Mystery

April 12, 2021
Why are people intrigued by mysteries, wonders Lehrer (A Book About Love) in this fascinating look at how humans respond to the unknown. In digging into the “mystery of mystery,” Lehrer begins with fiction, crediting Edgar Allan Poe with inventing a new kind of story whose appeal relied upon “the element of surprise” and turned readers into sleuths themselves, actively searching the texts for clues. He then examines why that itch is so gripping, maintaining that the biggest spikes in dopamine come from surprises. Lehrer branches out from there, surveying Shakespeare, who transformed a key element of the story that inspired Hamlet (making uncertain the question of whether his father had been murdered), the legendary blackout ending of The Sopranos, and the illusions of stage magicians. The only false note comes from a section endorsing a study that claimed plot spoilers actually enhance the reading experiences, which doesn’t mesh with his thesis that the unexpected matters most. Despite that dissonant note, this is a thought-provoking look at an aspect of human psychology—and literature—often taken for granted.

July 1, 2021
Life is full of mysteries, including the mystery of mystery itself. After having a book pulled from circulation and losing a New Yorker gig for transgressions such as plagiarism, cherry-picked facts, and invented quotations, Lehrer, sad to say, must be read under the shadow of a question mark. This foray in pop science is similar to his earlier works, though, one hopes, more scrupulously fact checked. Lehrer opens with an explication of what it is that makes us love a mystery story in the first place, citing the originator of the form, Edgar Allan Poe: "Poe's insight was that the audience didn't care about the murder....What they really cared about was the mystery." Mysteries do something to the mind, igniting neurons that try to predict outcomes but, if the story is skillfully told, give way to "subtly violating our expectations, postponing the answer for as long as possible." The storytelling skills of culture highbrow and middle come under consideration, from Citizen Kane to Law & Order: SVU, all of which make use of what J.J. Abrams calls the "mystery box technique," which keeps viewers both engaged and puzzled. Lehrer then turns to magic, chronicling his experiences with a statistician who figured out how to beat lottery algorithms and then became fascinated by sleight of hand--again, a species of mystery, "creating a performance we can't explain." So far, so good, but then Lehrer stretches the bounds of his thesis to enfold the question of how we perceive and misperceive and are beguiled, incorporating bits and pieces of music lore (John Lennon's "I Am the Walrus" and Bach foremost); the advertising campaign that brought the Volkswagen to America; the merits of the Comic Sans typeface, and the rabbit-duck optical illusion. Lehrer makes a good village explainer--good, as Gertrude Stein said of Ezra Pound, if you're a village--but the narrative souffl� often threatens to fall as he wanders from subject to subject. For those who like their science superficial and swaddled in pop culture.

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