Speaker 1: Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2: And I am Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday, so we
Speaker 2: are heading into the vault for an older episode of
Speaker 2: the show. This one originally published on September fifth, twenty
Speaker 2: twenty four, and it's the first part in our series
Speaker 2: on odds and evens. I hope you enjoy.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2: And I am Joe McCormick. And today we wanted to
Speaker 2: begin a series of episodes about the psychology of numbers,
Speaker 2: specifically the interesting and strange varieties of meaning and emotion
Speaker 2: that we attach to the concept of number parody p
Speaker 2: r it y number parody meaning whether a number is
Speaker 2: odd or even. Now to start to kind of back
Speaker 2: up one step and start with the broader question, I
Speaker 2: do realize at first it might seem kind of counterintuitive
Speaker 2: that anybody would have emotions about or read meaning into
Speaker 2: numbers themselves, because a number is almost the textbook example
Speaker 2: of a neutral, abstract object. You know, it is a
Speaker 2: tool for describing reality that is supposed to have no
Speaker 2: connotations of its own until it is applied to a
Speaker 2: quantity of something. So, you know, when people are just
Speaker 2: in conversation trying to speak about something that is neutral
Speaker 2: and without connotations, a number is one of the most
Speaker 2: common things people will bring up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, in fact, there's all you know, the idea of like, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm just a number to you. That would mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: I have no value to you outside of whatever my
Speaker 1: numerical value is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's the idea that you would be
Speaker 2: stripped of all personality, connotation and significance in somebody else's mind. So,
Speaker 2: depending on the context, it does seem totally normal that
Speaker 2: you would have thoughts or feelings about the fact that
Speaker 2: you have twenty three dollars cash in your pocket, or
Speaker 2: the fact that you have six eggs left in the refrigerator.
Speaker 2: They might be kind of simple thoughts like this is
Speaker 2: enough for now, or this is not enough for now,
Speaker 2: or something like that. But the question is, why would
Speaker 2: anybody have particular thoughts or feelings about the number twenty
Speaker 2: three itself or the number six when quantifying nothing in particular.
Speaker 2: And yet I do think there's some interesting evidence that
Speaker 2: we sometimes read meaning into bare numbers and project feelings
Speaker 2: and human characteristics onto them. And this goes beyond the
Speaker 2: practical sense of using those numbers to quantify things that
Speaker 2: are good or bad for us, you know, where we
Speaker 2: would prefer to have more or less of something. And
Speaker 2: one example that came to mind when I was thinking
Speaker 2: about this is in art, music, storytelling, in the creative domains.
Speaker 2: Now we're going to come back and do a deeper
Speaker 2: discussion of visual art in a bit later in this episode,
Speaker 2: but I wanted to start here by saying that I
Speaker 2: think a lot of times when a number or quantity
Speaker 2: is featured in an artwork, you cannot explain any rational
Speaker 2: reason that the number is more appropriate than any other,
Speaker 2: but it just is. It's just the correct number that
Speaker 2: should be there, which means it feels like it means something.
Speaker 2: One example that came to mind for me is on
Speaker 2: the Beatles White album from nineteen sixty eight. There is
Speaker 2: a track on there that's kind of famously pretentious in
Speaker 2: some people's minds, mind blowing to others. It is the
Speaker 2: avant garde sound collage track Revolution nine or Revolution Number nine,
Speaker 2: which is made out of a bunch of looping tape
Speaker 2: segments that play over one another, and it creates this
Speaker 2: weird sound collage of people reading bits of text, of music,
Speaker 2: of old orchestras playing symphonic music, of the sounds of people,
Speaker 2: you know, yelling or street noise, all different kinds of things.
Speaker 2: And the way that phrases and words are repeated in
Speaker 2: this track has the most. It creates the most peculiar
Speaker 2: incantatory feeling. It's both creepy and sort of thrilling, and
Speaker 2: a major motif in this track is a looping voice
Speaker 2: that just says over and over again, number nine, number nine. Now,
Speaker 2: I went and looked up some stuff about this track
Speaker 2: to see what the significance of the number nine was,
Speaker 2: because I never knew. And according to John Lennon, that
Speaker 2: segment came from a test tape found at EMI Studios
Speaker 2: that featured a sound engineer saying this is EMI test
Speaker 2: series number nine. Now, of course people have come along,
Speaker 2: including the artists themselves, and they would later attend all
Speaker 2: kinds of meaning to that number, like I think this
Speaker 2: is part of the track that some people thought was
Speaker 2: like saying Paul is dead when you played it backwards,
Speaker 2: so contributed to all kinds of conspiracy theories. But originally
Speaker 2: it was about as close to a totally random number
Speaker 2: as you could get. It was just a number found
Speaker 2: on a tape that some engineer was saying. And yet
Speaker 2: I think something about the vague cloud of emotion created
Speaker 2: by that track would be very different if it were
Speaker 2: a different EMI tape series number that had been used.
Speaker 2: Like I tried to imagine the track, but with a
Speaker 2: loop of someone saying number eight or number ten. I
Speaker 2: can't be sure, but it seems like that would feel
Speaker 2: quite different, even though I can't explain exactly how so,
Speaker 2: Even when numbers are not quantities of things that matter
Speaker 2: to our lives, but simply numbers read aloud on a
Speaker 2: tape over and over, they can feel like they mean something,
Speaker 2: and by consequence, the meaning would be changed if the
Speaker 2: numbers were different.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, of course, it's important to note that
Speaker 1: we're going to get into this obviously, that none of
Speaker 1: these numbers have been hermetically sealed away from all other
Speaker 1: culture an influence, so they have other associations that we
Speaker 1: end up dragging into our reevaluation and reuse of them.
Speaker 1: And but that being said, I think there you can
Speaker 1: find something cool about every number. I think about this
Speaker 1: a lot because when I'm swimming laps, I have to
Speaker 1: do something to make sure that I don't forget which
Speaker 1: lap I'm on, especially later on in my set, because
Speaker 1: if I forget, I have to back up, and then
Speaker 1: I can't keep doing that because then I'll just be
Speaker 1: there all day. So you know, it's like, if I'm
Speaker 1: on lap number four, well, a lot of times I
Speaker 1: will Well, some of the times I'll think about things
Speaker 1: particularly tied to four, like a fourth film and a
Speaker 1: particular franchise or something. But other times I'll just I'll
Speaker 1: sort of cast about, Okay, what is it about four?
Speaker 1: I can think about, Okay, well, we got the you know,
Speaker 1: the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and so forth, the okay, five,
Speaker 1: what's coming up next? All right? Five Wounds of Christ? Okay,
Speaker 1: but what do we got next? Six? You know, and
Speaker 1: so forth? And generally culturally speaking, you know, from from
Speaker 1: a literary standpoint and so forth musical standpoint, there's going
Speaker 1: to be something to latch on for all of them.
Speaker 1: And it depends on what your sort of pyramid of
Speaker 1: interest and influences are.
Speaker 2: I guess, yeah, yeah, though I would say I think
Speaker 2: the number of semantic reference points you can use, either
Speaker 2: from your life or from broader culture or literature or whatever.
Speaker 2: That those are going to be clustered lower on the
Speaker 2: number scale. So like the lower the number is, the
Speaker 2: more easily you will find lots of different significances of that.
Speaker 2: Once you start getting into like the triple digits and stuff,
Speaker 2: I bet then you start you do start to get
Speaker 2: some numbers where you can't really think of anything for them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a long walk between four twenty and six
Speaker 1: sixty six, that's for sure. I never swum that high,
Speaker 1: so I don't have to worry.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But anyway, So okay, the Beatles example I used.
Speaker 2: That's in the context of art and music, where we
Speaker 2: are primed to think about everything as imbued with meaning
Speaker 2: or call feeling, you know, even if we wouldn't give
Speaker 2: it a second thought in another context. So that's a
Speaker 2: different kind of scenario. But I still think that even
Speaker 2: in everyday life, we sometimes have mysterious tendencies to feel
Speaker 2: and think about quantities that are not relevant to our
Speaker 2: personal fortunes. And that's what I wanted to look at
Speaker 2: for the rest of the series. Specifically, again with respect
Speaker 2: to number parity meaning odds and evens. So separating numbers
Speaker 2: into odds and evens is one of the first principles
Speaker 2: we learn early in mathematical education, and fortunately it's a
Speaker 2: pretty simple principle to learn and apply. I think I
Speaker 2: remember the way I thought about it when I was
Speaker 2: a little kid was just sort of an alternating counting principle.
Speaker 2: You count starting at one, and every other number is even.
Speaker 2: The more formal way to express it would be that
Speaker 2: an even number can be expressed as two times in
Speaker 2: wherein is any natural number any the positive whole integer,
Speaker 2: and an odd number can be expressed as two times
Speaker 2: in plus one. And when I started thinking about this
Speaker 2: topic for today's episode, it sort of occurred to me
Speaker 2: that when we begin to think about a number for
Speaker 2: any reason, any number, a number comes into your mind.
Speaker 2: I think, at least for me, one of the first
Speaker 2: things I notice about any number that I think of
Speaker 2: is whether it is odd or even. In other words,
Speaker 2: that parity is a high salience characteristic of individual numbers
Speaker 2: in our brains. And later in my reading preparing for
Speaker 2: this episode, I did find a reference to a scientific
Speaker 2: study from the seventies that would seem to kind of
Speaker 2: line up with that intuition that parity is a high
Speaker 2: high salience characteristic of numbers. So there was a paper
Speaker 2: called the Internal Representation of Numbers by Shepherd, Kilpatrick, and
Speaker 2: Cunningham published in the journal Cognitive Psychology in nineteen seventy five,
Speaker 2: and in this study, the authors found that if if
Speaker 2: you give people random numbers, either as Arabic numerals like
Speaker 2: we used today, or as groups of dots, or as
Speaker 2: spoken words, and you ask people to arrange these numbers
Speaker 2: by similarity group them together with other more similar numbers, Apparently,
Speaker 2: one of the major criteria that people seemed to used
Speaker 2: to group them by similarity was the odd even distinction.
Speaker 2: So that seems to be represented pretty high in people's
Speaker 2: minds as a characteristic of numbers. And this suggests to
Speaker 2: me that if we do have strange, sometimes irrational feelings
Speaker 2: about numbers, oddness and evenness would likely play a role
Speaker 2: in these feelings. So I was casually reading about this
Speaker 2: looking for references to people having feelings about odd and
Speaker 2: even numbers, and I came across some evidence that there
Speaker 2: are indeed patterns in people's feelings about numbers, and one
Speaker 2: of those patterns has to do with number paroity. So
Speaker 2: shout out to where I came some of these references.
Speaker 2: It was in a couple of articles on this subject
Speaker 2: from twenty fourteen by a British writer and science communicator
Speaker 2: named Alex Bellows, who apparently writes on mathematics somewhat frequently
Speaker 2: and had written a book concerning some of these topics
Speaker 2: around this time. But anyway, these articles mention several different
Speaker 2: experiments with findings about emotional preferences for odd and even
Speaker 2: numbers and so. One example was an experiment by a
Speaker 2: researcher named Mariska Milikowski of the University of Amsterdam who
Speaker 2: showed subjects random numbers between one and one hundred and
Speaker 2: then asked people to judge whether these numbers were good
Speaker 2: or bad, or also excitable or calm, which is sort
Speaker 2: of an absurd task because why would numbers be any
Speaker 2: of those things? So, because of the absurdity of the task,
Speaker 2: you might imagine the results would be random, but instead
Speaker 2: she found there was a pattern. On average, people are
Speaker 2: more likely to say that even numbers are good and
Speaker 2: odd numbers are bad, and also even numbers were judged
Speaker 2: as more calm, so good and calm.
Speaker 1: It's so ridiculous, and yet I do feel some of it.
Speaker 1: As we'll get into.
Speaker 2: Bellos mentions another research team, Dan King of National University
Speaker 2: of Singapore and Chris Yanishevitz of the University of Florida,
Speaker 2: who again gave people random numbers randomly arranged between one
Speaker 2: and one hundred and asked if they liked, disliked, or
Speaker 2: felt neutral about all these numbers. And it turns out
Speaker 2: that people tend to like even numbers and numbers ending
Speaker 2: in five better than they like the other odd numbers
Speaker 2: that don't end in five. So people show more emotional
Speaker 2: positivity toward numbers that are divisible by two or five.
Speaker 2: Seems like kind of a strange pattern again, but as
Speaker 2: we go on in the series, we might find some
Speaker 2: interesting reasons for that kind of pattern why people would
Speaker 2: have preferences of this sort. One more thing, there's a
Speaker 2: kind of practical business implication. Bellows says that consumer research
Speaker 2: appears to show, at least in some cases, that people
Speaker 2: have preferences for products with an even number in their
Speaker 2: name as opposed to the same product with an odd number.
Speaker 2: I think the article mentions a hypothetical cleaning product that
Speaker 2: was in one of these experiments. But you can just imagine,
Speaker 2: you know, V eight juice versus V seven juice. I
Speaker 2: don't know if I'm drinking a V seven. Some seems
Speaker 2: wrong there, I will admit.
Speaker 1: V seven sounds more like it's supposed to go in
Speaker 1: your engine, I guess, and VA could conceivably go in
Speaker 1: your body.
Speaker 2: Wait, isn't a vight a type of engine?
Speaker 1: I guess. I guess part of what's going on here
Speaker 1: is that V eight is coded to both engine and
Speaker 1: tomato drink. V seven does not have a drink connotation,
Speaker 1: but he's close enough to the thing that is also
Speaker 1: you know, something do with cars. So so yeah, it's
Speaker 1: I feel like there's a lot of this that goes
Speaker 1: on with any of these, Like there's there's the reference
Speaker 1: you're aware of, and then there's like another sort of
Speaker 1: like phantom reference in your pyramid of interest and influences
Speaker 1: that is changing the way you think about a number. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But anyway, this made me so curious, like if
Speaker 2: these patterns are actually valid in the real world, if
Speaker 2: people do, in many cases show a kind of greater
Speaker 2: liking or emotional preference for even numbers, especially in certain contexts,
Speaker 2: or maybe even numbers and numbers, numbers that are otherwise
Speaker 2: easily divisible by a common factor like five. What causes that?
Speaker 2: And how do similar patterns manifest throughout human life and
Speaker 2: in our cultures and in our art. Oh and just
Speaker 2: to throw this in, because it was a funny thing
Speaker 2: that belos mentions in one of these articles I was
Speaker 2: talking about, he brings up the fact that Douglas Adams
Speaker 2: has talked about the number forty two seems like a
Speaker 2: mostly unremarkable number, though it does play a role in
Speaker 2: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy because spoiler alert, it
Speaker 2: is discovered to be the uh oh, what is the
Speaker 2: exact phrasing? It is the answer to the question like
Speaker 2: what is the meaning of life, the universe and everything?
Speaker 2: I apologize if I get that's like, that's correct, okay, yeah,
Speaker 2: and so so the answer is forty two. But Douglas Adams,
Speaker 2: speaking of the number forty two, apparently said that it
Speaker 2: was quote the sort of number that you could without
Speaker 2: any fear, introduced to your parents. That you know, that
Speaker 2: seems kind of right, something feels absolutely correct, communicates rectitude. Why,
Speaker 2: I don't know. I don't think it's a cultural association
Speaker 2: with the number. It feels deeper, it feels like something
Speaker 2: mathematical about the number. Forty two kind of seems like upstanding.
Speaker 1: Yeah it should be. There's like a proof for it. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's weird to think about it. Like you were
Speaker 1: talking about revolution number nine earlier, and it's like, to me,
Speaker 1: on some level, nine feels right. Nine feels nine is
Speaker 1: kind of a bad boy. You know, it belongs in
Speaker 1: a rock song, so somehow, you know. Now, I do
Speaker 1: want as we get into all this, I do want
Speaker 1: to just throw this out there that even when we're
Speaker 1: talking about evens and odds, we do have to be
Speaker 1: aware of the the temptation of the realm of numerology, uh,
Speaker 1: the you know, the belief in a magical, mystical, infernal
Speaker 1: or divine relationship between numbers and reality. It's really easy
Speaker 1: to get into with with with numbers in general, if
Speaker 1: only even if you're only doing it like surface level,
Speaker 1: you know, just sort of like accidentally believing in various
Speaker 1: superstitions about numbers. And then and then when push comes
Speaker 1: to shove saying well, okay, I'll go with twelve instead
Speaker 1: of thirteen. Thank you, very much. But then you'll find
Speaker 1: some some very strong examples of numerology concerning say, oh,
Speaker 1: I ran across one that said, okay, look to even
Speaker 1: numbers in the Bible, because that's that's how God is
Speaker 1: speaking to you. God speaks through even numbers. Why you know,
Speaker 1: I wasn't gonna I didn't. I didn't go too deep
Speaker 1: on it because I had a feeling the answer was
Speaker 1: not going to be fulfilling.
Speaker 2: What's wrong with the odd numbers in the Bible.
Speaker 1: Well, one thing that through that I instantly thought of
Speaker 1: is like some other bit of I guess, sort of
Speaker 1: you know, vaguely Christian numerology. I mean, maybe this is
Speaker 1: rooted in like more traditional Christian numerology, or maybe it
Speaker 1: was more like you know, recent like nineteen nineties fundamentalism.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure, but I remember reading at some point
Speaker 1: in my past that, oh, well seven is the holy
Speaker 1: number because it's odd and it can't be divided, but
Speaker 1: six six is bad because it can be divided, And I, like,
Speaker 1: I distinctly remember that, and for a while, I when
Speaker 1: I was younger, I was like, yeah, yeah, that that
Speaker 1: that adds up, right, But no, it doesn't it. What
Speaker 1: is what sense does that possibly make? And yet on
Speaker 1: some level I still hope by it that, Like, yet, yeah,
Speaker 1: seven feels like a wholly righteous number, and six six
Speaker 1: falls a little bit short. Six is going into the inferno.
Speaker 2: Well, it's funny you mentioned seven, because this also came
Speaker 2: up in some of the articles I was reading for today.
Speaker 2: I don't remember the exact source, so I'm sorry, but
Speaker 2: one of them got into the idea that if you
Speaker 2: ask people to pick a random number between one and ten,
Speaker 2: the most common number people will pick is seven. And
Speaker 2: there's actually a logic there because it's the number between
Speaker 2: one and ten that actually feels the most random, like
Speaker 2: all the even numbers between one and ten. That doesn't
Speaker 2: seem right because there's something about even numbers that doesn't
Speaker 2: feel very random to us. The even numbers feel too predictable,
Speaker 2: So you need to pick one of the odd numbers.
Speaker 2: So you shouldn't pick one because that's the beginning of
Speaker 2: the scale. You shouldn't pick nine because that's divisible by three.
Speaker 2: You shouldn't pick three because three times three is nine.
Speaker 2: You shouldn't pick five because five times two is ten.
Speaker 2: But seven, that's nothing. You can't do anything with that
Speaker 2: In there. No, there's no multiple, there's no way to
Speaker 2: divide seven into a whole number. It's prime, and there's
Speaker 2: no way to multiply it and still get a number
Speaker 2: within the scale of ten. So it's like the one
Speaker 2: that stands out in there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's kind of the rationale behind some
Speaker 1: of the ideas that the seven is holy, that it's
Speaker 1: like it is, it is like God, and that it
Speaker 1: is it cannot be divided, it's and it can't be
Speaker 1: doubled and still hit something within the one to ten
Speaker 1: range and so forth. I don't know, but you know, again,
Speaker 1: this is also, at the end of the day, pretty silly.
Speaker 1: The late m Berto Echo rightfully pointed out. He goes
Speaker 1: into this in an extended bit in Fuco's Pendulum, but
Speaker 1: he rightfully pointed out that humans have manipulated numbers since
Speaker 1: ancient times to create illusions of meaning, and that one
Speaker 1: can ultimately do whatever one wants with numbers. You can
Speaker 1: torture the numbers and get what you want. You can
Speaker 1: do all sorts of weird analysis of like, oh, well
Speaker 1: this this person has, you know, so many letters in
Speaker 1: their first name, so many in their last name. You know,
Speaker 1: divide by the root of such and such, and we
Speaker 1: have the number of the beast, and so you can
Speaker 1: do that kind of thing all day and it doesn't
Speaker 1: mean anything other than you can make the numbers do
Speaker 1: what you want. And on top of that, number based
Speaker 1: superstition's number based heuristics. These can be very sticky, you know,
Speaker 1: even if you don't really believe in them. Absolutely, they're
Speaker 1: in there in the background of your mind when you're
Speaker 1: dealing with numbers that otherwise don't mean anything, and your
Speaker 1: mind again always wants to make the best sense of
Speaker 1: the data it's presented with, even if it has to
Speaker 1: depend on things that are not real. So that's a
Speaker 1: warning against going too far. But that's not what we're
Speaker 1: for the most part talking about in this.
Speaker 2: Series, right Well, I personally take no position on whether
Speaker 2: odd or even numbers are holy or unholy or whatever.
Speaker 2: But I am interested in if we have patterns of
Speaker 2: feelings about them or ascribe meaning to them, and if so,
Speaker 2: why do we have the psychological tendency to do that. Now.
Speaker 2: One of the things that first got me interested in
Speaker 2: this subject of preferences for odd and even numbers or
Speaker 2: odd and even quantities of things was an idea that
Speaker 2: actually comes from the world of art, of art theory,
Speaker 2: art criticism, and the idea is that there is a
Speaker 2: widely held natural preference that people have for the staging
Speaker 2: of odd numbers of items within visual art, or the
Speaker 2: division of visual art into odd numbers, into odd patterns,
Speaker 2: basically odd quantified patterns, and that this applies to painting
Speaker 2: and photography and film and so forth. And I found
Speaker 2: that so curious, and that does ring very true to me.
Speaker 2: But I don't quite know where that preference would come
Speaker 2: from or why that is. And if so, is that
Speaker 2: I don't know, does that go to something deep within
Speaker 2: our brains or is it just sort of a is
Speaker 2: sort of a cultural preference. It's a convention that we've established.
Speaker 2: What's going on with this idea about odds and visual art?
Speaker 1: Well, the short answer is absolutely yes, definitely no, and
Speaker 1: it depends on who you ask. But it is really
Speaker 1: fascinating to get into. So one of the big ones.
Speaker 1: There are several different things that are kind of like
Speaker 1: different concepts and laws and rules that are involved here,
Speaker 1: but the big one, the one that I imagine a
Speaker 1: lot of you are thinking of, is, of course, the
Speaker 1: rule of thirds. This is a pretty widespread and famous
Speaker 1: composition rule. It's pretty standard in photography, cinematography, various forms
Speaker 1: of visual art, and it's a standard overlay in various
Speaker 1: visual editing software, titles, and even in phones and cameras.
Speaker 1: Most of you have seen this. It's pretty basic though.
Speaker 1: It's also interesting that when we're talking about the rule
Speaker 1: of thirds, how do we compose it? Well, we use
Speaker 1: we divide the frame up into an odd number of
Speaker 1: zones by using an even number of lines. So it's
Speaker 1: kind of like depending on which team you on, are
Speaker 1: you on Team even or team odd? You could like
Speaker 1: either team could make a claim for this and say
Speaker 1: that your team is at the center of visual perfection.
Speaker 2: Oh interesting, Yeah, So.
Speaker 1: The standard overlay in question consists of two evenly spaced
Speaker 1: horizontal lines and two evenly spaced vertical lines, thus breaking
Speaker 1: up an image. And this particularly works well if you're
Speaker 1: thinking of you know, the movie screen, you know, rectangle
Speaker 1: breaking it up into nine equal parts nine Another big
Speaker 1: score for team odd. But how do you use this grid? Well, okay,
Speaker 1: they're major caveat that they are different versions of this
Speaker 1: rule that break it down a little differently, So there's
Speaker 1: not like one definition, that is the answer, and there
Speaker 1: seems to be a little bit of wiggle room, and
Speaker 1: even more wiggle room when we get into the details.
Speaker 1: But the prevailing wisdom is that you make sure that
Speaker 1: the important parts of the image, the parts where we're
Speaker 1: going to focus our attention or where we're meant to
Speaker 1: focus our attention, that those points exist along these lines
Speaker 1: or at their intersection. And there's so many examples of this,
Speaker 1: and I honestly think that it's probably best for listeners
Speaker 1: to look up some examples, because we'll talk about some here.
Speaker 1: We'll try to describe some of the simpler ones. But
Speaker 1: for the most part, you know, this is an audio
Speaker 1: medium and we're talking about visual arts that we can
Speaker 1: only take you so far. But for example, if you
Speaker 1: think of a particular film that is very well regarded,
Speaker 1: you know, a great director, great cinematographer, you can probably
Speaker 1: probably look up the title of that film or that
Speaker 1: director and the term rule of thirds, and you might
Speaker 1: get some shots from that film where somebody has been
Speaker 1: so kind as to apply the grid and show you
Speaker 1: how things line up. I included one for you here, Joe,
Speaker 1: for us to look at and discuss. This is a
Speaker 1: scene from Stanley Kubrick's two thousand and one, A Space Odyssey,
Speaker 1: And yeah, you can see it. They hear two people
Speaker 1: talking to each other in a spacecraft and their heads
Speaker 1: are perfectly aligned with the nexus of these lines.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so this is the famous scene where the two
Speaker 2: astronauts in the ship have begun to suspect that there
Speaker 2: is something wrong with Hal, and so they step off
Speaker 2: of the ship into a secluded I think they step
Speaker 2: into like a I don't know, an airlock or a
Speaker 2: pod or something, so that they can talk to each
Speaker 2: other without being listened to. And so they're sort of
Speaker 2: both leaning toward the middle of the frame, but they're
Speaker 2: at each side of it. And as they talk to
Speaker 2: each other, we get that reveal where Hal is watching
Speaker 2: through the window and reading their lips as they talk,
Speaker 2: so they are not having the privacy they think they have.
Speaker 2: But before that, we're shown the two of them just
Speaker 2: sitting opposite one another, sort of reasoning about what's going on.
Speaker 2: And yeah, it's interesting. I don't know if I would
Speaker 2: have noticed this without the lines imposed on the screen,
Speaker 2: but the characters are lined up perfectly along this division
Speaker 2: of thirds vertically, and sort of their heads are right
Speaker 2: at the top division of the thirds horizontally.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then there are other ways to break down
Speaker 1: even a simple but beautifully shot scene like this as well.
Speaker 1: You have two individuals, two humans, but also how the
Speaker 1: third individual visible through the panel in the center. So
Speaker 1: you have this triangle where you have these two individuals
Speaker 1: in the foreground the one in the back, and that
Speaker 1: is serving as a way to sort of channel your
Speaker 1: attention back towards how who they are talking about. Now,
Speaker 1: another important way of thinking about the rule of thirds
Speaker 1: is the way that you may have encountered it with
Speaker 1: your camera before, if you've ever been encouraged to use
Speaker 1: the rule of thirds, and that is, if you're taking
Speaker 1: a picture of somebody, especially if it's like a portrait,
Speaker 1: you don't want to take that picture of them dead center,
Speaker 1: because if they're dead center, they're in the middle of
Speaker 1: the grid. They're not at any of the on any
Speaker 1: of the lines, or any at the convergence points. No,
Speaker 1: you want them generally a little bit to the left
Speaker 1: or a little bit to the right. And you know,
Speaker 1: if you look at various portrait shots out there, and
Speaker 1: plenty of scenes in films and paintings and so forth,
Speaker 1: this often holds up. They're not dead center, they're a
Speaker 1: little bit to the side, and often times the rest
Speaker 1: of the shot, like the over to their left or
Speaker 1: over to their right, there is sort of the thing
Speaker 1: they're looking at, or the thing or the vista that
Speaker 1: we're supposed to sort of take in as being either
Speaker 1: part of the story that's happening in the shot or
Speaker 1: part of some other level of contemplation, like I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's a shot in your it's a photograph in yours,
Speaker 1: your local newspaper about a gardener, and well, here's the
Speaker 1: gardener in the picture, and there's their garden. The gardener
Speaker 1: is going to be a little bit to the right,
Speaker 1: lining up with that second vertical line, and then you're
Speaker 1: going to see their garden more or less in full
Speaker 1: to their left. Now, to be clear, this again is
Speaker 1: not a natural law. There's nothing absolute about it, and
Speaker 1: in creative endeavors, rules are made to be broken. And
Speaker 1: there are plenty of other overlays you can use, though
Speaker 1: some of them line up with the rule of thirds,
Speaker 1: like the golden spiral is a big one, and you've
Speaker 1: probably seen this overlay and film editing software or cameras
Speaker 1: and so forth, or also people you know, showing you
Speaker 1: the brilliance of their favorite scene from their favorite movie.
Speaker 1: Look what happens when I put this golden spiral over
Speaker 1: this scene from Underworld three, Rise of the Lichens.
Speaker 2: Clearly they did that on purpose. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: But on the other end of the spectrum, symmetry can
Speaker 1: be quite intoxicating. And this is where it gets tricky too,
Speaker 1: because you can have a very symmetrical shot that lines
Speaker 1: up with the rule of thirds, but this idea of
Speaker 1: having like a single person in the shot and they're
Speaker 1: a little to the left or the the right, that
Speaker 1: ends up making a shot that's not symmetrical. But then
Speaker 1: we are also drawn to symmetry. And I was talking
Speaker 1: about this was my wife, who's a photographer, and she said, well,
Speaker 1: you know, this is why you see so many pictures
Speaker 1: of bands on a railroad track, oftentimes very symmetrical looking,
Speaker 1: because it's just irresistible. We like the symmetry and all. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we also like those parallel lines heading off into the distance.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, not only thematically suggesting that like there's a
Speaker 2: lot of road to go or something, but they meet
Speaker 2: the vanishing point they converge far away.
Speaker 1: Plus they're bad boys because they're on the tracks and
Speaker 1: it's dangerous. Just a word of caution, please don't take
Speaker 1: photos of your band on active train tracks. Those are
Speaker 1: active train tracks, y'all. But as for the term the
Speaker 1: rule of thirds, where does this come from? Well, the
Speaker 1: concept under this name is generally attributed to English painter
Speaker 1: and engraver John Thomas Smith, who lives seventeen sixty six
Speaker 1: through eighteen thirty three, who provides the earliest known reference
Speaker 1: to it by this name in his seventeen ninety seven
Speaker 1: work remarks on Rural Scenery, a work described in library
Speaker 1: catalogs as a collection of quote essays on landscape gardening
Speaker 1: and on unit uniting picturesque effects with rural scenery, containing
Speaker 1: directions for laying out and improving the grounds connected with
Speaker 1: a country residence.
Speaker 2: The way you said that about the coinage of the
Speaker 2: term rab, I take that to mean you're saying that
Speaker 2: Smith is not necessarily saying that he invented the idea
Speaker 2: of using thirds in art.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, he's based on my reading of this section
Speaker 1: of his book. It's a rather stuffy book, by the ways,
Speaker 1: which I think you can get from the topic covered
Speaker 1: time period. But my take on it is that he
Speaker 1: is saying, hey, here's this thing I've observed. This seems
Speaker 1: to hold true. I'm not sure if it has a name,
Speaker 1: but this is what I'm going to call it. In fact,
Speaker 1: he refers to it as the rule of thirds and
Speaker 1: says if I may be allowed to call it, So
Speaker 1: he's not pretending to invent it, but he's pointing it
Speaker 1: out as a guiding principle of good esthetics, calling out
Speaker 1: other principles that were well established, like Hogarth's line or
Speaker 1: the line of beauty. That's an S shape, curved line
Speaker 1: that is often held to be attractive in visual works,
Speaker 1: and not merely in a sexual fashion either. But you'll
Speaker 1: see it like lined up with just say, pictures of
Speaker 1: just you know, random humanoid figures or abstract patterns.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I didn't know about this already, but I
Speaker 2: googled it after I saw this in your notes, and
Speaker 2: this is interesting. So yeah, it's like a sort of
Speaker 2: S shape that I don't know figures and a lot
Speaker 2: of old drawings and paintings do seem to follow. It
Speaker 2: kind of reminds me of something we've talked about before
Speaker 2: in sculpture, which is a kind of a popular posture
Speaker 2: used in classical sculpture that is sometimes called contraposto, meaning
Speaker 2: sort of counterpoise, where a figure is not standing exactly
Speaker 2: straight up, but their body is kind of tilted or
Speaker 2: leaning at the hip.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So Smith speaks to the rule of thirds, generally
Speaker 1: for landscapes, and he speaks of it as two thirds
Speaker 1: of one element to one third of the other, with
Speaker 1: his given example being two thirds land to one third water,
Speaker 1: providing us with, for example, a beach scene. And indeed,
Speaker 1: this is what we see in some beach paintings. I
Speaker 1: was looking around at various beach paintings, and there are
Speaker 1: a lot of different ways to paint a beach, and
Speaker 1: they certainly don't all line up with this. But for
Speaker 1: your an easy example for listeners is imagine you have
Speaker 1: a horizontal painting and if you're scanning it from left
Speaker 1: to right, all right, here's ocean. Okay, I'm halfway through
Speaker 1: the painting. There's still nothing but ocean. And then the
Speaker 1: third the right most portion of the painting, Oh suddenly
Speaker 1: it's beach and there people and buildings and so forth.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And of course this can have very interestingly different
Speaker 2: effects depending on which part of the scene you decide
Speaker 2: to devote the two thirds versus the one third two.
Speaker 2: I often notice I'm kind of attracted to landscape paintings
Speaker 2: where the two thirds part is the more empty part,
Speaker 2: you know, where it gives more to the void. In
Speaker 2: this case with the ocean, is the two thirds.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. And then we'll get into different ways to
Speaker 1: potentially read a painting as well, because I just use
Speaker 1: the example of left or right, but there's nothing that
Speaker 1: says you can't go right to left. There are some
Speaker 1: very definite reasons why you might do that. And I
Speaker 1: was just thinking of this casually too. If you've ever
Speaker 1: been to an art museum, if you were at one
Speaker 1: where there are other people, sometimes you end up approaching
Speaker 1: a piece that already has someone viewing it, and you
Speaker 1: don't get to choose at what point you start viewing
Speaker 1: the picture. You know there might only be room on
Speaker 1: the right or the left, and that might or might
Speaker 1: not dictate how you scan it. And that's assuming you
Speaker 1: just give it like one really meaningful scan and you
Speaker 1: don't sit there and try different things on it. So
Speaker 1: I'll read just a quick quote from Smith. I say
Speaker 1: a lot of his writing is a little stuffy for
Speaker 1: my taste, But this kind of sums up what he's saying.
Speaker 1: In short, in applying this invention generally speaking to any
Speaker 1: other case, whether of light, shade form, or color, I
Speaker 1: have found the ratio of about two thirds to one
Speaker 1: third or of one to two a much better and
Speaker 1: more harmonizing proportion than the precise formal half the two
Speaker 1: far extending four fifths, and in short, than any other
Speaker 1: proportion whatever. So fair enough, this is a man who's
Speaker 1: tried out different proportions.
Speaker 2: Doesn't like that four fifths?
Speaker 1: Yeah, what about three fifths doesn't like it?
Speaker 2: What about two fitths doesn't like it?
Speaker 1: Now? I've also read an interpretation that the rule of
Speaker 1: thirds also works because the eye is typically drawn towards
Speaker 1: points just beyond the center of an image, and in
Speaker 1: cultures where people read left to right, they also tend
Speaker 1: to scan an image in the same fashion, making the
Speaker 1: upper left hand portion of an image the easiest to overlook,
Speaker 1: in the bottom right the likely focus. I was reading
Speaker 1: about this in a masterclass article on the rule of thirds,
Speaker 1: and this got me interested to learn a little bit
Speaker 1: more about this whole linguistic effect, And indeed, there have
Speaker 1: been various studies on the effects of language reading direction
Speaker 1: on a number of cognitive and centsory processes. So, you know,
Speaker 1: just to remind everyone, you know, not all languages are
Speaker 1: read left to right. Some are read right to left,
Speaker 1: and there have been a lot of observations and thoughts
Speaker 1: and some research looking into well, how does that change
Speaker 1: the way that various things work, you know, cognitively and observationally.
Speaker 1: So according to Smith at all in native reading direction
Speaker 1: and corresponding preference for left or right lit images. This
Speaker 1: is from twenty thirteen in Perceptual and Motor Skills. Apparently
Speaker 1: at the time there was a lot that hadn't been
Speaker 1: agreed on yet, and I'm to believe that this is
Speaker 1: still largely the case. They point out that the first
Speaker 1: language and individual learns does appear to influence spatial attention,
Speaker 1: and it may factor into differences in eye movement as well. However,
Speaker 1: one of the things that you see when you start
Speaker 1: looking at some of this research is that it tends
Speaker 1: to result in a leftward bias in left to right readers.
Speaker 1: And I'm not sure if that really lines up with
Speaker 1: some of these ideas about positioning objects in the rule
Speaker 1: of thirds.
Speaker 2: Okay, so if the classical idea is a person who
Speaker 2: is in a left to right reading literacy culture would
Speaker 2: quote read a painting from left to right, and thus
Speaker 2: they will end up on the right, and so you
Speaker 2: should have stuff at the bottom right if you want
Speaker 2: people to kind of land decisively on that when looking
Speaker 2: at the image. This research would seem to suggest more
Speaker 2: of the opposite, that there's more of a tendency to
Speaker 2: look to the left of the painting, more towards the
Speaker 2: beginning of the lines on the page where he used.
Speaker 1: To Yeah, And I think an important thing to note
Speaker 1: here too is that maybe some of these concepts would
Speaker 1: be more defined if you're dealing with something really abstract.
Speaker 1: But when you get into scenes via it in visual
Speaker 1: arts or certainly in films where there are human beings
Speaker 1: involved and or environments that are realistic or unrealistic for
Speaker 1: that matter, your mind is also trying to put piece
Speaker 1: together a story. It's trying to predict the future. Even
Speaker 1: if you're looking at a still painting where you haven't
Speaker 1: had an update on what happens next, but your brain
Speaker 1: is still trying to figure out what will happen next
Speaker 1: in the world of that painting, and therefore there are
Speaker 1: all these other things involved, like where's what's the person
Speaker 1: looking at or they looking at me, or they're looking off.
Speaker 1: If the person in the painting is looking to the
Speaker 1: left or to the right, well then that changes the
Speaker 1: value of the left or the right to me, the
Speaker 1: reader or the viewer. And so like I say this,
Speaker 1: a lot of this comes back to the fact that
Speaker 1: the rule of thirds, the exact definition of it and
Speaker 1: the application of it, kind of depends on who's accounting
Speaker 1: it and how much weight they're putting behind it. Again,
Speaker 1: it's not a natural law or anything. It is often
Speaker 1: held up as kind of maybe a best practices for
Speaker 1: subjective art, but it's a rule that's made to be broken.
Speaker 1: I was reading about it a little bit more in
Speaker 1: a paper titled evaluating the Rule of Thirds in Photographs
Speaker 1: and Paintings by A Mirasha at All. This was from
Speaker 1: twenty fourteen in the journal Art and Perception, and they
Speaker 1: conducted a study where the researchers compared computer calculated rock values.
Speaker 1: I should note that in multiple articles folks abbreviate rule
Speaker 1: of thirds to rot. Rot ended up reading a lot
Speaker 1: about Rot and testing out Rot, but they compared computer
Speaker 1: calculated rock values with human test subject rock values concerning
Speaker 1: images and their findings. They argued suggested that rot might
Speaker 1: not be as essential to the evaluation of photos and
Speaker 1: artworks as previously thought, and that quote it might have
Speaker 1: become a normative aspect of creating artworks rather than a
Speaker 1: quality if one.
Speaker 2: Ah okay, So if that's the case, it could be
Speaker 2: more a result of a kind of convention that we
Speaker 2: expect to see replicated because it is a convention used
Speaker 2: by artists, but not so much a natural preference of
Speaker 2: all viewers of art.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's my understanding. I was reading a little
Speaker 1: bit more about this too, in a paper titled when
Speaker 1: might We Break the Rules? A Statistical analysis of Esthetics
Speaker 1: and Photographs from plus one twenty twenty two by one
Speaker 1: at All, and they they pointed out something that is
Speaker 1: also worth taking into account here, because they were talking
Speaker 1: about how, okay, high quality photographs often obey a handful
Speaker 1: of various rules, not only the rule of thirds, but
Speaker 1: also things like the rule of odds, which simply states
Speaker 1: that if you're going to have multiple subjects or objects
Speaker 1: in your work, an odd number is better than an
Speaker 1: even number. Ah.
Speaker 2: Here we come full circle. So this is what I
Speaker 2: was thinking about originally, though the rule of thirds does
Speaker 2: sort of catch some of this as well.
Speaker 1: Well. Yeah, and there are a lot of examples of this,
Speaker 1: and like basically, like we can basically go back to
Speaker 1: the example we were talking about with how and the
Speaker 1: two humans earlier. Three figures may be positioned in a
Speaker 1: triangular format, which naturally draws our attention in and gives
Speaker 1: us that depth. I included a picture I've included to
Speaker 1: still here from the excellent Carosawa film Throne of Blood.
Speaker 1: This was on a video maker article by Wayland Bourne.
Speaker 1: And this is another one. This is kind of I'll
Speaker 1: briefly describe this because this is a classic setup. To
Speaker 1: the right and the left. You have two individuals their
Speaker 1: backs turned to you, and they are entering into a
Speaker 1: room or a structure, and there is a third person
Speaker 1: in the center of the frame facing out, facing us,
Speaker 1: the viewer, and this creates that triangle.
Speaker 2: Coras was a genius at framing scenes like this, And yeah,
Speaker 2: this does look incredibly striking, especially because of the So
Speaker 2: this is a film in black and white. It is
Speaker 2: an adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth. And these two characters I
Speaker 2: think are the story's equivalents of the Macbeth and Banquo characters.
Speaker 2: I don't recall what their names are in Throne of Blood,
Speaker 2: but they're coming across the equivalent of what in Macbeth
Speaker 2: is the three witches who give the prophecy. In this movie,
Speaker 2: it is an old figure who lives in the forest
Speaker 2: and is working some kind of device. Is it like
Speaker 2: a spinning wheel or something like that?
Speaker 1: Something like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And whereas the two warriors are dressed in dark
Speaker 2: samurai armor, the prophet or witch figure is very brightly
Speaker 2: lit and appears kind of hazy and pale. And so
Speaker 2: this three person composition with the opposite facing and the
Speaker 2: difference in the white versus dark, the contrast there, it's brilliant.
Speaker 2: It looks so good.
Speaker 1: I'll have more on witches here shortly. Because another way
Speaker 1: to look at this rule of odds is that if
Speaker 1: you have four characters in a scene in an image,
Speaker 1: you can also go ahead and group three together and
Speaker 1: have one off the side. You can do things like
Speaker 1: this where Okay, I have an even number of subjects
Speaker 1: in this picture, but I can group them in a
Speaker 1: way that makes them read as odd. You know. Now,
Speaker 1: again this is another thing where this is not a
Speaker 1: natural law. This is a rule that's made to be broken,
Speaker 1: and so you'll find plenty of examples of people not
Speaker 1: following this because you don't have to follow it. But
Speaker 1: it was it was interesting. I started thinking about witches
Speaker 1: more because you know, what is the classic number of witches,
Speaker 1: and certainly in Western traditions, is three, right, three witches
Speaker 1: or three hags. And I instantly thought to some of
Speaker 1: the paintings of Goya, for example, and some of them
Speaker 1: have a lot of witches in those pictures where it's
Speaker 1: not even really worth thinking about whether it's an even
Speaker 1: or odd number. But there is one called Elcunjuro that
Speaker 1: is sometimes is given the English title witches or incantation.
Speaker 1: And if you look here, we have what's a one, two, three,
Speaker 1: four five witches. So it's a nice odd amount of witches.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, I don't know if you're
Speaker 1: being like very analytical of it too. Okay, well, we
Speaker 1: have one, two, three, four five witches and then a
Speaker 1: we have a sixth individual here that is like the
Speaker 1: subject of their interests, and the way that he's blocked
Speaker 1: the witches is interesting in that we basically have four
Speaker 1: witches and then a fifth individual, and then we have
Speaker 1: one witch in the foreground. Another comparison that I ran
Speaker 1: across is you look at Albert Duro's The Four Witches
Speaker 1: as a black and white image, and you have four
Speaker 1: witches that they're basically nude females. You don't know that
Speaker 1: they're witches based on anything other than the title. They're
Speaker 1: not doing anything that I can see it's particularly witchy
Speaker 1: other than their naked But I've seen it compared to
Speaker 1: a sculpture by Antonio Canova titled The Three Graces. The
Speaker 1: Three Graces as the title and indicates three naked individuals
Speaker 1: and the witches. We have four, but in Albreuch Duur's artwork.
Speaker 1: Here they're grouped like three with a fourth witch kind
Speaker 1: of in the background. You'll only really see her from
Speaker 1: the shoulders up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so it still feels like three. It's three and
Speaker 2: one instead of four.
Speaker 1: Now, going back to that paper by Wing at All,
Speaker 1: they point out that we have these various rules, but
Speaker 1: we also have plenty of examples of artists that break
Speaker 1: the rules, but in doing so, it doesn't seem to
Speaker 1: hamper the aesthetic merits of their work, and they break
Speaker 1: all this down at a level of detail that doesn't
Speaker 1: really suit our purposes here, but suffice to say that
Speaker 1: they point to a number of various other desirable aesthetic
Speaker 1: elements that enable the breaking of rules, and the paper
Speaker 1: seems interested in codifying all of this further. But I
Speaker 1: think one of the big takeaways for our purposes is
Speaker 1: that something like the rule of thirds is important and
Speaker 1: seems to align with the sort of esthetic qualities we
Speaker 1: look for. But again, there are plenty ways to There
Speaker 1: are plenty of ways to skirt around it. Rules and
Speaker 1: subjective art once more, are there to be broken. In
Speaker 1: thinking about all of this too, and certainly thinking of
Speaker 1: cinematic examples, I also instantly thought about the work of
Speaker 1: director Wes Anderson, who is especially with his long time
Speaker 1: cinematographer Robert Yeoman. It's known for shots that often have
Speaker 1: a high degree of symmetry to them. Yeah, and you
Speaker 1: know this often helps create that sort of signature, stage flavored,
Speaker 1: slightly surreal vibe that he's going for in his pictures.
Speaker 2: Yes, there's absolutely that. I would almost say also the symmetry,
Speaker 2: there's something kind of cute about it that can that
Speaker 2: can make a scene kind of feel cute or tidy
Speaker 2: or friendly or amusing in a way where even if
Speaker 2: the subject matter would otherwise be I don't no, more
Speaker 2: more threatening or upsetting or something like that, there's a
Speaker 2: kind of gentle harmlessness that creeps in with the symmetry
Speaker 2: of the framing, if that makes any sense.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. The most recent full length film his that
Speaker 1: I've seen is twenty twenty three's Asteroid City, which I
Speaker 1: thought was quite good. But it has there are elements
Speaker 1: to the plot that involve stage productions, and then there's
Speaker 1: this flavor extends throughout the rest of the piece, and
Speaker 1: so you'll often have these, you know, for instance, that
Speaker 1: very symmetrical subject in center shots that also do, at
Speaker 1: least via the background, adhere to the rule of thirds,
Speaker 1: So you could you could definitely lay the grid over
Speaker 1: this and be like, all right, you know, there are
Speaker 1: things line up here, but we are looking at the
Speaker 1: character dead center. Sometimes I feel like that kind of
Speaker 1: blocking in his films. It kind of creates this feeling of,
Speaker 1: you know, very much an amateur play, but with of
Speaker 1: course impeccable set design and generally you know, a very
Speaker 1: talented actor at the center of it. So you get
Speaker 1: this kind of interesting juxtaposition there that again create helps
Speaker 1: create this feeling of slight unreality. All right, so I'm
Speaker 1: gonna skip up my other examples from Wes Anderson's work,
Speaker 1: because again you can't see them listening to the podcast,
Speaker 1: so I feel like it would just mostly be Joe
Speaker 1: and Me geeking out over some of these images. But
Speaker 1: to skip ahead a bit, I will point out that
Speaker 1: there are critics of rot of the rule of three
Speaker 1: that very much argue that there's less of a direct
Speaker 1: connection here. For instance, I was looking at a twenty
Speaker 1: sixteen post by an artist by the name of Anthony
Speaker 1: Wallcoulis who this was titled A Spurious Affair A Primer
Speaker 1: on Pictorial Composition, Part four, and he argued that it
Speaker 1: is akin to theories of spontaneous generation, you know, the
Speaker 1: idea that flies are born from rotten mead and rats
Speaker 1: and so forth, that it's you know, it's correlation that
Speaker 1: might spring forth from a bag of grain exactly. That's
Speaker 1: sort of thing basically, and it's it's a very good boast.
Speaker 1: He makes the argument that, look, there's so many things
Speaker 1: going on in the human brain when we make sense
Speaker 1: of an image, including you know, quite importantly again prediction
Speaker 1: and modeling over what's going to happen next, including you know,
Speaker 1: arguably better supported visual perception biases such as inward bias
Speaker 1: that's inward facing objects, of bias for inward facing objects
Speaker 1: near the border, center bias that's front facing figures near center,
Speaker 1: and goodness of fit, which can also depend on how
Speaker 1: you're tackling it, favor central stability and an image.
Speaker 2: Okay, so those three things like inward facing objects near
Speaker 2: the border or front facing figures in the center. This
Speaker 2: author is saying that those are better supported by research
Speaker 2: as things that we naturally favor in artworks than the
Speaker 2: rule of thirds is correct.
Speaker 1: That's their their argument. So I you know, I think
Speaker 1: at the end of the day, again, it's not a
Speaker 1: natural law. It's a rule that's meant to be broken.
Speaker 1: But there's something about it that does at least correlate
Speaker 1: with the things we like and or create in visual representations.
Speaker 1: There is something about dividing things up into thirds that
Speaker 1: works really well for us, and it processes well for us.
Speaker 1: That doesn't mean we can only deal with thirds, but
Speaker 1: there is something about it, and it serves as a
Speaker 1: great guide, certainly for people who are figuring out what
Speaker 1: they're doing with their art, with their visual representations and
Speaker 1: in their filmmaking.
Speaker 2: Right, So, I mean the way I would look at it,
Speaker 2: if you're thinking about the rule of thirds or the
Speaker 2: rule of odds with numbers of subjects in an artwork,
Speaker 2: I would never say that like, oh, well, good art
Speaker 2: follows this rule and bad art doesn't. But I would
Speaker 2: say there is likely a reason. There's some kind of
Speaker 2: reason that there is this tendency to say, uh, you know,
Speaker 2: grouping things in terms of three or five is better
Speaker 2: than two or four, and that if you have four
Speaker 2: of something, you have this impulse to split it into
Speaker 2: three and one, or if you have two of something,
Speaker 2: you have this impulse to put something between them to
Speaker 2: make it more like three of something. There is something
Speaker 2: we're feeling there, even if it's not actually the difference
Speaker 2: between art being good or bad, there's an impulse we're following.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I would like to come back to the
Speaker 1: rule of odds in another episode and look at some
Speaker 1: of the literature around it's usage in food advertising, because oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I feel this seems like an area where you can
Speaker 1: be a lot more on target with how we're processing it.
Speaker 1: Because we want to eat the food, or at least
Speaker 1: we're thinking about eating the food, and therefore there's like
Speaker 1: more of a like a direct relationship with the number.
Speaker 1: Because Yeah, the basic idea here is that, Yeah, if
Speaker 1: you're going to have an advertisement for I don't know,
Speaker 1: slider Hamburgers, would want to have three on a little
Speaker 1: silver platter, Yeah, in your magazine ad, not two, not four,
Speaker 1: not one, but three.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, Yeah, especially if you're showing them on like a
Speaker 2: TV commercial or in a visual picture. The idea even
Speaker 2: if they like the two were bigger and you're getting
Speaker 2: the same amount of food overall, you want the three.
Speaker 1: Yeah, huge victory for team odd there.
Speaker 2: Why are there always three things in a fast food combo?
Speaker 2: You know, it's like you get the sandwich, the fries,
Speaker 2: and the drink, and they never like put the fries
Speaker 2: on the sandwich and you just get two things, the
Speaker 2: sandwich in the drink.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you gotta have that side, right, you have that
Speaker 1: third element. Otherwise it feels like you're missing something, like
Speaker 1: even if it's just a very measly side salad. And
Speaker 1: I love a good side salad, but sometimes a side
Speaker 1: salad is just some lettuce thrown on there, like it
Speaker 1: still feels like a certain sacred law is being obeyed,
Speaker 1: you know, some sort of Game of Thrones esque arrangement
Speaker 1: where it's like, okay, a side has been served, we
Speaker 1: cannot murder each other.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the law of hospitality. I accept your bread and
Speaker 2: chicken fries or whatever. They're still doing chicken fries out there.
Speaker 2: I wonder how many of those you get. I bet
Speaker 2: it's an odd number.
Speaker 1: I don't know anything about chicken fries, so I can't
Speaker 1: speak to them. Is it chicken or fried? Like, what's
Speaker 1: the or is it like fries made with chicken fat?
Speaker 2: I don't know, well, Rob, I think it's fries made
Speaker 2: out of chicken. It's like, you know, you can get
Speaker 2: chicken parts that come in normal chicken parts shapes, but
Speaker 2: then you could also just take that chicken and turn
Speaker 2: it into fries, and that's what they do.
Speaker 1: That really sounds like chicken fingers to me. I don't
Speaker 1: understand why this is we need this category confusion.
Speaker 2: Chicken fingers got a lot of edges, a lot of contours,
Speaker 2: you know, don't you just want a straight pillar of chicken,
Speaker 2: just like just like.
Speaker 1: A shredded chicken. But shredded but stiff. I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe I guess.
Speaker 2: Okay, well, I think we're gonna have to call it there,
Speaker 2: But we will have more to say about about our
Speaker 2: thoughts and feelings about odd and even numbers next time.
Speaker 1: That's right. In the meantime, I'm sure you have some
Speaker 1: observations and thoughts about about odds and evens and numbers
Speaker 1: in general. Write in. We would love to hear from you.
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