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