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Familiar ideas are processed faster, and the sensation of quick and easy thinking—also known as fluency—is strong yet sneaky, so that people attribute the pleasure of the thought to the quality of the idea.
More than anything, they love the recognition of a familiar pattern in a fresh setting, that special moment when the fuzzy anxiety of newness resolves into the crystalline clarity of understanding. Psychologists have a perfect term for this click of meaning—they call it an “aesthetic aha.”
Impressionism was, famously, a disparaged artistic style of a handful of enfants terribles whose works were considered moral blights.
Designing for humans means abandoning the childish dream of a universal formula and embracing a more chaotic dance between novelty and wonder, belonging and uniqueness, familiarity and surprise.
His lullaby was an instant success not because it was incomparably original, but because it offered a familiar melody in an original setting.
This is the first thesis of the book. Most consumers are simultaneously neophilic—curious to discover new things—and deeply neophobic—afraid of anything that’s too new. The best hit makers are gifted at creating moments of meaning by marrying new and old, anxiety and understanding. They are architects of familiar surprises.
It is not enough to study products themselves to understand their inherent appeal, because quite often the most popular things are hardly what anybody would consider the “best.” They are the most popular everywhere because they are, simply, everywhere. Content might be king, but distribution is the kingdom.
It is rarely sufficient to design the perfect product without designing an equally thoughtful plan to get it to the right people.
The twinkling of camera flashes at that premiere might have blinded some movie executives to the fact that Americans’ monogamous relationship with the silver screen was already ending.
People prefer paintings that they’ve seen before. Audiences like art that gives them the jolt of meaning that often comes from an inkling of recognition.
People simply liked whatever shapes and words they saw the most. Their preference was for familiarity.
But adult tastes are diverse, in large part because they’re shaped by the experience of life, and each person enjoys and suffers life in a different way. People are born average and die unique.
In the final analysis, beauty does not reside in forms, or cosmic ratios, or even in the standard-issue wiring of humans’ minds, hearts, and guts. It exists in the interplay between the world and people—which is to say, in life. People adapt. To paraphrase Tennyson, they are the sum of all they have met. They are born average and die unique.
while the second song is widely ignored and ultimately forgotten because, for some reason, it never received that crucial moment of public consecration. There are simply too many “good-enough” songs for every worthy hook to become a bona fide hit. Quality, it seems, is a necessary but insufficient attribute for success.
Beyond a certain level of songwriting genius, how many times audiences have heard a melody matters more for its popularity than how inherently catchy it is.
When they read a political argument that reflects their biases, it fits snugly into their story of how the world works. Thus, familiarity, fluency, and fact are inextricably linked.
When something becomes hard to think about, people transfer the discomfort of the thought to the object of their thinking.
Fluency’s attraction is obvious. But there is a quieter truth: People need a bit of its opposite. They want to be challenged, shocked, scandalized, forced to think—just a bit.
But when the artist looked closer, he was crestfallen. New York was a grungy product of the machine age—greasy, crude, and hulking.
People gravitate to products that are bold, yet instantly comprehensible—“Most Advanced Yet Acceptable.”
It was a period when American industrialists were learning that, to sell more products, you couldn’t just make them practical. You had to make them beautiful—even “cool.”
On the one hand, humans seek familiarity, because it makes them feel safe. On the other hand, people are charged by the thrill of a challenge, powered by a pioneer lust.
They have radical curiosity crossed with conservative minds.
Loewy wanted to clothe the sharp man-made protuberances of the machine age with nature’s smooth shells. The Studebaker coupes, pencil sharpeners, and locomotives of the era all hold the same ovular style.
In Silicon Valley, where venture capitalists also sift through a surfeit of proposals, high-concept pitches are so common that they’re practically a joke.
But whether you’re an academic, screenwriter, or entrepreneur, the difference between a brilliant new idea with bad marketing and a mediocre idea with excellent marketing can be the difference between bankruptcy and success. The trick is learning to frame your new ideas as tweaks of old ideas, to mix a little fluency with a little disfluency—to make your audience see the familiarity behind the surprise.
A good headline, they said, is not overly familiar, but rather familiar enough; a welcome surprise expressed in the vernacular of its intended audience; a promise to advance understanding in a broadly acceptable subject—MAYA.
The most significant neophilic group in the consumer economy is probably teenagers. Young people are “far more receptive to advanced designs,” Loewy wrote, because they have the smallest stake in the status quo.
An earworm is a cognitive quarrel. The automatic mind craves repetition that the aware brain finds annoying. As we saw in previous chapters, perhaps the unconscious self wants more repetition—wants more of the old, wants more of the familiar—than the conscious self thinks is “good.”
when you were five?—but now it does nothing for you. That’s habituation, and it happens with every song and almost any stimulation. It’s the brain’s way of saying, “Been there, done that.”
The answer to the question How do I scare a mouse with the fewest notes for the longest period of time? turns out to be a specific pattern that anticipates the way so many modern pop songs are written.
Repetition and variation do not make any piece of music great on their own. Instead, they establish clear rules within which great songwriters work. Writing poetry without rhyme is “like playing tennis without a net,” the poet Robert Frost once said. In music, repetition is the net.
This suggests that repetition is powerful, not only for music, but for all communication. Music is like memory candy. Musical language helps people remember words, and it signals to people that some words are worth remembering.
There is anaphora, which is repetition at the beginning of a sentence (Winston Churchill: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields”). There is tricolon, which is repetition in short triplicate (Abraham Lincoln: “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people”). There is epizeuxis, which is the same word repeated over and over (Nancy Pelosi: “Just remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs”). There is diacope, which is the repetition of a word or phrase with a brief interruption
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The strange truth is that all speech is composed of microscopic melodies and undiscovered songs. It just takes a little repeating to hear the music.
Running up and down your arms, just beneath the surface of your skin, amid the veins, glands, arteries, vessels, and nerves, there is a smooth thin muscle gripping the bottom of each hair. It is called the arrector pili muscle, and it is activated by the sympathetic nervous system.
it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress towards well-being of individuals and of humanity.
“The dynamic linkages between one’s past, present, and future experiences through the reconsumption of an object allow existential understanding,”
“Reengaging with the same object, even just once, allows a reworking of experiences as consumers consider their own particular enjoyments and understandings of choices they have made.”
And so Flash Gordon was doubly responsible for Star Wars: Not only did it inspire Lucas to direct a space fantasy, but its unavailability also forced Lucas to write his own.
Was Star Wars the hit of the century because it was like nothing that had come before it? Or was it popular because, at its heart, it is the sum of a thousand stories?
In this universal myth, the seemingly ordinary man goes on a journey, crossing over from the known world to the unknown. With help, he survives several key trials, only to face down an ultimate challenge. With this final victory, he returns to the known world as the hero, the prophet, the One, the Son. It is the story of Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker, Moses and Muhammad, Neo in The Matrix and Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, and, of course, Jesus Christ.
The specific beats of Campbell’s arc aren’t as important as its three primary ingredients: inspiration, relatability, and suspense. First, a hero must inspire, which means the story must begin with a flawed character whose journey leads to both victory
Second, it must be relatable, since audiences want to imagine themselves as heroes. That means the heroes cannot be invincible or obnoxiously eager to achieve invincibility. They have to struggle with their destiny (one does not simply walk into Mordor, after all) before accepting its charge. Third, Campbell’s formula comes with prepackaged suspense. The road to glory is pockmarked with small defeats that keep audiences anxious and alert.
Its most recent reincarnation is Save the Cat, the modern bible of screenwriting, which seemingly every person with a screenplay on a laptop has read, claimed to have read, or pointedly (and often fictitiously) claimed not to have read so as to seem rebellious.
The hero’s journey is not a white straitjacket, uniform and constricting. It’s more like a men’s suit: Even if the cut is relatively standard, it leaves wide latitude for customization, rarely looks messy, and looks smart done right.
Viewers are not just nostalgic, yearning for old feelings and familiarities to resurface. One might say they are also prostalgic, obsessed with predicting the future of everything and satisfied when their expectations are met in the right way.
For example, nobody wants a ton of salt in a cake. This is a good rule. But you can find a purposeful exception. It’s called salted-caramel cake. A great baker can find the exceptions because he understands the rules.”
The crash changed his life. “It gave me this perspective on life that said I’m operating on extra credit,” he told Oprah Winfrey in 2012. “What I’m getting is bonus material.”
semiotics
