Wrote By Jonah Lehrer
Published on September 10, 2010
A fascinating new paper in Psychological Science explores an apparent paradox of eavesdropping: It’s harder to not listen to a conversation when someone is talking on the phone (we only hear one side of the dialogue) than when two physically present people are talking to each other. Although the phone conversation contains much less information, we’re much more curious about what’s being said. Let’s call this “The Annoying Guy On The Train Effect.” He is the last man on earth we want to listen to, and yet he is impossible to ignore.
What explains “The Annoying Guy Effect”? The answer returns us to the nature of information processing, and the perverse way in which the brain allocates our attention. As I noted in this post on curiosity, we are especially drawn to gaps in information. (This is known as the “information gap” theory of curiosity, and was first described by George Loewenstein in the early 90s.) In this new study, the Cornell psychologists build on the “information gap” model. They demonstrated, for instance, that subjects listening to only one side of a conversation – what they call a “halfalogue” – showed decreased performance on a range of cognitive tasks that require undivided attention. In a second experiment, the researchers confirmed that it’s the “unpredictable nature” of the halfalogue that makes it so compelling. Because we don’t know what the conversation is about, or where it’s headed, we can’t help but eavesdrop. Our attention is sucked in by the uncertainty of the words.
This effect doesn’t just apply to obnoxious cell phone conversations. In Proust Was A Neuroscientist, I discuss how the same concept can also explain the allure of music:
Before a musical pattern can be desired by the brain, it must play hard to get. Music only excites us when it makes our auditory cortex struggle to uncover its order. If the music is too obvious, if its patterns are always present, it is annoyingly boring. (Just think of an alarm clock, which is a perfectly predictable pitch playing in perfect time. Not so nice.) This is why composers introduce the tonic note in the beginning of the song and then studiously avoid it until the end. The longer we are denied the pattern we expect, the greater the emotional release when the pattern returns, safe and sound. Our auditory cortex rejoices. It has found the order it has been looking for.In other words, listening to Beethoven is the artistic form of the halfalogue – it is a sensory stimulus that draws us in precisely because of what it doesn’t tell us. The information is incomplete – we don’t know when, exactly, the tonic will return – and so we eagerly await its completion. Meyer would later apply this principle to all narratives. He pointed out, for instance, that the moment of most suspense in a movie is also the moment of peak unpredictability. We are riveted because we have no idea what will happen next.
To demonstrate this psychological principle, the musicologist Leonard Meyer, in his classic book Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956), analyzed the 5th movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet in C-sharp minor, Op. 131. Meyer wanted to show how music is defined by its flirtation with—but not submission to—our expectations of order. He dissected fifty measures of Beethoven’s masterpiece, showing how Beethoven begins with the clear statement of a rhythmic and harmonic pattern and then, in an intricate tonal dance, carefully avoids repeating it. What Beethoven does instead is suggest variations of the pattern. He is its evasive shadow. If E major is the tonic, Beethoven will play incomplete versions of the E major chord, always careful to avoid its straight expression. He wants to preserve an element of uncertainty in his music, making our brains beg for the one chord he refuses to give us. Beethoven saves that chord for the end.
According to Meyer, it is the suspenseful tension of music (arising out of our unfulfilled expectations) that is the source of the music’s feeling. While earlier theories of music focused on the way a noise can refer to the real world of images and experiences (its “connotative” meaning), Meyer argued that the emotions we find in music come from the unfolding events of the music itself. This “embodied meaning” arises from the patterns the symphony invokes and then ignores, from the ambiguity it creates inside its own form. “For the human mind,” Meyer writes, “such states of doubt and confusion are abhorrent. When confronted with them, the mind attempts to resolve them into clarity and certainty.” And so we wait, expectantly, for the resolution of E major, for Beethoven’s established pattern to be completed. This nervous anticipation, says Meyer, “is the whole raison d’etre of the passage, for its purpose is precisely to delay the cadence in the tonic.” The uncertainty makes the feeling. Music is a form whose meaning depends upon its violation.
Reference : http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/the-science-of-eavesdropping/
