You Are Not Ordinary
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What is the Kuleshov effect and how does it explain our drive to create life narratives?
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the early days of Soviet cinema, a filmmaker conducted an experiment that would change our understanding of the human mind. Lev Kuleshov showed an audience a short film featuring a famous actor. The footage of the actor was always the same, a single, unmoving, and entirely neutral expression. But the filmmaker intercut the shot with three different images, a bowl of hot soup, a child in a coffin, and a woman reclining on a sofa. Even though the actor's face never changed, the audience was mesmerized by his performance. When paired with the soup, they saw a man gripped by hunger. When paired with the coffin, they saw a face transformed by grief. They didn't see a sequence of unrelated pictures.
They saw an integrated story. The human brain is wired to make connections like this. We want to see the frames as part of a narrative, and so we invent the connective tissue. We turn frame one and an unrelated frame two into a cohesive story. This psychological tendency also shapes how we see our own lives. We are the editors of our own personal documentaries, constantly splicing together random chaotic events into a narrative. Depending on our personalities and temperaments, our documentaries might be comedies or tragedies. They might be gripping tales or boring stories where nothing much happens. But all of this raises a question. If we are the ones sitting in the editing room, are we making the best use of the footage?
Are we choosing to tell the right stories? This week on Hidden Brain, and in a companion story on Hidden Brain Plus, the tales we tell about our lives, and why some stories turn out to be better for us than others.
When we turn on the TV, or read a novel, or buy a ticket to a movie, we're in search of a good story. A narrative that will capture our imagination, transport us to a different world, offer a satisfying resolution. The best stories create this magic. How do they do this? At Boston College, Benjamin Rogers studies how narratives generate meaning and significance in our minds and the implications of the stories we tell about our own lives. Ben Rogers, welcome to Hidden Brain.
Hi, Shankar. It's great to be here.
Ben, I understand that starting when you were a teenager, you've been interested in stories. In the books that you've read about the craft, especially when it comes to the craft of filmmaking, you learned that there was one storytelling framework that audiences find especially compelling. Now, this framework shows up in ancient literature and modern tales. I'm wondering if we can start with a story like Harry Potter. How does the Harry Potter story follow this storytelling framework?
Sure, yeah. So it starts off with Harry. At the time that you meet him, he's an orphan boy. He's living with his uncle and aunt and cousin, but he's just kind of put down upon, doesn't have anything special about him. But then mysterious things keep happening, and then he ends up having a moment of shift. And that's when a series of wizards and wizard-adjacent people tell him that he's actually... unbeknownst to him a wizard and he needs to go off to Hogwarts a school to learn how to craft magic and to take up the mantle by his parents that he didn't know a lot about and so over the course of the first story and over the series he learns he faces a series of challenges in terms of facing monsters and people who want to hurt him and hurt his friends but he learns magic and he ends up transformed and really embracing the idea that he's there to help others and become a
someone who can stand up to fight for the little guy. And this is one of those stories that, both within an individual novel or a movie, but across the entire series, he follows the main elements of what we call the hero's journey.
One of the things that you and others have pointed out is a hallmark of the hero's journey is not just about the plot and the events and the narrative and the things that the hero does, but an internal change that happens within the hero.
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Chapters
3 chapters
1
What is the Kuleshov effect and how does it explain our drive to create life narratives?
0:00–16:19
2
How does Joseph Campbell's hero's journey appear in modern stories like Harry Potter and Star Wars?
16:19–1:13:12
3
What are the seven condensed elements of the hero's journey using Star Wars and Lord of the Rings as examples?
1:13:12–1:34:50