🤔 Anticipation §

How to create anticipation? §

Balance:

Simplicity ← Golden Spot → Complexity or Theme ← Golden Spot → Ambiguity

Creating a theme (= simplicity): §

• Minimize Surprise Reduction (→ 💭 Entropy)
  • Recognition through 🟨 Abstraction
  • → don’t overwhelm the brain
• Ease of inference
  • → allow the brain to construct a whole from parts

Use of ambiguity §

The brain enjoys havingits disambiguation engine teased: “Jokes are often of the form of an ambiguity of contexts/themes resolved by a punchline which evaluates one way in one context and another way in the other context (say true in one and false in the other); the story that precedes the punchline serves to amplify the weaker context, the weaker side of the ambiguity, so as to maximize the punch of the line by making it break symmetry between two almost equal contexts/themes”

Noteworthy §

• Garden-path sentences: “The    horse    raced    past    the    barn    fell.”
  • → cutoff after which possible interpretations (computed in parallel) get deemed unlikely