Spoiler Alert!

Hidden Brain

Hidden Brain Media

Arts, Science, Performing Arts, Social Sciences

4.6 • 40.4K Ratings

🗓️ 3 December 2018

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Why do we always fall for surprise endings? It turns out that our capacity to be easily fooled in books and movies is made possible by a handful of predictable mental shortcuts. We talk this week with Vera Tobin, one of the world's first cognitive scientists to study plot twists. She says storytellers have been exploiting narrative twists and turns for millennia — and that studying these sleights of hand can give us a better understanding of the contours of the mind.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantan.
0:08.5	We all love a good surprise.
0:10.7	In movies, we love the moment when the rug is pulled out from under us.
0:14.5	When everything we thought we knew, turns out to be totally wrong.
0:18.8	We love these moments so much, we even get a kick out of watching other people being surprised.
0:24.2	In fact, there's an entire mini-jonger on YouTube of parents filming their children,
0:33.2	with them as they watch one of the greatest surprise scenes in movie history.
0:39.8	Spoiler alert, this is the showdown between Archrivals Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker in Star Wars,
0:46.8	the Empire Strikes Back.
0:48.0	Or be one that will told you what happened to your father.
1:02.7	This week we'll find out why our tendency to be easily fooled in movies can reveal something
1:23.9	important about the way our minds work outside the movie theater.
1:28.4	Stories do what happens to us as we make our way through the world all the time.
1:34.0	We're making inferences, we're trying to make sense of the world and understand what
1:38.2	other people think, what other people know, what's going on, and what stories do is they
1:42.9	play on these tendencies and they exploit them to produce really piratecnic effects.
1:50.3	We'll talk to Vera Tobin, a cognitive scientist at Case West University.
1:54.8	She's the author of Elements of Surprise, our mental limits and the satisfaction of plot.
2:01.2	We're going to look at two movies from the 1990s, the sixth sense and the usual suspects.
2:06.7	If you haven't seen those movies yet, fair warning, more spoilers are coming your way.
2:12.0	What do you think?
2:13.0	What do you think?
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Hidden Brain Media, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Hidden Brain Media and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.