Mind and Suspense
Always used to think how I was able to watch a suspense movie over and over and wonder what will happen next. Even though we know that the ending of the movie we always expects a twist or we will be curious to know how Arnold is going to save the kid in Terminator II.Think about the cold war stories. We know that there was no nuclear disaster otherwise we won't be here to read these stories. Still we are anxious to the last minute thinking whether they will be able to avert the danger. How this happens? Are we so dumb?
This should have something to do with the way mind stores these memories or knowledge and retrieves it, and the part of the mind that creates the suspense. There seems to be some lack of co-ordination between these two departments. Either the part of the mind which creates suspense doesn't care about the knowledge which is already there or creating the suspense is faster than retrieving the memory.
We cannot completely retains the suspense. Some part of it is lost when we watch the movie second or third time and some part is always there. The “what is next” part will be lost after the first time but the “how is it going to happen” part remains.
This should give some inside information of the working of the mind. “What is next” part of the suspense is mostly a static part which will be created for the complete movie and each incidents in the movie. But “how” part of suspense is a dynamic one which is updated each and every moment so this part seems to be not in sync with our knowledge.
Think of this as a shared object and which is getting calculated and updated very frequently and after the update another function try to correct the correct the value using some static values and these happens in a two independent threads. What will be the output. Calculated value or corrected value?. This depends on the frequency at which the correction thread executes. Brain will have some resource contention/ performance issues and might have optimized this for optimistic concurrency which caused this issue.
Don't think it is a bug because of tons of business banks on this feature.
posted by Chathan @ 10:03 PM
2 Comments:
Chatha,
Good thinking, I must say. But what I can't digest is the fact that why then we are not interested in seeing some movies who were not good at all? I know that your reference to movies was just an example, but my question also belongs to the same category. Can we also deduce that brain does a matching and feels good when it finds one? Or is it possible that since a frame is not fully digested the very first time, brain finds it easy to go through the details the second time? And will that justify the fact that we used to find things or dialogues that we haven't noticed the very first time? Whatever be the case, there is no doubt in the fact that brain is a super duper computer.
Mantru,
There are films which you can see once. There are films which you can see howmany ever times without getting bored. I think the difference is if the suspense the static part of it is good you may want to see it onece. But only if the dynamic part of it "How" is treated well then you are interested in seeing it again and again.
All the films which we call classic films would have handled both parts properly.
Bad films are different they don't generate any suspense so that the brain gets bored and goes for sleep.
What I am saying is more than the suspense it way it handled is more important. I don't know wheather you have seen fazil's new movie "Vismaya thumbathe" the main suspense was better than "Manichitrathazu" still the way it handled was poor and the film was a flop.
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