MisEntropy

The perils of reading Lifehacker

A couple of days ago, I riffed a bit on research findings about how walking through doors seems to have an adverse effect on memory.

Folks at Lifehacker read about the research too - and had their own angle on it, dictated in part by the site's raison d'etre. Their take was the tip 'to write down what you want to remember before you move into another room' - the emphasis being on ideas that you come upon and may subsequently forget, as happens all too often.

That conclusion is only partly true. Walking through doors affects only one kind of memory - episodic memory which relates to specific events, places and times. The other kind of declarative memory - semantic memory - is responsible for meanings, understandings and concept-based knowledge unrelated to specific experiences, and is immune to doorways.

If the idea or thought had anything to do with the latter, you're not going to forget it even after repeated mishaps of walking through doors. But ideas are also often related to sequential events or thinking around events - this thought leads to that and that leads to an idea.

It is here that the risk of forgetting something as a result of a new memory episode (related to the simple act of leaving a room) is high. But even here, from my own experience, one tends to forget not the idea in particular but the whole chain of thought leading up to it. All it takes is remembering a link in the chain and, sure enough, the idea comes back with the eagerness of a lost puppy.

To be fair, the original BPS Research Digest post doesn't actually clarify these distinctions of memory - but there's something more that it does clarify that Lifehacker gets positively and absolutely wrong.

Here's what the Lifehacker goes on to say :

Another interpretation, BPS Research Digest says, is that the increased forgetting wasn't about the "boundary effect of a doorway" but that the context had changed. In other words, participants had better memory about objects in the room where they created those objects.

The original post mentions the plausibility of context playing a possible role, but only to report that further research doesn't support that hypothesis :

Radvansky and his team tested this possibility with a virtual reality study in which memory was probed after passing through a doorway into a second room, passing through two doorways into a third unfamiliar room, or through two doorways back to the original room - the one where they'd first encountered the relevant objects. Performance was no better when back in the original room compared with being tested in the second room, thus undermining the idea that this is all about context effects on memory. Performance was worst of all when in the third, unfamiliar room, supporting the account based on new memory episodes being created on entering each new area.

In other words, if it's an idea you have misplaced and forgotten, don't bother going back into the original room and looking for it there. 

[Original pic by Kristine David]

The machine code of story-telling

According to Wikipedia, the stock phrase "Once upon a time..." has been in use in some form since at least the 14th century. And its prevelance is not just limited to the English language - the Wikipedia page lists variants in dozens of languages from around the world - as also the modern variants, "A long time ago..." and even "Not so long ago..."

While all of us have heard at least one story that began "Once upon a time...", we are also acutely aware that some lines make for great story openers - if only because they unambiguously announce the intention to narrate a story.

(The line that did the trick for me during my childhood was "For those who came in late..." enshrined in the opening panel of every Phantom comic book, as seen above.)

But is there something else at work here? Do great (or stock) opening lines do more than just build the expectation of a narrative?

I would like to think so. At least after reading up research findings that the mere act of passing through a doorway clears up your memory and begins a new memory episode (Via). Making it less likely that you'll remember something that happened in the room you just left. The unlikely result of simply walking through a doorway to another room is akin to wiping your memory slate clean.

The effect itself is not dependent on the distance walked but only on the act of walking through a doorway. As the reserachers put it "Walking through doorways serves as an event boundary, thereby initiating the updating of one's event model [i.e. the creation of a new episode in memory]."

The findings also complement so-called episode markers in story-telling - phrases like "a while later" seem to create a temporal boundary within the narrative. As a result, test subjects found it difficult to remember the sequence of sentences in an episode prior to the narrative divide vis-a-vis sentences in the current episode.

So, here's what I think is happening with the stock opening phrases or with great opening lines.

An effective opening line creates a temporal boundary between what you were doing or thinking before the story began and afterwards. Or in other words, the opening line is transporting you across an imaginary doorway - if not to another world, but at least to the adjacent room.

Of course, most people know or would readily believe that great stories transport them to another world or another time and place. But what this research, coupled with my conjecture, could suggest is that it is a cognitive trick related to memory - and in particular episodic memory - that creates that illusion.

It also suggests that certain key phrases or lines serve as subliminal commands - in effect, setting up, or even resetting, a new memory episode in your mind. Often, without your knowledge.

From here, it's not hard to imagine a  programming language of story-telling - yielding the machine-readable (or is it mind-readable) source code of every story. Don't you think so? 

To target or not to target

Adliterate recently penned a rant about targetting in online advertising. The experience that triggered it is something all of us have encountered (or will eventually do so) - search for something online and be bombarded with ads for the same for eternity.

His conclusion about targetting - it's a great idea in theory, but in practice it's better to waste ad spend reaching a broader audience. Hard to disagree with that, especially if one has been at the receiving end of this pesky tactic.

Malcolm Gladwell in a recent TED talk addressed this issue as well - not with regards to advertising, of course. He recounts the story of Carl Norden, a Swiss engineer who created the Norden Mark II Bombsight - a complex device designed to vastly improve the accuracy of dropping bombs from aircraft. Adopted by the US in WWII, it took a lot of money to develop and was great in ideal conditions. But in battle, it hardly achieved its promise. Another case of targetting failure.

But what these two examples reveal is that targetting is a ruse that's not just limited to advertising or to dropping bombs - it's a widely adopted stratagem in the natural and unnatural world around us (Think about a bird's keen eyesight and its graceful swoop over its prey or the over-representation of sharpshooters in warlore.) That partly explains its enduring allure. A yearning for more efficiency through targetted means is something that's deeply inherent in all us - especially when we're expending our own resources. (Which can hardly be said to be the case for planners and adfolk recommending clients to loosen their purse strings willy-nilly.)

So, while not targetting is an option, targetting is a legitimate strategy too - and clients are right to pursue it. Some may decide it's not for them, some may experiment with it and then decide it's not for them - and some may persevere in demanding better targetting technologies and techniques. (The US Army didn't stop pursuing accuracy in bombing even after the dismal failure of the Norden Bombsight. Which is why we have cruise missiles and Predators now - not everyone's idea of progress, but progress nonetheless.)

And what is it about receiving targetted ads that drives us nuts? When targetting in advertising doesn't work or draws attention to itself, it's failure is starkly obvious to its quarry. We understand the ruse and are repelled by its naked artifice - by its profiteering motive and its seeming use of 'pilfered' data. Like a victim aware of a conman's trick, we then either mock its failure or are repulsed by its successs.

That may very well be what the non-advertising professional will continue to do. But for those of us in the business, it's a chance to observe how and when our (or someone else's) best-laid plans don't work. To contemplate ways to improve or change that; and while we wait for things to get better, to explain to our clients the risks of targetting as is practiced now. (And for this reason alone, every person working in advertising should suffer from the failure of targetted ads.)

And it is here that the final act in the story of Carl Norden and his bombsight has something more to impart to us. Though its track record in WWII was dismal, the Norden bombsight was ironically used to drop the atom bomb - a device of destruction built to make the very idea of accuracy redundant.

And that's the lesson we could also be sharing with our clients and with our comrades-in-advertising. To either pursue better bombsights or more destructive bombs - but not both together*. That targetting has its place, but not alongside rampant repetition and the racking up of exposures. 

(*To be fair to the US Allied forces, they spent a lot of money on the bombsight and the atom bomb but probably did not expect to use the atom bomb in the first place.)

[Pic of Norden Bombsight by Mouser NerdBot]

Ganesha, The Mahabharatha and Complexity as a narrative device

In a recent post, Bobulate concludes that "Well-placed complexity has a place. If only to encourage us to think more deeply and globally about simplicity."

 En route to that, she quotes this fascinating passage by psychologist Adam Atler : 

"What complexity does is it acts as a cognitive roadblock. …. If you have a communication that last 30 seconds or a minute or even five minutes, if you know there’s a particular point that you really want people to pay attention to — you’ve already hooked them in, they’re interested and they’re motivated — if you introduce complexity even briefly, that changes the way people think. They go from thinking in this very shallow, very superficial way … to thinking much more deeply about whatever you say next.

You still want to keep the message simple, but if you pick that moment of complexity carefully and appropriately, you can lead people to believe whatever you say after that moment of complexity very deeply. If the message is a complicated one … that’s a really effective technique."

I found this fascinating because the opportunistic use of complexity to draw an audience deeper into what's being narrated is a technique that's referred to even in the ancient Indian epic, The Mahabharatha.

At roughly ten times the length of both the Iliad and Odyssey combined - and with a total of over 1.8 million words - The Mahabhratha is the world's longest poem. It is a narration of the great war between rival factions of a royal clan, while also incorporating philosophical and devotional discourses along the way.

According to legend, the epic was composed and narrated by the great poet and sage Ved Vyasa. He was instructed to pray to Lord Ganesha, a deity in the Hindu pantheon (pictured above), and request him to be his scribe.

Ganesha agreed to be his scribe on one condition: that upon commencing dictation of the epic, Vyasa wouldn't pause the recitation until the very end.

That put Vyasa in a fix. How would he then go about life - eating, resting, etc.? However, he did agree  to Ganesha's clause but with a clever counter condition of his own. That Ganesha would comprehend every verse Vyasa was dictating before penning it down.

Ganesha agreed and the recital and transcription of the world's longest poem was on.

But with his counter condition in place, every time Vyasa wanted a break, he would compose a particularly complex passage. And while Ganesha laboured to decipher it and then write it down, Vyasa would take a time-out to attend to his needs and be back.

While the story itself may be a ruse to explain the origins of complex passages within the Mahabhratha (in mythical terms), the passages themselves may be an early use of complexity as a narrative device - inserted skillfully to draw the listener deeper into the story and to view what is essentially a princely skirmish over royal power within the expansive context of the very universe itself. 

[Illustration: 'Ganesha Scripting The Mahabharatha' via ExoticIndia]