excerpt: "rivited"

8/12/2019 Excerpt: "Rivited"

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INTRODUCTION

In my first year of graduate school I worked in a condemned build-ing. Sitting in my office was a woman I was trying to impress. We

were talking about dance music. She liked club music and techno;

I liked rap. I put on an acid jazz album in the compact disc player.

“How can you dance to this?” she asked.

“How can you not dance to this?” I replied, and then demon-

strated the irresistibility of the track. For the most part, I only want

to listen to music that makes me want to dance. Sorry, John Denver.When I was young I was fascinated with psychic powers. I read

every book in the libraries of both my elementary and high school

on the subject, and was convinced that people had untapped mental

abilities. All these books in the nonfiction section of my school’s

library told me that people could move things with their minds, scry

with crystal balls, and predict the future. We used only 10 percent

of our brains, right? What else could that 90 percent possibly be for?I was absolutely captivated by this idea and convinced of it, until

I read Susan Blackmore’s sobering In Search of the Light: Adven-

tures of a Parapsychologist in college.1 It was the first skeptical book

I’d encountered and it scorched and salted the lush landscape of my

paranormal beliefs. First Santa Claus and now this? Ideas can be

beautiful and we don’t want to let go of them even when we know

they’re wrong.

There are things in this world that deeply resonate with us. We

seek them out. They hold our attention. They feel right. I want to

dance to hip-hop. I feel moved by sad, uplifting stories. I want to

believe that people can move things just by willing it to happen.



2 RIVETED

You are struck by a beautiful view from a mountain cabin. You

hear that everyone gets the afterlife that they imagined they’d have,

and the idea is so beautiful, and feels so right, that you smile in spite

of yourself. You hear a story of some terrible thing that happened to

a child that gives you chills and haunts you for days. You find your-

self glued to the screen, watching a close basketball game. You hear

a great joke and can’t wait to tell it to your friends.

With the huge variety of things we find compelling, it seems nat-

ural that a huge variety of qualities would make them compelling.

There can’t be anything similar about what’s good about a pop song

on the radio and what’s moving when someone recounts their near-

death experience, can there?

Yes, there can. Strange as it might seem, compelling things share

many similarities. My purpose in this book is to tie together research

from many fields. I’ll do something that has never been done before

and show how all these phenomena can be explained with the foun-

dations of compellingness. I will show you that, like art and other

sensory experiences, beliefs and explanations have aesthetic qualities

that make us more or less likely to believe them. The same qualities

appear again and again in riveting things, be they jokes, paintings,

quotations, paranormal beliefs, religions, sports, video games, news,

music, or gossip. The qualities that are common to all these things

fit like a key in a lock with our psychological proclivities. I call it the

compellingness foundations theory.

* * *

Understanding compellingness and how it works requires some un-

derstanding of our brains and how they were shaped by evolution.

Our brains are a mix of old and newer processes that evolved at

different times. They sometimes “disagree” on the meaning, impor-

tance, and value of things, and often we are clueless as to how wegot our opinions. Often we are attracted to something or repelled by

it and don’t know why, and the reasons we dredge up are confabula-

tions, mere guesses about our underlying psychologies.

The old brain is evolutionarily older. It’s located near the top

of the brain stem and the back of the head. We share much of its



INTRODUCTION 3

anatomy with other animals. It’s a Rube Goldberg contraption, with

special rules for this and not for that, all evolved, rather haphaz-

ardly, to help us survive and reproduce. It consists of a hodgepodge

of specialized systems.

In the front of our head is the new brain, which is a general-

purpose learning and reasoning machine and a system that tries to

control the impulses of the older brain. It’s a slow, deliberate plan-

ner and imaginer. Jazz improvisers quiet this part of their brain be-

fore performing.2 This part of the brain is not built to do specific

jobs; rather it’s built to learn to do, well, just about anything. Where

the old brain looks different depending on where you look, the new

brain (particularly the cerebral cortex), looks remarkably similar no

matter where you look. We have an old brain for the same reasons

all animals do. We have the new brain because our ancestors got into

an intelligence arms race with each other.

Because the old and new brains think with different rules, care

about different things, and might even use different stores of knowl-

edge, they often come up with different evaluations of the same situ-

ations. For example, there is a famous moral-reasoning experiment

run by psychologist Joshua Greene that asks whether or not it is

morally acceptable to pull a switch that will cause a train to kill one

person rather than five (this is a version of a problem first proposed

by Philippa Foot in 1967). Most people answer yes, such an action

is acceptable, which indicates relatively high activation in the newer,

more frontal areas. More emotionally salient problems, such as a

version of the same problem that would require the pushing of a

single person onto a track to save five people, show activation in the

emotional, older parts of the brain. In this kind of scenario, where

there is direct physical contact involved, people often report that do-

ing so is morally unacceptable.3

When the new brain pulls in the opposite direction from the old,

you can literally be of two minds about something. For example,

your new brain can know that prepackaged cupcakes are unhealth-

ful, but your old brain can be quite insistent that they should be

devoured. Many of them. With a cold glass of milk, please. The old

brain “knows” that sugar and fat are scarce and should always be

excerpt: "rivited"

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