Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind from housetop dot Com.
Speaker 1: Three brothers named Franklin, Emmett, and Bill are together in
Speaker 1: prison for a failed case of rail robbery in Oklahoma.
Speaker 1: Their plan had been to make off with all the
Speaker 1: packages from a US Post Office mail car, which they
Speaker 1: reasoned would have some expensive merchandise on the way to
Speaker 1: the west. Instead, they got tracked down by US marshals
Speaker 1: and sentenced to thirty years in a federal penitentiary. On
Speaker 1: the one year anniversary of their incarceration, the prison gets
Speaker 1: a new warden. This warden, everybody says, is a soft
Speaker 1: hearted academic social scientists type, and instead of harsh punishments,
Speaker 1: he brings in new accommodations for the prisoners. One is
Speaker 1: a newly stocked library and a collection of board games.
Speaker 1: How sweet. One day, Bill, the youngest of the brothers,
Speaker 1: brings his brothers a spirit board from the board game card.
Speaker 1: He suggests they use it to ask how they can
Speaker 1: escape the prison. Laughing, the older brother, Franklin, balks at
Speaker 1: this otherworldly nonsense, but Bill convinces them to play, and
Speaker 1: so the three brothers put their hands on the plant
Speaker 1: of the spirit board. After several minutes of asking questions
Speaker 1: and getting no answers, the plancher begins to move, ever
Speaker 1: so slowly at first, but then gaining speed, and it spells,
Speaker 1: I want to talk to Bill, so Franklin laughs, but
Speaker 1: Bill is dead serious. He takes the board away in
Speaker 1: the corner by himself and spends the rest of the
Speaker 1: day with it. The next morning, out in the yard,
Speaker 1: Bill is shot by guards while trying to climb over
Speaker 1: the fence. Stupid, Franklin says, why would Bill have thought
Speaker 1: he could make it? A month goes by Immett. The
Speaker 1: middle brother brings the spirit board back, and he suggests
Speaker 1: they use it to see if they can contact Bill
Speaker 1: to ask him why he did such a stupid thing.
Speaker 1: They do im it speaks to the air, Franklin shits quietly.
Speaker 1: After several minutes of nothing, the plancha finally starts to
Speaker 1: move its else I want to talk to Emmett. Emmett
Speaker 1: takes the board by himself to the corner and spends
Speaker 1: the rest of the day playing with it in silence.
Speaker 1: The next morning, Emmett has wall cleaning duty on the
Speaker 1: guard towers, and in the middle of this he tries
Speaker 1: to jump from the tower over the fence and breaks
Speaker 1: his neck. It was so high, why would he have
Speaker 1: thought he could survive? Immediately afterwards, Franklin goes to the
Speaker 1: prison library and retrieves the spirit board for himself. He
Speaker 1: takes it to a quiet corner. He says, what have
Speaker 1: you been telling my brothers? The plant you under his
Speaker 1: fingers begins to move, and unfortunately that's all there is
Speaker 1: of the story. Hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. What
Speaker 1: happens next? How can we leave it there? The just
Speaker 1: the ragged ends of the story. We're bleeding all over
Speaker 1: the place. What are we supposed to do? It leaves
Speaker 1: us hungry for more? Joe, Uh, So, I wrote that story,
Speaker 1: so that may have been a horrible story. I was
Speaker 1: trying to inflict the pain that people feel when there
Speaker 1: is a story that's set up that is not completed.
Speaker 1: I know we all have this experience. You ever have
Speaker 1: one of those great uh TV shows that gets one
Speaker 1: season going, everybody likes it, and then it gets canceled
Speaker 1: and you never know what what was going to happen? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I seem to recall having the same experience with Stephen
Speaker 1: King's Golden Years back in the day. I don't know
Speaker 1: what that is. It was like a TV show that
Speaker 1: he did about this guy that was getting older or
Speaker 1: getting younger. It's been a long time, but they have
Speaker 1: the David Bowe's song is the theme song. And uh,
Speaker 1: it just it did not do well and it did
Speaker 1: not get picked up, and I have no idea what happened, um,
Speaker 1: and I never will. Wow, it's a horrible feeling. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, even if the material is not that good,
Speaker 1: it sticks with you. You you want to follow it through.
Speaker 1: You want to have the complete experience of that story. Right.
Speaker 1: So this episode We're gonna do today is about the
Speaker 1: concept of incompleteness and unfinished ideas in art, in science,
Speaker 1: and in psychology in general. But this was actually inspired
Speaker 1: by a couple of events that you attended when you
Speaker 1: were recently in New York City. But I think we
Speaker 1: were actually in New York City around the same time,
Speaker 1: the same week, Yeah, separately, and you I think you
Speaker 1: left right before I arrived and we didn't actually realize
Speaker 1: that this was happening. But but yeah, I was. I
Speaker 1: was in New York for the World Science Festival, which
Speaker 1: I tried to attend at least every couple of years.
Speaker 1: And uh, I attended a fabulous discussion titled to Unweave
Speaker 1: a Rainbow, Science and the Essence of Being Human. And
Speaker 1: by the time this publishers, I believe the video is
Speaker 1: actually available for everyone else. I'll make sure that we
Speaker 1: include a link to it on the landing page for
Speaker 1: this episode. UH. And I also attended a wonderful exhibit
Speaker 1: at the Metropolitan Museum of Art titled The Unfinished Thoughts
Speaker 1: Left Visible. This is crazy because when I was New York,
Speaker 1: I all I went to the met but I did
Speaker 1: not see this exhibit, and that drives me crazy, not
Speaker 1: only because I was unable to finish seeing everything at
Speaker 1: the DUM and thus my museum experience is left incomplete
Speaker 1: and unfinished task, but also because this exhibit sounds really cool.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, indeed, it's um It features a features a
Speaker 1: vast gallery of incomplete works um by a number of
Speaker 1: just really famous artists, and each work exposes something of
Speaker 1: the artist process, uh, the realities of the artistic process,
Speaker 1: and something of the the timescape in which each one
Speaker 1: was produced. So um, yeah, it's a fascinating exhibit. It's
Speaker 1: as as of this publication date, it's still ongoing through
Speaker 1: most of this year, So if you're in New York
Speaker 1: or you're making it up that way, go check it out.
Speaker 1: But also, the the online presence for the exhibit is
Speaker 1: is pretty strong as well. Any piece that we mentioned
Speaker 1: here and all the ones that we do not mention,
Speaker 1: they are all viewable at the METS website. Cool. So
Speaker 1: I guess this episode is probably going to be a
Speaker 1: little bit looser than many of them. Yeah, that's the
Speaker 1: way I'm kind of envisioning it, that it's going to
Speaker 1: be more sort of back and forth and just talking
Speaker 1: about ideas here because both experiences, both the World Science
Speaker 1: Festival panel and the exhibited to MET, really got me
Speaker 1: thinking about the nature of incompleteness and finished unfinished works
Speaker 1: and the human experience. So yeah, I thought we'd dive
Speaker 1: dive into the topic of it here um and just
Speaker 1: see where it takes us. Will we will get to
Speaker 1: some more you know, sort of scientific material towards the
Speaker 1: end in case, in case everything feels a little too
Speaker 1: lucy doocy to you. Alright, So here we are. Let's
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about human obsessions with completeness, and
Speaker 1: the sort of unfinished nature of our lives. It's kind
Speaker 1: of a weird paradox, isn't it. Yeah, why is it that?
Speaker 1: It drove me crazy? When I was in New York
Speaker 1: at the same time, I was going to museums. I
Speaker 1: went to Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and
Speaker 1: the American Natural History Museum. All fantastic. At the met
Speaker 1: and the Natural History Museum, I was not able to
Speaker 1: see everything in the museum in a day. Yeah, They're
Speaker 1: gigantic museums, and that drove me crazy. I felt like
Speaker 1: I was going insane because I was like, I've spent
Speaker 1: a whole day here, I haven't even gotten through half
Speaker 1: of it. Uh. But if I had gone to a
Speaker 1: museum that was composed entirely of only the things I
Speaker 1: was able to see at those museums, that would have
Speaker 1: been a wonderful experience. Yeah. It was just the knowledge
Speaker 1: that I hadn't finished it. I mean I even find
Speaker 1: that towards the end, even the stuff that I have
Speaker 1: time to to look at and try to absorb, by
Speaker 1: the end of my my visit, I have I'm feeling
Speaker 1: enough of a cognitive drain that I know that I'm
Speaker 1: not properly assimilating all the information, So really I need
Speaker 1: to always make it a point to just hit the
Speaker 1: stuff is most interesting to me first and pray that
Speaker 1: I don't run across something even more interesting later in
Speaker 1: the visit, especially on the way out when you have
Speaker 1: no time to see it at all. Yeah, So part
Speaker 1: of this is of course just just you know, as
Speaker 1: far as the broader human experience goes, it's just a
Speaker 1: quest for like an understanding of the world. Uh, you
Speaker 1: want to know where you are, you want to know
Speaker 1: what's around the corner, and in a larger sense, you
Speaker 1: want to a concise cosmology. We want to know where
Speaker 1: we came from, where we're going. We want to know
Speaker 1: how the world works and how we can exploit that
Speaker 1: information to better carry out all those biological objectives that
Speaker 1: we have mandated in our genes. But of course we
Speaker 1: can't know all that, right, We're never going to know everything. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we can fool ourselves into thinking we know all the
Speaker 1: necessary information and it given time, such as what are
Speaker 1: the main exhibits we want to see at the met
Speaker 1: But then we turn a corner on our way out
Speaker 1: and we realized there was something we wanted to see, uh,
Speaker 1: and we just didn't know it was there. But that
Speaker 1: same kind of obsession with having a complete picture, complete
Speaker 1: view that comes in in art to get what's that
Speaker 1: old expression, who is it who said that? You know? Uh,
Speaker 1: poems or novels, maybe whatever it is, they're they're never
Speaker 1: really finished, They're only abandoned. Yeah, yeah, that's and that's
Speaker 1: I think that's an accurate statement to bring up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: even even a work like that, which is a contained work,
Speaker 1: a self contained universe in many senses, with a definite beginning, middle,
Speaker 1: and end. Uh, even those are arguably all incomplete. Um.
Speaker 1: And of course all any of this is completely out
Speaker 1: of step with our experience of reality. Our lives are
Speaker 1: in a constant state of incompleteness. You know, we're all
Speaker 1: half finished. Stories, are relationships, or values, are beliefs, They're
Speaker 1: constantly in flux. And we have this this maddening, more
Speaker 1: you know, empowering, depending on how you look at it,
Speaker 1: ability to believe in multiple things that totally contradict each other.
Speaker 1: So as much as we crave a complete narrative, as
Speaker 1: much as we crave a complete cosmology, our own inner
Speaker 1: experience is just a jumble that best we're able to
Speaker 1: to to sort of deceive ourselves into thinking of as
Speaker 1: part of a more complete war. Okay, so how does
Speaker 1: this tie I can see how it ties into the
Speaker 1: met exhibit with unfinished works of art, but how does
Speaker 1: this tie into the discussion you saw at the World
Speaker 1: Science Festival. Okay, So the talking question was to unweave
Speaker 1: a rainbow science in the essence of being human, and
Speaker 1: it featured a three way discussion between physicist Brian Greene
Speaker 1: is also one of the founders of the World Science Festival,
Speaker 1: neuroscientist Miguel Nicolaylis, and writer Leon weasel Tier weasel Tier.
Speaker 1: So their their conversation wove in and out of this
Speaker 1: very notion of basically with a focus on on science
Speaker 1: and non scientific understanding of science and religion, science and philosophy,
Speaker 1: talking about each one's ability to try and create a
Speaker 1: complete picture or even just to go after a complete
Speaker 1: picture of what the universe is, what the human experiences.
Speaker 1: Weaseltier in particular took up the more the pro religion,
Speaker 1: pro philosophy argue in here um and he just makes methods.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, and he brought it up, you know, basically
Speaker 1: and saying that you know, this is this is the
Speaker 1: best way to trump what is the best way to
Speaker 1: trump uncertainty in our lives? You know, we have science
Speaker 1: and we have religion. We need to feel that our
Speaker 1: lives or an outcome of something, so we want to
Speaker 1: turn to something that has a complete answer. But of
Speaker 1: course there's that we run into obvious problems there. First,
Speaker 1: Let's stake science, right, um, sciences we understand it on
Speaker 1: the show, and I think his most listeners understand it
Speaker 1: is not a complete understanding of the universe. I think
Speaker 1: one of the quickest ways you can tell someone is
Speaker 1: not scientifically literate is when they say something like, oh,
Speaker 1: scientists think that that science gives you all the answers. Uh.
Speaker 1: That that is not what science is about. It is,
Speaker 1: in fact, always uncertainty. Uh. And anybody who thinks like
Speaker 1: that probably doesn't interact with science very much. Right and
Speaker 1: and Weaseltier put a nice little summary over this discussed
Speaker 1: by discussing an intern of science and vulgar science, saying
Speaker 1: that you know, real science is questing after the answers
Speaker 1: and is inherently incomplete, whereas vulgar science is more of
Speaker 1: this sort of idea of science, this bumper sticker Um,
Speaker 1: I love science level of scientific understanding where it's really
Speaker 1: more like a religious understanding of science. It's just dogma's
Speaker 1: science says we know X, rather than thinking about the
Speaker 1: method itself. Right. But then in terms of religion, he
Speaker 1: makes a distinction between religion and vulgar religion. The idea
Speaker 1: here being that just as vulgar science believes that science
Speaker 1: has all the answers and shouldn't be questioned, and is this,
Speaker 1: you know, bumper sticker understanding of it, you also have
Speaker 1: this version of religion that thinks, oh well, it's it's
Speaker 1: written on a tablet somewhere, it's all taken care of,
Speaker 1: it's all explained. Whereas you know it, at higher levels
Speaker 1: of most faiths, you're going to encounter a lot more
Speaker 1: consideration there is. I mean that when you get into
Speaker 1: theological discussions of how this model of faith interacts with
Speaker 1: the human experience and with our daily lives, it's gonna
Speaker 1: be a little more nuanced and particularly and and possibly changing.
Speaker 1: This is weasel weasel tears yea weasel tears argua. So
Speaker 1: that religion also has a sort of quest for meaning
Speaker 1: version that that leaves a sort of radical openness in
Speaker 1: the same way science does. Yeah, radical openness. I think
Speaker 1: that's a that's that's a good way to put it.
Speaker 1: Uh So, so I really liked his argument that you
Speaker 1: can find that radical openness on both sides. UM. Now,
Speaker 1: as far as art goes there, there was actually some
Speaker 1: direct references to Art in this talk. Uh. Miguel Nicolaylis,
Speaker 1: who who's a very interesting neuroscientists by the way, involved
Speaker 1: in a number of different UM projects that involve using
Speaker 1: an exoskeleton device to assist severely paralyzed patients. Imagine he's
Speaker 1: come up in your work. Yes, I've read about him
Speaker 1: with with mind computer interfaces. Yeah, so he's he's a
Speaker 1: great guy to here talk about sort of the limits
Speaker 1: of the human mind. Sorry, more accurately, I should say
Speaker 1: brain computer in Oh yeah, I mean with mind you
Speaker 1: get into different territory. Yeah, And in this discussion, Nikolaalis
Speaker 1: is definitely taking the brain approach, and uh and weasel
Speaker 1: t here is more of the mind spokesman, I guess
Speaker 1: you could say, but Nikolaals brings up this idea that
Speaker 1: that art was once very precise. So you go, you're
Speaker 1: going through the mat or any art museum. You're looking
Speaker 1: at the older pieces and what not, the really old pieces.
Speaker 1: But you know, so certainly Renaissance work, you're all representative. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're seeing very almost photographic paintings of what people look like. Uh. People,
Speaker 1: the artists are trying to create an image of the world.
Speaker 1: Is everyone else sees it universal truth? Right? But then
Speaker 1: we reached this point when artists want to paint their
Speaker 1: own experiences of something rather than the universal experience of
Speaker 1: the thing. Um so uh, you get into these areas
Speaker 1: such as um uh. Well. On one specific example that
Speaker 1: that was brought up was William Turner's steamboat painting. I
Speaker 1: see you have a picture of this in here. I do,
Speaker 1: and it's it looks kind of like a bunch of
Speaker 1: hair going down the drain. Yeah, it's uh, if you
Speaker 1: could say that, it's definitely kind of brownish, blackish, bluish
Speaker 1: swirls with an illumination in the middle. And knowing that
Speaker 1: it's about a steamboat, you can look at it and
Speaker 1: you can see a steamboat, but it is not a
Speaker 1: has no photographic clarity to it. In fact, it's in
Speaker 1: fact it utilizes what is often referred to in art
Speaker 1: as non finite intention something that is intentionally unfinished. Um.
Speaker 1: And and sometimes that's like an obvious state of unfinished,
Speaker 1: like portions of of a canvas or are not filled in.
Speaker 1: But other times it's about the detail, like stuff is
Speaker 1: left vague, stuff is left without that level of photographic detail,
Speaker 1: because it's more about the the subjective experience of the
Speaker 1: thing as opposed to an objective truth. I like this
Speaker 1: Michuel Miguel Nicholales quote you have in here, where he
Speaker 1: says all art is a collision of sight and conception
Speaker 1: of reality. You could also say in the same way
Speaker 1: that all vision is a collision of external and internal.
Speaker 1: I mean vision is part photons but also part psychology exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So this puts an interesting spin on on the the
Speaker 1: idea of incompleteness and completeness and what we experience. As
Speaker 1: weasel Tier brought up as well, there's there's no perfect
Speaker 1: objectivity here, there's no view from nowhere. It's all an
Speaker 1: amalgam of what comes from inside what comes from outside. Uh.
Speaker 1: And in this we kind of get into It reminds
Speaker 1: me a lot of Plato's theory of forms, right that
Speaker 1: you have these there's an ideal version of something say, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, a sculpture of a woman, or a or
Speaker 1: a or a chair or a you know, a governmental system,
Speaker 1: whatever your your dream happens to be. There's an ideal
Speaker 1: form that exists outside of our reality, and all we
Speaker 1: can do is quest after it, but we can never
Speaker 1: quite achieve it, right, all the stuff we've been countered
Speaker 1: or imperfect strivings towards that ideal. Right, and if so,
Speaker 1: if everything is imperfect, um, if everything falls short of
Speaker 1: the the ideal from the realm reforms, then does it
Speaker 1: matter where we stop. It's almost like if whatever you
Speaker 1: do is going to be incomplete, like it's better to
Speaker 1: try and figure out where is the artful level of incompleteness,
Speaker 1: you know, like men, sometimes it's better to be to
Speaker 1: keep things vague, right then to to absolutely list everything
Speaker 1: that you know and therefore list the things that you don't,
Speaker 1: If that makes sense. Yeah, But I could also see
Speaker 1: how that same embracing of incompleteness could in the wrong
Speaker 1: ecology of the mind lead to a sort of nihilism,
Speaker 1: where well, what does it matter finishing anything? What does
Speaker 1: it matter attaining goals? Now, from a neuroscientific point, Nicola
Speaker 1: Lists said he want on to point out that the
Speaker 1: brain and all of this is not a passive decoder,
Speaker 1: of course obviously, Yeah, that that is an obsolete view
Speaker 1: the brain as a quote, self adapting complex system, and
Speaker 1: this is all built atop physics, of course. But but
Speaker 1: he pointed out that you know, he he connects brains
Speaker 1: to machines for a living. That's that's pretty much an
Speaker 1: exact quote on that. Uh. And there's a there's a
Speaker 1: tendency to discredit the unique aspects of human consciousness in
Speaker 1: all of this. So if you try and work with
Speaker 1: the brain as if it's a digital computer, it doesn't work. Well.
Speaker 1: You have here is a probabilistic turing machine, a hyper
Speaker 1: computer that's an order above digital computers or normal touring
Speaker 1: machine that relates to some to something we talked about
Speaker 1: in our P versus NP episode with probabilistic machines versus
Speaker 1: deterministic machines all all of our computers today or deterministic machines. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so as such, any experience of beauty, it all
Speaker 1: depends on experience as a As Nicolas points out, a
Speaker 1: functional brain involves exchanges at various levels. So there's no truth,
Speaker 1: there's only this just this best approximation of the truth
Speaker 1: that our minds can make. So even our mind states
Speaker 1: are ever changing, ever evolving, and of course ever incomplete,
Speaker 1: and therefore it makes perfect sense that that incompleteness is
Speaker 1: sometimes part of the design, as in these incomplete works
Speaker 1: of art. Well, let's take a look at some of
Speaker 1: these incomplete works of art. So there are obviously a
Speaker 1: lot of different reasons that you could have a work
Speaker 1: of art that isn't finished. I mean, we're we're talking
Speaker 1: here about this nonfinite technique where it's intentionally sort of
Speaker 1: left unfinished in order to convey something. But there's a
Speaker 1: lot of accidental unfinished nous too, right, Yeah, And some
Speaker 1: of these are pretty obvious like that, Like you can
Speaker 1: easily imagine, oh, well, if this work was incomplete at
Speaker 1: the time of the artist's death, and that happens a lot.
Speaker 1: They just don't get around to finishing it and it
Speaker 1: never gets done. Um. But then other times that's they
Speaker 1: abandon it. It was just kind of a sketch to
Speaker 1: begin with, Maybe they never intended to finish it. Other times,
Speaker 1: especially with with with with portraits, Uh, there's a financial
Speaker 1: disagreement with a patron, there's a political disagreement, personal issuing
Speaker 1: in about that mole on my lip, yeah, or you know,
Speaker 1: or or illness or death ends up taking the patron
Speaker 1: or at least the subject of the painting out of
Speaker 1: the picture and just can't picture it finish it. Um.
Speaker 1: And it was one of the interesting things in that
Speaker 1: the exhibit, too, is just how often you sel patron
Speaker 1: problems with with artists that would go on to just
Speaker 1: be too you know, complete famous names like you wouldn't
Speaker 1: think of this individual ever having a situation where their
Speaker 1: painting is rejected like two or three times by the patron,
Speaker 1: But but it occurs. I believe that that in particular,
Speaker 1: there was one by Gustaf Clint uh and uh and
Speaker 1: you just you don't think about someone saying, I don't know,
Speaker 1: goof staff, this just doesn't look great. Can you take
Speaker 1: another another crack at it and then get back to me.
Speaker 1: All of our listeners out there, you who are graphic
Speaker 1: designers and have this frustrating experience over an over, that's
Speaker 1: not what I want. Yah, take comfort in this, Yeah,
Speaker 1: in the company of Clint. Yeah. No matter how how
Speaker 1: skilled you are during your life, you're gonna be You're
Speaker 1: gonna have your your work returned multiple times. It's only
Speaker 1: after you've you've died that everyone will take every little
Speaker 1: scrap of paper that you did a doodle on and
Speaker 1: start selling it. Now, one of the examples you included
Speaker 1: here in our outline for for this is really interesting.
Speaker 1: I was not familiar with this painting, but I think
Speaker 1: it is gorgeous and awesome. I love it. Yeah, Okay,
Speaker 1: So the painting and question is the Puniment Punishment of
Speaker 1: Marcia's also known as the Flaying of Marcillas by Italian
Speaker 1: Late Renaissance artist Titian. And I had seen this one
Speaker 1: before because it's grizzly, and that tends to be my
Speaker 1: main entry point into classic words of art is if
Speaker 1: they're violent and weird. And this one has like a
Speaker 1: number of of fauns and staters standing around, and so
Speaker 1: somebody being there's in they're inverted and they're being flayed alive.
Speaker 1: So Marcias is actually a sadder, right, He supposed to
Speaker 1: be like a fawn kind of creature who who gets
Speaker 1: into a he has he has beef with Apollo, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that they for some reason have a contest of playing music,
Speaker 1: I believe, is that right? Yeah? And Apollo wins, and uh,
Speaker 1: and whichever whichever contestant wins gets to do whatever he
Speaker 1: wants to to the other one. And I guess what
Speaker 1: Apollo wants to do to this poor sat Or is
Speaker 1: flay him alive? It's um. You know, you see this
Speaker 1: a lot in in Greek mythology, right, You have an
Speaker 1: individual who challenges a god to or accept the god,
Speaker 1: accepts the god's challenge to some sort of a competition,
Speaker 1: or they just end up in a in some sort
Speaker 1: of a spat with a deity. Always a bad devil
Speaker 1: went down to Georgia. Yeah, like devil went down to
Speaker 1: Georgia's like that actually ends up okay. But if that,
Speaker 1: if the devil went down to Georgia was a was
Speaker 1: an ancient Greek myth, he would have you know, wound on, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the devil would play him with a pill. Right.
Speaker 1: That was it was, That was the That was how
Speaker 1: their cosmolo she worked. So this particular painting is one
Speaker 1: of several that Titian produced later in life that displays
Speaker 1: horrific scenes of murder, misery. Um. And here recreated all
Speaker 1: of these with the intentional imperfect detail. So I guess
Speaker 1: the idea is that the mind can't quite take it
Speaker 1: all in because it's just so grizzly, just so depressing,
Speaker 1: just so mind rending, lee awful, that things kind of
Speaker 1: blur out. Yeah, I think it accomplishes that well. Now,
Speaker 1: there are obviously different ways that paintings can have an
Speaker 1: unfinished style, and I think this one is considered unfinished
Speaker 1: just in the level of sort of resolution of detail.
Speaker 1: It's blurry, it's not like there's a missing corner or something,
Speaker 1: but there's stuff like that too. Yeah. Yeah. And and
Speaker 1: another key example and one of my favorites from the piece,
Speaker 1: because it definitely gets into some discussions here we can
Speaker 1: have about literature and film and other media, but it's
Speaker 1: it involves another work by Titian. Uh, And what we
Speaker 1: have here is an unfinished portrait of an unknown lady
Speaker 1: and her daughter, probably mens of Titian's family, but it
Speaker 1: was it was left uncomplete, incomplete at the time of
Speaker 1: his death. So what happened, Well, this particular painting was
Speaker 1: setting around and then um, somebody came along and decided
Speaker 1: to finish it for him, somebody who maybe wasn't as
Speaker 1: good an artist as definitely not as good as good
Speaker 1: maybe I'm probably thinking of it, you know, as you know,
Speaker 1: somebody else working in the studio and underlying came along
Speaker 1: and says, oh, well, look this is almost completed. Um,
Speaker 1: but I feel pretty talented. I'm gonna take this, complete
Speaker 1: it and then I can sell it. Right then it's
Speaker 1: going to be a value. And so the painting was
Speaker 1: altered in the studio to depict Tobias and the Archange
Speaker 1: del raphael um. So it doesn't look up pictures of this, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the original one that's kind of striking, the redone one?
Speaker 1: What could it looks insipid? Yeah? It clearly even to untrained,
Speaker 1: you know, mostly untrained eyes such as my own, you
Speaker 1: can tell that there's a big dip in quality. It
Speaker 1: goes from you know, looking like an unfinished masterpiece to uh,
Speaker 1: just another paintings. Yeah, just another painting of an angel
Speaker 1: and a boy, uh, just standing there. Uh. So it
Speaker 1: wasn't until the second half of the twentieth century, uh
Speaker 1: that they were able to restore and this is kind
Speaker 1: of this is kind of crazy, restore the completed work
Speaker 1: to its original incomplete status um, which is which is
Speaker 1: lovely because what does this say about our first of all,
Speaker 1: about our desire to complete works, But then about our
Speaker 1: feelings regarding a completed work, especially if it's completed by
Speaker 1: someone other than the artists. Well, I feel like this
Speaker 1: is very different between an artist who is still living
Speaker 1: and an artist who has been dead for a while,
Speaker 1: Because once an artist has been dead for a while
Speaker 1: and becomes part of art history, I think maybe that
Speaker 1: there is a different motivation and interacting with each of
Speaker 1: their works. It's less to experience a single completed work,
Speaker 1: but to get a complete and true view of the
Speaker 1: artist's career, in which case the unfinished work that's a
Speaker 1: true reflection of the artist is more a part of
Speaker 1: this completeness paradigm we want than a truly finished portrait
Speaker 1: that doesn't look like that artist style. Yeah, because in
Speaker 1: many cases an incomplete painting it it gives us insight
Speaker 1: into their technique, how they went about creating these particular paintings,
Speaker 1: Like what did they complete first? What? Whether did they
Speaker 1: do the background? Did they do the foreground, did they
Speaker 1: do some sort of you know, scaffolding blueprint underneath it?
Speaker 1: You know, it's all tremendously interesting when you're trying to
Speaker 1: figure out who this artist was and how they conducted
Speaker 1: their craft. Yeah, but tying into what I just said,
Speaker 1: I mean, that's sort of lets us know that there
Speaker 1: are different levels of completeness we seek. Do you want
Speaker 1: completeness at the individual works scale, or do you want
Speaker 1: completeness at the artist's biography scale? Or do you want
Speaker 1: complete this from a historical periods understanding scale? You know,
Speaker 1: you want to see this as part of the Italian Renaissance.
Speaker 1: I don't know what all the eras of paintings are,
Speaker 1: but uh, you see what I mean. Yeah, But like
Speaker 1: a literary example that I can't help it come to
Speaker 1: is that of Frank Herbert's Dune saga Oh Boy, which
Speaker 1: we discussed a little open talking about today. So this,
Speaker 1: the Dune Saga was of course left incomplete at the
Speaker 1: time of Frank Herbert's death. Now, how many books did
Speaker 1: Herbert himself, right, what is it? Five or six? I
Speaker 1: don't have the list in front of me, and I
Speaker 1: they begin to kind of bleed together from me towards
Speaker 1: the end, but he wrote several. But then, yeah, the
Speaker 1: saga itself was left incomplete. He had notes, and then
Speaker 1: his son Brian Herbert and co author Kevin J. Anderson,
Speaker 1: they picked up the work years after his death and
Speaker 1: finished the Saga based on his notes, and of co
Speaker 1: wrote a ton of other Dune notes. I mean, at
Speaker 1: this point Brian Herbert has written at Brian Herbert and
Speaker 1: Kevin J. Anderson have written more Dune books than than
Speaker 1: Frank Herbert ever wrote um which is which is interesting.
Speaker 1: But it's also one of these areas that is very
Speaker 1: divisive because you have Dune fans that you know, refer
Speaker 1: to themselves as orthodox Dune fans. They're only going to
Speaker 1: read the the Frank books, only the prophet himself, right,
Speaker 1: But then you have but then you have plenty of
Speaker 1: fans who embrace the Brian Herbert Kevin J. Anderson books
Speaker 1: in this expanded view of the universe. But but yeah,
Speaker 1: at the at the at the heart of it, like
Speaker 1: the complete saga is not a Frank Herbert creation. It's
Speaker 1: a Frank Herbert, Brian Herbert, Kevin J. Anderson creation. Like
Speaker 1: it becomes a different thing right by by completing it,
Speaker 1: they have sort of transformed into something else. But also
Speaker 1: is a franchise ever completed, That's true. I think of
Speaker 1: our age of Star Wars, what if George Lucas were
Speaker 1: to have gotten to a point where he said, Okay,
Speaker 1: maybe imagine an alternate universe George Lucas makes nine Star
Speaker 1: Wars movies or whatever, and then he says, Okay, we're done.
Speaker 1: Um I would the fans be okay with that? Or
Speaker 1: would they keep wanting more Star Wars stuff? Well, I
Speaker 1: mean it seems to me that now that we're in
Speaker 1: Disney's hands, there is going to be Star Wars until
Speaker 1: the end of time, right, there will never not be
Speaker 1: new Star Wars stuff. Yeah, but but yeah, what what
Speaker 1: would have happened if he was if he just did
Speaker 1: the three movies and said him done? Or what if
Speaker 1: or what if something had happened and he didn't get
Speaker 1: something past the Empire strikes Back? Like what if Empire
Speaker 1: Strikes Back had been a bomb? Just no, But nobody
Speaker 1: loved it at the time, and we only grew to
Speaker 1: love it, say in recent years we said, hey, this
Speaker 1: is a masterpiece. What I wonder what the next installment
Speaker 1: would have been? Like, what would have happened if we
Speaker 1: had actually followed Luke through and and you know, actually
Speaker 1: figured out kind of come back the rebels were going
Speaker 1: to have. Lucas's son would write it and well, why
Speaker 1: it often does seem like it's an hereditary enterprise. Didn't
Speaker 1: the same thing happen with Tolkien after Tolkien's death, didn't
Speaker 1: his son takeover? Well, that's an interesting example to bring up,
Speaker 1: And I, you know, I don't. I don't know a
Speaker 1: lot about that because my Tolkien experience is basically um
Speaker 1: basically revolves around just the Lord of the Rings and
Speaker 1: the Hobbit. But I understand that a lot of of
Speaker 1: his of the subsequent work has been sort of a
Speaker 1: mix of like it's been a little bit literary. It's
Speaker 1: kind of like commentating on and well, yeah, I think
Speaker 1: he's edited together took some of his father's notes and
Speaker 1: edited them into books or something. Yeah. But then there
Speaker 1: was that there was like a complete saga that came
Speaker 1: out and I never read it, Pose of the Children
Speaker 1: of Hurine or something, no idea, but certainly that you
Speaker 1: could see that as a as a as a as
Speaker 1: an example with this though it would have been more
Speaker 1: I think clearly in a example, I say, you know,
Speaker 1: he had not actually finished The Lord of the Rings
Speaker 1: and someone had to come along and finish it. And
Speaker 1: we we do find other examples of fantasy saga's uh
Speaker 1: ending up incomplete. Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, for example,
Speaker 1: was actually completed by Brandon Sanderson. Uh. And this was
Speaker 1: by the deceased author's design, like he picked the individual
Speaker 1: to finish these books. And UH, I have not read them,
Speaker 1: but I was reading about them. I was actually talking
Speaker 1: to our coworker Tyler, who has read them. And UH.
Speaker 1: It seems like most of the reactions to this are
Speaker 1: far more positive. There's less um schism among the Wheel
Speaker 1: of Time fans. Um. Most people say that the new
Speaker 1: authors style you know, shines through and some applaud has increased.
Speaker 1: Increased pace is willingness to tie up loose ends, which
Speaker 1: of course is important when you're trying to finish a saga. Uh.
Speaker 1: Some add point out that maybe he didn't have the
Speaker 1: knack for descriptions and detail that Jordan had, But for
Speaker 1: the part, it seems like everyone embraced this completion of
Speaker 1: the incomplete work. Well, I know what all of you
Speaker 1: are yelling at your ear budget now, germ right, it's
Speaker 1: all about what's going to happen with Game of Thrones,
Speaker 1: A Song of Ice and Fire, George R. Martin's currently
Speaker 1: incomplete UH series of novels and the slightly more complete
Speaker 1: HBO series based on those novels. Yeah, so the show,
Speaker 1: the TV show you probably already know this, but the
Speaker 1: TV show Game of Thrones is actually outpaced, uh Martin's novels.
Speaker 1: It's ahead of the novels that it's based on. He
Speaker 1: has not released the one that he was planning on
Speaker 1: releasing that would contain some of the same stuff as
Speaker 1: the current season of the show Winds of Winter, I believe. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so, so how old is George R. Martin. He's
Speaker 1: sixty seven years old and he's taking about ten thousand
Speaker 1: years to write each book. So people have I mean
Speaker 1: not to be I wish him great health and long life,
Speaker 1: but people do speculate, like what if he dies before
Speaker 1: he finishes writing these books? Yeah, and everybody wants to
Speaker 1: know the end? Yeah, I mean, I mean the reverse
Speaker 1: is also true. I feel with any book or film series,
Speaker 1: what if I die before I get to complete watching
Speaker 1: or reading this thing? I mean, so it's it's coming
Speaker 1: from that place of us craving completeness in our works.
Speaker 1: But yeah, if he if he dies before completing the books,
Speaker 1: will fans uh you know, embrace whoever the chosen writer
Speaker 1: is to to finish it. How will we feel about
Speaker 1: the the the the the HBO series as it completes
Speaker 1: the soka before the books? What if? What if the
Speaker 1: what if the book series remains incomplete, um, you know,
Speaker 1: for the foreseeable future. What if artificial intelligence has to
Speaker 1: finish it later on? You know, Oh, it won't do
Speaker 1: a very good job, will it. Uh? Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: who knows. Maybe maybe, as long as it can make good,
Speaker 1: solid descriptions of Western oast food while you know, laying
Speaker 1: out with a bunch of political details, I think you
Speaker 1: can do a good job. I am firmly of the
Speaker 1: opinion that any artificial intelligence good enough to write an
Speaker 1: entertaining and compelling work of fiction will eradicate the human species.
Speaker 1: Now this being said, you know, there are plenty of
Speaker 1: examples of incomplete works out there, and and most of
Speaker 1: them it seems like we're pretty okay with them. We're
Speaker 1: probably getting more into that territory of an incomplete work
Speaker 1: by a master who has been dead for a while.
Speaker 1: But some of the works that come to mind A
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty Days of Sodom by the Marquis assad
Speaker 1: Billy Bud, the Mysterious Stranger The Pale King by David
Speaker 1: Foster Wallace. Um The Mysterious Stranger, of course, being um
Speaker 1: Mark Twain's story. And I believe they're like three different drafts. Um,
Speaker 1: all of them are kind of incomplete, and you can
Speaker 1: sort of cobble together a finished product from that, but
Speaker 1: it's still ultimately incomplete. You know, Charles Pickens The Mystery
Speaker 1: of Edwin Drew, that's an unfinished work of fiction. That
Speaker 1: and crazy that it's unfinished because it's a mystery. Oh so,
Speaker 1: so nobody knows? How how ads you don't know the
Speaker 1: solution to the mystery? Well, in the musical version of
Speaker 1: the Mystery of Edwin Drew, it actually allows the audience
Speaker 1: to select the ending, So the audience gets to vote
Speaker 1: on who the who the murderer turns out to be?
Speaker 1: And then what about music? Are there musical? Is there
Speaker 1: a musical equivalent to an either an incomplete or intentionally
Speaker 1: incomplete work? Well, yeah, I think there are. I mean,
Speaker 1: I I'm a big fan of the going back to
Speaker 1: my nineties catalog, the album B thousand by Guided by Voices.
Speaker 1: A lot of the early Guided by Voices songs, uh,
Speaker 1: they sound like half of a song, like so the
Speaker 1: song will come on and it plays one verse and
Speaker 1: one chorus and that was about, you know, seventy five
Speaker 1: seconds long, and then it moves on to the next
Speaker 1: song and it never comes back. That's just it. That's
Speaker 1: all there is. And this was published during the artist lifetime.
Speaker 1: I mean, so it's it's not a matter of them
Speaker 1: of some coming along and saying, oh, here are some
Speaker 1: recordings around finished it, let's make a few bucks off
Speaker 1: of it. It's just what the song is. Huh. Okay,
Speaker 1: So that would but that would seem to be more
Speaker 1: than an intentionally incomplete um mode of creation then, But
Speaker 1: like the sketch as art, I think that it creates
Speaker 1: a good effect. I mean, one reason I think I
Speaker 1: love that album is that no song gets tiresome. None
Speaker 1: of them last long enough for you to like really say, okay,
Speaker 1: I've heard the chorus four times now. It just doesn't happen.
Speaker 1: And so every time a song is over, you kind
Speaker 1: of wish it was still going on. Interesting, and I'm
Speaker 1: sure that our listeners out there will come up with
Speaker 1: the numerous examples of unfinished art, fiction, music, etcetera. To
Speaker 1: share with us. We're gonna take a quick breaking when
Speaker 1: we come back, we're gonna get into the psychology of
Speaker 1: this why our brains while our why our minds crave
Speaker 1: that complete work? All right, we're back, So Robert it
Speaker 1: what why do we crave completion enclosure? Why do we
Speaker 1: have to see the end of a thing? Well, that's
Speaker 1: the big question, right, I mean, because, as we've discussed,
Speaker 1: our lives are these unfinished stories. But then we read
Speaker 1: these finished stories and then we sort of think about
Speaker 1: our own lives in terms of a story, and we
Speaker 1: imagine ourselves as the central character in this story. Um.
Speaker 1: One uh. One description that I think helps shine a
Speaker 1: little light on it is that from a cognitive point
Speaker 1: of view, we're all quote, information seeking, prediction loving cognitive systems.
Speaker 1: So this gets into the whole idea that we're trying
Speaker 1: to survive in this world, and in order to do so,
Speaker 1: we want to understand our our situation. We want to
Speaker 1: know what came before, we need to know what comes after.
Speaker 1: So this particular quote comes from Flora Lichtman, co author
Speaker 1: of Annoying The Science of What bugs U and Uh.
Speaker 1: This is a book that deals with the number of
Speaker 1: just you know, all the various pet peeves and what
Speaker 1: sort of the psychological or scientific underpinnings where them happens
Speaker 1: to be. But one thing that she particularly brings up
Speaker 1: is that overhearing another person's phone call is inherently engaging
Speaker 1: and mindlessly irritating because we're tuning into an incomplete conversation,
Speaker 1: we can only hear part of it, and then we
Speaker 1: have to just maddeningly guess at what the rest of
Speaker 1: it consists of, indeed, like what the point of the
Speaker 1: entire call happened to be to begin with. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: that's crazy because I I would tend to think that
Speaker 1: because of that, in completeness, hearing half of a phone
Speaker 1: call is way more distracting than hearing a complete conversation
Speaker 1: going on in the room with you, with both parties,
Speaker 1: And I wonder if that's born out well indeed, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a Cornell University study that actually looked into this idea.
Speaker 1: Uh Andy. They conducted it by taking a conversation, garbling
Speaker 1: half the words so that the subjects only heard half
Speaker 1: of the conversation, and they found the overhearing half a
Speaker 1: conversation a half a log, as they referred to it,
Speaker 1: is more distracting than other kinds of conversations because we're
Speaker 1: missing that other side of the story and we can't
Speaker 1: predict the flow of the conversation because if you overhear
Speaker 1: somebody just you know, a couple of people talking about
Speaker 1: a TV show you don't watch, say you, you can
Speaker 1: very quickly realize, oh, they're just talking about this episode
Speaker 1: of the show. I know exactly what they're talking about
Speaker 1: it and about and I don't care. I can I
Speaker 1: can see exactly how this is going to play out.
Speaker 1: But what if you just here, oh yeah, yeah, he
Speaker 1: he dies in that episode? Uh huh? And then you're like,
Speaker 1: what what what show did I have? Is it a
Speaker 1: show I watched? Did they just spoil me? Do I
Speaker 1: dare listen more? Because what if it's a show I
Speaker 1: haven't watched yet? And then you just start screaming no spoilers,
Speaker 1: no spoilers like a madman. But yeah, so I'm very
Speaker 1: basically of our brains require complete information because you know,
Speaker 1: at risk of getting into uh um in perfect comparisons
Speaker 1: to a computer, our brains are that hypercomputer that that
Speaker 1: needs data input in order to choose its next move.
Speaker 1: And if we're getting incomplete data in there, it just
Speaker 1: starts going a little Haywire. Right. Yeah, So another psychology
Speaker 1: concept that I think might be relevant to our our
Speaker 1: relationship with incompleteness and unfinished things is something we've actually
Speaker 1: talked about a little bit on the show before, the
Speaker 1: Zygarnic effect, which we mentioned it briefly in our two
Speaker 1: part episode about the science of Tetris, and it played
Speaker 1: into that because we were, I think picking up on
Speaker 1: somebody else had made this point and we were we
Speaker 1: were sort of repeating the idea that um Tetris has
Speaker 1: something to do with the Zigarnic effect. Now, the Zigarnic effect,
Speaker 1: it's a phenomenon that was identified by the Russian psychologist
Speaker 1: bloom Movie Zygarnic. She lived nineteen hundred to night, and
Speaker 1: it posits that we tend to have better recall for
Speaker 1: unfinished tasks than we do for finished ones. Uh. And
Speaker 1: so that, of course that would figure into Tetris because
Speaker 1: Tetris is never finished. There's no end of the game.
Speaker 1: It is a perpetually unfinished job. They just play to
Speaker 1: tell extinction playing. So, yeah, what a Tetris and gambling
Speaker 1: have in common. There's only one way for it to
Speaker 1: be over, and it's when you cannot conject when you
Speaker 1: have lost uh so, yeah. So a standard evaluation of
Speaker 1: the Zigaronic effect would go something like this. You get
Speaker 1: test subjects and you ask them to complete a number
Speaker 1: of mental and or physical jobs, for example, solving jigsaw
Speaker 1: puzzles or stringing beads. So if they're solving jigsaw puzzles,
Speaker 1: there might be details on the jigsaw puzzle that they're solving.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's a picture of a bunch of dinosaurs writing
Speaker 1: on jet skis, or you know, whatever it is. And
Speaker 1: in half of the tasks, the subject will be allowed
Speaker 1: to finish, and in the other half, the subject will
Speaker 1: be interrupted and asked to move on to another task
Speaker 1: before the one they're currently working on is completed. And
Speaker 1: then they get asked to remember details about both types
Speaker 1: of jobs. And you can express this differential recall as
Speaker 1: an I see ratio the number of details remembered about
Speaker 1: incomplete tasks versus the number of details remembered about completed tasks,
Speaker 1: and Zigarnick herself found this ratio to be more than
Speaker 1: one point. Oh, people had a better memory for incomplete
Speaker 1: and unfinished things. But why so a number of different
Speaker 1: interpretations have been offered throughout the years that you people
Speaker 1: have said that ambition plays a role in the extent
Speaker 1: to which people have differential recall. Here people positive, well,
Speaker 1: maybe interruption by the experiment or causes a feeling of
Speaker 1: irritation that heightens the emotion, and that heightened emotion causes
Speaker 1: a greater recall. Who who knows exactly what it is?
Speaker 1: There are a lot of interpretations, but there have been
Speaker 1: many subsequent evaluations of this effect throughout the years which
Speaker 1: have sort of complicated the picture because we don't all
Speaker 1: always remember incompleted tasks better so, according to the Dictionary
Speaker 1: of Theories, Laws, and Concepts in Psychology by John A.
Speaker 1: Rock Aline uh studies have indicated that the Zigaric effect
Speaker 1: is less likely to take place if the subject is
Speaker 1: quote ego involved in the task, and more likely to
Speaker 1: take place if the subject thinks the task is ultimately possible,
Speaker 1: of possible to achieve, or possible to finish. And hill
Speaker 1: Guard in nineteen sixty six found that the I S
Speaker 1: memory differential is short term, like it lasts for only
Speaker 1: a period of less than twenty four hours, and apparently
Speaker 1: it also doesn't work for all types of tasks. Now,
Speaker 1: there's one study I looked at from nineteen nine one
Speaker 1: by uh, Seifert and Padalano called memory for incomplete tasks
Speaker 1: a re examination of the Zigarnic effect, And so essentially
Speaker 1: that said that zigarnics original findings have been both replicated
Speaker 1: and not replicated by subsequent studies, so that that seems
Speaker 1: to suggest there's a sort of complex effect going on.
Speaker 1: The different variables are interacting with it in different ways,
Speaker 1: and the results have been explained a lot of times
Speaker 1: in terms of social psychological variables. But Seiford and Patalano
Speaker 1: attempted to replicate these effects adjusting variables affecting cognitive problem solving,
Speaker 1: like the nature of the interruption what happens when somebody
Speaker 1: comes in and interrupts you, or the time spent during
Speaker 1: processing the job, and the set size of the the
Speaker 1: number of tasks. So in the first experiment they did,
Speaker 1: they found that in solving word problems, interruption after a
Speaker 1: short interval of active problem solving actually lead to better
Speaker 1: memory for completed tasks than uncompleted ones. Actually the opposite
Speaker 1: of Zigonic if you don't spend much time on the tasks.
Speaker 1: But this kind of makes sense, right, Uh, Intuitively, that
Speaker 1: sounds right to me if I'm not spending much time
Speaker 1: on a problem, I'd remember the problem better if I
Speaker 1: finished it. Uh. And and they sort of acknowledge that
Speaker 1: that that seems kind of obvious, but all right. And
Speaker 1: the second experiment replicates Zigarnic. They found that if you
Speaker 1: allow subjects to take as long as they need and
Speaker 1: then abandoned problems they're unable to solve, it does hold
Speaker 1: that they have a better memory for the ones that
Speaker 1: they weren't able to complete. Uh. Thus, here's piece of
Speaker 1: evidence that our recall is better for things for unfinished
Speaker 1: tasks that we gave up on than for unfinished task
Speaker 1: we were sort of ripped away from by circumstances. So
Speaker 1: I send this zigarnic effect presents a complicated picture. It
Speaker 1: depends on the subject, It depends on the type of task.
Speaker 1: But another difference is that it applies to tasks and
Speaker 1: like problems to be solved or jobs to be completed.
Speaker 1: And I wonder if our relationship with art, fiction, music,
Speaker 1: et cetera, and the way we've been talking about is
Speaker 1: like this when we're the audience, And thus does the
Speaker 1: Zigarnic effect in any way have any sway over our
Speaker 1: participation with work of art? Yeah, I can't help but
Speaker 1: think that it does. Because on one hand, I'm thinking
Speaker 1: about the experience of reading a book. So if you're
Speaker 1: just like a couple of pages into a book and
Speaker 1: you set it down, like generally, it's pretty easy to
Speaker 1: not pick that book up again, to just leave it
Speaker 1: on the table or on the shelf. But if you've
Speaker 1: read a half or you know, or even you know
Speaker 1: a good two thirds of the book, there's often that
Speaker 1: just maddening uh compulsion to complete it, even if you're
Speaker 1: not digging it anymore. It's like, I've put so much
Speaker 1: time into it, You've got to finish it. Or I've
Speaker 1: encountered that with TV shows before. TV shows that you
Speaker 1: know go multiple seasons and I'm not going to name
Speaker 1: any in particular, but but they go multiple seasons and
Speaker 1: then you really are losing interest. But there are the
Speaker 1: remaining mysteries. There's you've got to know if they make
Speaker 1: it to their their destination, and you keep watching just
Speaker 1: out of the that the need to finish it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I I can totally agree. I mean, I think I'll
Speaker 1: call out one TV show lost put its hooks in
Speaker 1: me this way. I This is a controversial position. A
Speaker 1: lot of people who like the show will probably want
Speaker 1: to tear my head off. But I don't think Lost
Speaker 1: was actually all that great of a show, you know.
Speaker 1: I think that it had a lot of storytelling problems, uh,
Speaker 1: and some of its characterization was kind of shallow and
Speaker 1: and obvious looking back on it, But it had its
Speaker 1: hooks in me. I couldn't stop. I had to keep
Speaker 1: going to see the completion of this narrative because they
Speaker 1: had set up tons of unfinished problems in it. The
Speaker 1: show was just a litany of of setting up a
Speaker 1: problem that was not resolved, and and you'd continue thinking
Speaker 1: that it would be resolved. I'll leave that up to
Speaker 1: you two if you ever want to watch the show
Speaker 1: to find out if these things are resolved or not.
Speaker 1: But I will just say that personally, I've found myself
Speaker 1: very frustrated in the end. You know. It's interesting to
Speaker 1: think of this in terms of TV, because that's the
Speaker 1: classic TV model is very cyclical. A classic sitcom formula
Speaker 1: involves a complete reset at the end of each episode,
Speaker 1: so there's there's no zigaronic reason to come back and
Speaker 1: watch it the next week, except that you're going to
Speaker 1: get the more or less the same experience, experience, everything's
Speaker 1: going to reset to the same place, and there's virtually
Speaker 1: no overarching narrative that you need to concern yourself with. Yeah, though,
Speaker 1: I think we should also be aware of the possibility
Speaker 1: that we are just misapplying this concept and that it
Speaker 1: really has to do more with jobs you're working on
Speaker 1: than than participation with narratives. But I don't know. I mean,
Speaker 1: i'd be interested to hear from you psychologists out there, like,
Speaker 1: do you do you think the zigaronic effect, in any way,
Speaker 1: to whatever extent it does hold true for humans, applies
Speaker 1: to our participation with works of art and and external narratives. Indeed, now,
Speaker 1: at the same time, is there anything that is we're
Speaker 1: discussing all this if we're taking in incomplete stories, complete stories,
Speaker 1: cyclical and linear stories. Um, the brain is writing tons
Speaker 1: of incomplete stories itself. Of course. According to philosopher cognitive
Speaker 1: scientists Daniel Dennett, the human brain, as a computational device
Speaker 1: is constantly processing all sorts of information at different rates
Speaker 1: and in different locations, and this produces what he refers
Speaker 1: to as multiple incomplete narrative drafts, and these are all
Speaker 1: just continually synthesized into a coherent but highly unstable narrative equilibrium.
Speaker 1: And it's within this unstable narrative that we devote our
Speaker 1: sense of of we we develop our sense of eye
Speaker 1: and self. I really love Daniel Dennett's analogies for cognitive
Speaker 1: cognitive philosophy and philosophy of mind. I feel like that
Speaker 1: they're often very helpful. Yeah, it's it's it's interesting to
Speaker 1: to to to look at this argument, and especially after
Speaker 1: just talking about TV, to think of our basic variance
Speaker 1: of ourself and our immediate reality is like a flimsy
Speaker 1: TV narrative that's cobbled together from a number of bad
Speaker 1: scripts that did all land on the showrunner's desk and
Speaker 1: they're like, all right, a little of this one, a
Speaker 1: little of that one. Uh, let's run with this script, Joe.
Speaker 1: And then and then everyone's saying, well, this doesn't really
Speaker 1: make sense. There's some big story problems here. Who is
Speaker 1: this main character. It seems that on one hand that
Speaker 1: he thinks he's some sort of a hero, but then
Speaker 1: he's this and as well, and then just run with it,
Speaker 1: just let's film it and call it a day, And
Speaker 1: that's kind of what we do. But it's sort of
Speaker 1: like a script for a lost episode is just got
Speaker 1: tons of it's got a polar bear there, and you're like,
Speaker 1: surely I'm going to find out where this thing came from. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean at the end, it is still this continual journey.
Speaker 1: Um and uh And I mean maybe that's part of
Speaker 1: it too. We we like our stories, We like our
Speaker 1: fiction the most when it is in the journey phase,
Speaker 1: when it's incomplete but has the promise of completion. Well,
Speaker 1: how many examples can you think of where where there's
Speaker 1: a narrative that's as much fun once you've finished it
Speaker 1: as it was to be in the middle of it.
Speaker 1: It's a rarity. I mean, that's the work. That's the
Speaker 1: mark of a really great work of fiction, right, is
Speaker 1: that you know all the twists and turns, but you
Speaker 1: just want to experience it again because you want to
Speaker 1: experience that world, You want to experience those characters. Um.
Speaker 1: Because there are plenty of lesser works, I guess you
Speaker 1: could say, and ctently that's a that's very subjective, but
Speaker 1: they're lesser works of fiction out there that once you've
Speaker 1: once you've taken the journey, once you've ridden the ride,
Speaker 1: you know the twists and turns you have no desire
Speaker 1: to write it again because it's just gonna feel kind
Speaker 1: of flimsy afterwards. Uh. Though sometimes that first ride is amazing,
Speaker 1: but it's just impossible to to experience it again. Quite
Speaker 1: the same way. I'm thinking particularly of of films and
Speaker 1: works where you end up with a very unreliable narrator.
Speaker 1: You have sort of sort of like a without getting
Speaker 1: a despoiler's like a memento uh experience, or a fight
Speaker 1: club experience or um, what was the uh, the switch
Speaker 1: Switchblade romance horror film that came out years ago, the
Speaker 1: French one High Tension, Yes, high tension. Um, great film.
Speaker 1: The first viewing, that's all I'll say. Yeah, but that
Speaker 1: great That first viewing was it was tremendous. So yeah,
Speaker 1: great film in my opinion, just not the kind of
Speaker 1: ride you want to do over and over again. But
Speaker 1: back to incompleteness. Completeness. We we crave a linear story,
Speaker 1: and we have a tendency to chafe at anything that
Speaker 1: doesn't give us that. The The offending work might be
Speaker 1: a non linear book or nonlinear film. It might be uh,
Speaker 1: an intentionally incomplete or unfinished work. University of California Santa
Speaker 1: Barbara Professor h. Porter Abbott calls the preference for linear
Speaker 1: storytelling a fundamental operating procedure of the mind. So essentially
Speaker 1: it breaks down like this. At three years of age,
Speaker 1: our brains began to compartmentalized sensory information in the world
Speaker 1: around us into an ongoing narrative which each of us
Speaker 1: then places ourselves at the center. It's set the kind
Speaker 1: of story that the same thing that Daniel Tennett was
Speaker 1: discussing earlier. And uh, there's a there's an interesting paper
Speaker 1: that looks at this two thousand fifteen Yeshiva University paper
Speaker 1: the Power of and of the Picture, How narrative film
Speaker 1: captures attention and disrupts goal pursuit, And this was published
Speaker 1: in Plos one. So, in this particular experiment, participants were
Speaker 1: that they viewed either an intact version of an engaging
Speaker 1: twenty minute film Bang You're Dead by Alfred Hitchcock, or
Speaker 1: a version of the same film with the scenes presented
Speaker 1: out of order. And so they called this the contiguous
Speaker 1: condition versus the non contiguous condition, non contiguous meaning out
Speaker 1: of order exactly. Yeah, I don't, I don't think. Both
Speaker 1: are available on the DVD release but maybe the blur
Speaker 1: rate right, so that they were in this experiment, they
Speaker 1: weren't told that this was about you know, narratives in
Speaker 1: our experience, they were told that this was about gun
Speaker 1: violence and film, and then they had to raise their
Speaker 1: hands anytime someone said gun in the film. So those
Speaker 1: who view the linear film, they were far less likely
Speaker 1: to follow these orders because they were essentially just ensource
Speaker 1: sold by the fiction. Yeah, that makes perfect sense to me.
Speaker 1: And so these results illustraight the idea that that we
Speaker 1: have an innate preference for linear narrative, though there is
Speaker 1: of course a you know, an artful balance to maintain there,
Speaker 1: because we can all think of non linear narratives that
Speaker 1: work to varying degrees, sometimes exceptionally well. And of course
Speaker 1: I think that the very fact of linear narrative that's
Speaker 1: so compelling is that it promises a conclusion. It's exactly
Speaker 1: the thing that makes it seem linear. Yeah, you want
Speaker 1: to see the hero, when you want to see the
Speaker 1: villain get their come up, and you want to the
Speaker 1: line segment is the shortest distance between two points. If
Speaker 1: you don't have a second point, you're in trouble. Right now,
Speaker 1: all of this being said, Uh, we have visual works
Speaker 1: of art that have metten story to them. We also
Speaker 1: have works that represent decisive segments of an incomplete linear narrative,
Speaker 1: and the viewer has to sort of has to fill
Speaker 1: them out with his or her own mind, deciding how
Speaker 1: we came to this place and where we go from there. Um.
Speaker 1: Like one example that comes to mind here, and this
Speaker 1: is not something that I saw at the met um
Speaker 1: is uh uh ilya repins haunting five masterpiece, Ivan the
Speaker 1: Terrible and his son Ivan. You've seen this one before, right,
Speaker 1: I don't know if I have seen it before. Maybe
Speaker 1: I have, but I'm looking at it now and wow, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a that is some pathos in a painting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's Uh. It's Ivan the Terrible having brained his
Speaker 1: son with believe a hammer or recepter, I can't remember
Speaker 1: the exactly. It's based on a historical occurrence. Uh. And
Speaker 1: he's just staring up his cradling is bleeding adult son
Speaker 1: and just staring with these haunted eyes into the middle distance.
Speaker 1: So we we know that it depicts an historical occurs
Speaker 1: We we know that this depicts one murder of Ivan's
Speaker 1: own son, and we know how to fit it within
Speaker 1: a rough linear narrative. But it's not like we have
Speaker 1: a sequence of paintings filling out the rest of the narrative.
Speaker 1: We have this one potent, potent segment, and it forces
Speaker 1: us to envision everything else. And we see that in
Speaker 1: works of fiction too, right to capture our imagination with
Speaker 1: an incomplete glimpse of a wider, maybe weirder world, And
Speaker 1: that's often I think it certainly is for me. I
Speaker 1: assume it is for other people. A point of specific
Speaker 1: pleasure in fiction is the sense that you are getting
Speaker 1: a feeling for a much broader world or a much
Speaker 1: broader story through a kind of key hole. Yeah, a
Speaker 1: little narrative people into the world, and that that feeling
Speaker 1: of there being so much more is one of the
Speaker 1: great pleasures of fiction. Yeah. So, I guess like some
Speaker 1: of my closing questions here um for this segment would be,
Speaker 1: how do all of these factor into our understanding of
Speaker 1: income leader unfinished works? Why are some fragments sort of
Speaker 1: ideal mental seeds while others are larval forms that we
Speaker 1: have to to grow. Why are some partial work sacro
Speaker 1: sanct and why are others? Why are others things that
Speaker 1: just must be completed by skilled hands at all costs.
Speaker 1: And granted there's you know, there's consumer elements here, their
Speaker 1: market forces involved, as well as just personal taste. But
Speaker 1: but there, you know, there's this interesting division between the
Speaker 1: works that that can and should remain incomplete and those
Speaker 1: that just have to be fleshed out. We have to
Speaker 1: have the complete specimen. I think it's a fascinating question,
Speaker 1: and I don't know if we've come across the answer today.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's obvious that our brains are very
Speaker 1: strongly driven by narrative. Narrative is very highly motivated by
Speaker 1: the desire for completion enclosure, uh that that we do
Speaker 1: tend to via the sigaronic effect. Whether that applies truly
Speaker 1: to fiction and art, I mean, it's certainly clear that
Speaker 1: we tend to return mentally to things that are unfinished. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Well, it's an open question, and we
Speaker 1: certainly invite our listeners to uh to attend to it
Speaker 1: as well. Yeah, and if you feel compelled that they're
Speaker 1: absolutely must be an ending to the story of the
Speaker 1: three brothers in the prison, feel free to write that
Speaker 1: and send it in. All right, So there you have
Speaker 1: it uh incomplete, complete works, unfinished works. Let us know
Speaker 1: what you think. As always, you can speak us at
Speaker 1: at stuff to about your Mind dot com. That is
Speaker 1: our homepage. That's where you'll find all the blog posts,
Speaker 1: podcast videos, links out to our social media accounts such
Speaker 1: as Facebook and Twitter. And then Joe, if they want
Speaker 1: to make direct contact with it, perhaps with an ending
Speaker 1: to your story fragment from the beginning, how can they
Speaker 1: get in touch with it? Well? Of course, as always
Speaker 1: you can email us that blow the mind of how
Speaker 1: stuff works. Got for more on lest thousands of other topics.
Speaker 1: Isn't house stuff works dot com any big st