us with the job. Fenster got the vans.

Pockney supplied the hardware. I came through with how to do it, so no one got killed. But Keaton. Turns out to all have been just a story that he was spinning in order to buy himself time in order to escape. We all knew it could be done. The way I figured to do it wrong meant killing, to do it right took five men, five men meant Keaton.

I wonder who are misdirected here partly because we adopt the beliefs and worldview of the people who narrate the stories to us, and the person who tells the story shapes the way we see the story. That's exactly right. So what happens is the more immersive a narrative is, the more and more we tend to take

what some people have called an inactive viewpoint, which is to say that we sort of have this immersive experience and our viewpoint begins to align more and more with the viewpoint that's being depicted to us and presented to us by the narrative. And of course you can see there's in all kinds of movies which is you know you tell the movie from the point of view of the victim, and it becomes a tragedy. You tell the same story about a bank heist from the point of view of the robbers, and it becomes, you know, potentially a funny story, or even a Victoria story about a heist pulled off successfully.

The point of view of the story, the narrator of the story, plays really a central role in shaping how we think about what's real and what's not real. At that point, I wasn't scared. I knew I hadn't done anything they could do me for. Besides, it was fun. I got to make like I was notorious. The framing of events and their significance and what parts are worth paying attention to and what they mean, all of these things are part of the way that the story is being told to us and the viewpoint of the person telling the story. And again, this is all mostly unconscious.

We're not actually thinking, this is the point of view, this is the frame I'm adopting. As you say, when a good story starts to unfold, we just get swept along and then, in some ways, our critical faculties are put on hold. That's right. So the more emotionally engaged, the more gripping and vivid the story is, the less attention we're paying to sort of the apparatus of the story and questioning and wondering and being on guard and monitoring these questions about, should I trust this source?

What are the discrepancies here and so on? You're just immersed in that perspective. And of course, then that means that if you're an artist, creating a movie or writing a book, what you want to do is take advantage of the fact that in highly emotional settings, people are more likely to be gullible than in other situations. That's right.

And so I think in a lot of circumstances, people tend to think of plot twists as being in some way opposed to, you know, their gimmicky, their operating on a level that is counter to these other sort of literary and filmic values of immersive storytelling, vivid characterization, depth and complexity and so on, but actually often they capitalize on exactly those things. You know, as I was reading your book, Vera, I got to thinking about how the usual suspects also takes advantage of the fact that we have sympathy for verbal because he has a disability. And it's difficult in our minds to see that someone who demands our sympathy might also be a psychopath that in some ways it requires a certain complexity of sort of holding these two opposing ideas simultaneously that is so hard to do that we just sort of jettison one of them.

Well, yeah, so stereotypes can be taken advantage of in these ways, and in fact that's part of the framing within the story, right? So, you know, verbal has cerebral pals palsy and or he seems to, right? But part of the final scene as he walks out into the city and his limp melts away and so on. So the idea is that the character was taking advantage of the fact that people often tend to see people with physical disabilities or other kinds of stereotyped vulnerabilities as somehow not eligible for other kinds of roles and that he's capitalizing on that as well. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. And like that, he's gone.

You know, psychologists sometimes talk about the hindsight bias, which is once an event has unfolded, you feel like you knew all along that it was going to happen. At some point, once you see the reveal in the sixth sense or the usual suspects, you go back and there's a part of you that kicks yourself or not seeing it, but there's a part of you that also says, yes, of course, I actually did see all those things. I actually, this actually makes sense to me. Yes, you can talk yourself into this position where you say, oh, yes, you know, I, I, it was, I halfway oh yes, you know, I, it was, I have way believed that, you know, I was, I was on the track, more than you really were potentially, right? So all of this

helps to, to sell you on this idea that the story really played fair with you, that the clues were there, that it was guessable after the fact. There's a clip on YouTube of a teenage boy on the couch watching the end of the sixth sense for the first time. The person filming him cannot contain his excitement. Don't check your phone. Just watch the fucking... As the kid on the couch learns the movie's big secret, he goes through a few stages. Confusion...

Wait a second. Understanding? Oh my God! Then he turns to the camera with a look of total glee. And the guy with the camera, he's euphoric. Hehehehe. It's as if he is seeing the surprise for the first time. Hehehe. So what's going on here?

Why do the surprises and stories leave us so delighted? Vera says there are a few reasons. One is, after all, it really is a story, not real life. So this kind of safe exploration of the thrill of surprise without the possible outcomes that would make surprises so unpleasant potentially in real life. So, you know, it's part of why it's really fun to go on a roller coaster and it's not so much fun to fall off a cliff. Right? And the other reason is that when they're constructed well, in real life, you don't have necessarily

a lead up to these sudden surprises where you can reflect back on what happened before and discover that the surprise is enlightening, right? That it lends new, interesting significance to the events that happened before, but with a well-made surprise, this has been set up for you. It's a little bit like the pleasure we get from solving a crossword puzzle or a difficult problem. It's at some point things that seem confusing all fall into place and there's an intense pleasure at seeing how all the parts come together beautifully. Exactly. So what a story can do for you is construct this insight

experience where you feel not that something has blindsided you or that you were just taken by surprise, but this experience that feels as if you have a real aha moment about how things fit together. And that is something that humans like a lot. Vera Tobin is a cognitive scientist at Case Western Reserve University. She's the author of the book, Elements of Surprise, our mental limits and the satisfaction of plot. Vera, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thank you so much for having me.

This week's show was produced by Laura Quarell and edited by Tara Boyle. Our team includes Jenny Schmidt, Raina Cohen, Parth Shah and Thomas Liu. Our topic today resonated deeply with me because stories are something we think about a lot at Hidden Brain. We work hard to find stories that bring research and ideas to life, and we often spend months working on those stories to ensure that we are providing you with the most useful takeaways. If you have ever benefited from the ideas you've learned from our show, please consider making a gift at donate.npr.org slash hidden brain. That address again is donate.npr.org slash hidden brain. Your donation will support your local public radio station and

our work. And thanks, we're truly grateful. Our unsung hero this week is Albert Lee. Albert helps to manage the budget for hidden brain and his attention to detail is everything you would want from someone in his role. It's said that behind every good business is a great accountant. And in our case, that's certainly true. Thank you, Albert. So what did you think? Did you like the fact that Darth Vader was actually a loomstad? Yeah! No! I'm Shankar Vedantum, and this is NPR.

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