Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

by Shankar Vedantam

Consider this: In 2007, a street musician wearing a baseball cap stood next to a trash bin outside a Washington, DC, subway station, and started playing the violin. Over the next forty-three minutes, he played six pieces of classical music as more than a thousand commuters passed by. Almost all ignored the fiddler and hurried past; just twenty-seven people stopped to listen. The musician was, in fact, Joshua Bell, one of the most celebrated violinists in the world. Some of the Washington commuters who rushed past without stopping might have paid hundreds of dollars to listen to Bell play in concert halls. During his street performance, Bell collected a grand total of thirty-seven dollars and twelve cents, not counting a twenty from one person who actually recognized him. The violin he was playing—the Gibson ex Huberman, a Stradivarius crafted in 1713—cost a little under four million dollars. The Washington Post set up the stunt, and published a story about it. In many ways, this was the other side of the coin of Penn and Teller’s charade about expensive water: If people foolishly pay too much for ordinary water that is dressed up to appear fancy, people foolishly fail to recognize genius when it isn’t presented in a fancy package. The subtext of the Washington Post story was that people were fools to miss out on a chance to listen to great music. The story resonated with people. It won a Pulitzer Prize. But the story missed a great psychological truth: The music you hear w...