Incomplete/Unfinished

and sentenced to thirty years in a federal penitentiary. On the one year anniversary of their incarceration, the prison gets a new warden. This warden, everybody says, is a soft hearted academic social scientists type, and instead of harsh punishments, he brings in new accommodations for the prisoners. One is a newly stocked library and a collection of board games. How sweet. One day, Bill, the youngest of the brothers, brings his brothers a spirit board from the board game card.

He suggests they use it to ask how they can escape the prison. Laughing, the older brother, Franklin, balks at this otherworldly nonsense, but Bill convinces them to play, and so the three brothers put their hands on the plant of the spirit board. After several minutes of asking questions and getting no answers, the plancher begins to move, ever so slowly at first, but then gaining speed, and it spells, I want to talk to Bill, so Franklin laughs, but

Bill is dead serious. He takes the board away in the corner by himself and spends the rest of the day with it. The next morning, out in the yard, Bill is shot by guards while trying to climb over the fence. Stupid, Franklin says, why would Bill have thought he could make it? A month goes by Immett. The middle brother brings the spirit board back, and he suggests they use it to see if they can contact Bill to ask him why he did such a stupid thing.

They do im it speaks to the air, Franklin shits quietly. After several minutes of nothing, the plancha finally starts to move its else I want to talk to Emmett. Emmett takes the board by himself to the corner and spends the rest of the day playing with it in silence. The next morning, Emmett has wall cleaning duty on the guard towers, and in the middle of this he tries to jump from the tower over the fence and breaks his neck. It was so high, why would he have

thought he could survive? Immediately afterwards, Franklin goes to the prison library and retrieves the spirit board for himself. He takes it to a quiet corner. He says, what have you been telling my brothers? The plant you under his fingers begins to move, and unfortunately that's all there is of the story. Hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. What happens next? How can we leave it there? The just

the ragged ends of the story. We're bleeding all over the place. What are we supposed to do? It leaves us hungry for more? Joe, Uh, So, I wrote that story, so that may have been a horrible story. I was trying to inflict the pain that people feel when there is a story that's set up that is not completed. I know we all have this experience. You ever have one of those great uh TV shows that gets one season going, everybody likes it, and then it gets canceled

and you never know what what was going to happen? Yeah? I seem to recall having the same experience with Stephen King's Golden Years back in the day. I don't know what that is. It was like a TV show that he did about this guy that was getting older or getting younger. It's been a long time, but they have the David Bowe's song is the theme song. And uh, it just it did not do well and it did not get picked up, and I have no idea what happened, um,

and I never will. Wow, it's a horrible feeling. Yeah, I mean, even if the material is not that good, it sticks with you. You you want to follow it through. You want to have the complete experience of that story. Right. So this episode We're gonna do today is about the concept of incompleteness and unfinished ideas in art, in science, and in psychology in general. But this was actually inspired by a couple of events that you attended when you

were recently in New York City. But I think we were actually in New York City around the same time, the same week, Yeah, separately, and you I think you left right before I arrived and we didn't actually realize that this was happening. But but yeah, I was. I was in New York for the World Science Festival, which I tried to attend at least every couple of years. And uh, I attended a fabulous discussion titled to Unweave

a Rainbow, Science and the Essence of Being Human. And by the time this publishers, I believe the video is actually available for everyone else. I'll make sure that we include a link to it on the landing page for this episode. UH. And I also attended a wonderful exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art titled The Unfinished Thoughts

Left Visible. This is crazy because when I was New York, I all I went to the met but I did not see this exhibit, and that drives me crazy, not only because I was unable to finish seeing everything at the DUM and thus my museum experience is left incomplete and unfinished task, but also because this exhibit sounds really cool.

Oh yes, indeed, it's um It features a features a vast gallery of incomplete works um by a number of just really famous artists, and each work exposes something of the artist process, uh, the realities of the artistic process, and something of the the timescape in which each one was produced. So um, yeah, it's a fascinating exhibit. It's as as of this publication date, it's still ongoing through most of this year, So if you're in New York or you're making it up that way, go check it out.

But also, the the online presence for the exhibit is is pretty strong as well. Any piece that we mentioned here and all the ones that we do not mention, they are all viewable at the METS website. Cool. So I guess this episode is probably going to be a

little bit looser than many of them. Yeah, that's the way I'm kind of envisioning it, that it's going to be more sort of back and forth and just talking about ideas here because both experiences, both the World Science Festival panel and the exhibited to MET, really got me thinking about the nature of incompleteness and finished unfinished works and the human experience. So yeah, I thought we'd dive dive into the topic of it here um and just

see where it takes us. Will we will get to some more you know, sort of scientific material towards the end in case, in case everything feels a little too lucy doocy to you. Alright, So here we are. Let's talk a little bit about human obsessions with completeness, and the sort of unfinished nature of our lives. It's kind of a weird paradox, isn't it. Yeah, why is it that? It drove me crazy? When I was in New York

at the same time, I was going to museums. I went to Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the American Natural History Museum. All fantastic. At the met and the Natural History Museum, I was not able to see everything in the museum in a day. Yeah, They're gigantic museums, and that drove me crazy. I felt like I was going insane because I was like, I've spent a whole day here, I haven't even gotten through half

of it. Uh. But if I had gone to a museum that was composed entirely of only the things I was able to see at those museums, that would have been a wonderful experience. Yeah. It was just the knowledge

that I hadn't finished it. I mean I even find that towards the end, even the stuff that I have time to to look at and try to absorb, by the end of my my visit, I have I'm feeling enough of a cognitive drain that I know that I'm not properly assimilating all the information, So really I need to always make it a point to just hit the stuff is most interesting to me first and pray that I don't run across something even more interesting later in the visit, especially on the way out when you have

no time to see it at all. Yeah, So part of this is of course just just you know, as far as the broader human experience goes, it's just a quest for like an understanding of the world. Uh, you want to know where you are, you want to know what's around the corner, and in a larger sense, you want to a concise cosmology. We want to know where

we came from, where we're going. We want to know how the world works and how we can exploit that information to better carry out all those biological objectives that we have mandated in our genes. But of course we

can't know all that, right, We're never going to know everything. Yeah, we can fool ourselves into thinking we know all the necessary information and it given time, such as what are the main exhibits we want to see at the met But then we turn a corner on our way out and we realized there was something we wanted to see, uh, and we just didn't know it was there. But that same kind of obsession with having a complete picture, complete view that comes in in art to get what's that

old expression, who is it who said that? You know? Uh, poems or novels, maybe whatever it is, they're they're never really finished, They're only abandoned. Yeah, yeah, that's and that's I think that's an accurate statement to bring up. Yeah, even even a work like that, which is a contained work, a self contained universe in many senses, with a definite beginning, middle, and end. Uh, even those are arguably all incomplete. Um. And of course all any of this is completely out

of step with our experience of reality. Our lives are in a constant state of incompleteness. You know, we're all half finished. Stories, are relationships, or values, are beliefs, They're constantly in flux. And we have this this maddening, more you know, empowering, depending on how you look at it, ability to believe in multiple things that totally contradict each other.

So as much as we crave a complete narrative, as much as we crave a complete cosmology, our own inner experience is just a jumble that best we're able to to to sort of deceive ourselves into thinking of as part of a more complete war. Okay, so how does this tie I can see how it ties into the met exhibit with unfinished works of art, but how does this tie into the discussion you saw at the World

Science Festival. Okay, So the talking question was to unweave a rainbow science in the essence of being human, and it featured a three way discussion between physicist Brian Greene is also one of the founders of the World Science Festival, neuroscientist Miguel Nicolaylis, and writer Leon weasel Tier weasel Tier.

So their their conversation wove in and out of this very notion of basically with a focus on on science and non scientific understanding of science and religion, science and philosophy, talking about each one's ability to try and create a complete picture or even just to go after a complete picture of what the universe is, what the human experiences. Weaseltier in particular took up the more the pro religion, pro philosophy argue in here um and he just makes methods.

Yeah yeah, and he brought it up, you know, basically and saying that you know, this is this is the best way to trump what is the best way to trump uncertainty in our lives? You know, we have science and we have religion. We need to feel that our lives or an outcome of something, so we want to turn to something that has a complete answer. But of

course there's that we run into obvious problems there. First, Let's stake science, right, um, sciences we understand it on the show, and I think his most listeners understand it is not a complete understanding of the universe. I think one of the quickest ways you can tell someone is not scientifically literate is when they say something like, oh, scientists think that that science gives you all the answers. Uh. That that is not what science is about. It is,

in fact, always uncertainty. Uh. And anybody who thinks like that probably doesn't interact with science very much. Right and and Weaseltier put a nice little summary over this discussed by discussing an intern of science and vulgar science, saying that you know, real science is questing after the answers and is inherently incomplete, whereas vulgar science is more of this sort of idea of science, this bumper sticker Um, I love science level of scientific understanding where it's really

more like a religious understanding of science. It's just dogma's science says we know X, rather than thinking about the method itself. Right. But then in terms of religion, he

makes a distinction between religion and vulgar religion. The idea here being that just as vulgar science believes that science has all the answers and shouldn't be questioned, and is this, you know, bumper sticker understanding of it, you also have this version of religion that thinks, oh well, it's it's written on a tablet somewhere, it's all taken care of, it's all explained. Whereas you know it, at higher levels of most faiths, you're going to encounter a lot more

consideration there is. I mean that when you get into theological discussions of how this model of faith interacts with the human experience and with our daily lives, it's gonna be a little more nuanced and particularly and and possibly changing. This is weasel weasel tears yea weasel tears argua. So that religion also has a sort of quest for meaning version that that leaves a sort of radical openness in

the same way science does. Yeah, radical openness. I think that's a that's that's a good way to put it. Uh So, so I really liked his argument that you can find that radical openness on both sides. UM. Now, as far as art goes there, there was actually some direct references to Art in this talk. Uh. Miguel Nicolaylis, who who's a very interesting neuroscientists by the way, involved in a number of different UM projects that involve using

an exoskeleton device to assist severely paralyzed patients. Imagine he's come up in your work. Yes, I've read about him with with mind computer interfaces. Yeah, so he's he's a great guy to here talk about sort of the limits of the human mind. Sorry, more accurately, I should say brain computer in Oh yeah, I mean with mind you

get into different territory. Yeah, And in this discussion, Nikolaalis is definitely taking the brain approach, and uh and weasel t here is more of the mind spokesman, I guess you could say, but Nikolaals brings up this idea that that art was once very precise. So you go, you're going through the mat or any art museum. You're looking at the older pieces and what not, the really old pieces. But you know, so certainly Renaissance work, you're all representative. Yeah,

you're seeing very almost photographic paintings of what people look like. Uh. People, the artists are trying to create an image of the world. Is everyone else sees it universal truth? Right? But then we reached this point when artists want to paint their own experiences of something rather than the universal experience of the thing. Um so uh, you get into these areas such as um uh. Well. On one specific example that that was brought up was William Turner's steamboat painting. I

see you have a picture of this in here. I do, and it's it looks kind of like a bunch of hair going down the drain. Yeah, it's uh, if you could say that, it's definitely kind of brownish, blackish, bluish swirls with an illumination in the middle. And knowing that it's about a steamboat, you can look at it and you can see a steamboat, but it is not a has no photographic clarity to it. In fact, it's in fact it utilizes what is often referred to in art

as non finite intention something that is intentionally unfinished. Um. And and sometimes that's like an obvious state of unfinished, like portions of of a canvas or are not filled in. But other times it's about the detail, like stuff is left vague, stuff is left without that level of photographic detail, because it's more about the the subjective experience of the

thing as opposed to an objective truth. I like this Michuel Miguel Nicholales quote you have in here, where he says all art is a collision of sight and conception of reality. You could also say in the same way that all vision is a collision of external and internal. I mean vision is part photons but also part psychology exactly. Yeah. So this puts an interesting spin on on the the

idea of incompleteness and completeness and what we experience. As weasel Tier brought up as well, there's there's no perfect objectivity here, there's no view from nowhere. It's all an amalgam of what comes from inside what comes from outside. Uh. And in this we kind of get into It reminds me a lot of Plato's theory of forms, right that you have these there's an ideal version of something say, yeah, you know, a sculpture of a woman, or a or a or a chair or a you know, a governmental system,

whatever your your dream happens to be. There's an ideal form that exists outside of our reality, and all we can do is quest after it, but we can never quite achieve it, right, all the stuff we've been countered or imperfect strivings towards that ideal. Right, and if so, if everything is imperfect, um, if everything falls short of the the ideal from the realm reforms, then does it

matter where we stop. It's almost like if whatever you do is going to be incomplete, like it's better to try and figure out where is the artful level of incompleteness, you know, like men, sometimes it's better to be to keep things vague, right then to to absolutely list everything that you know and therefore list the things that you don't, If that makes sense. Yeah, But I could also see how that same embracing of incompleteness could in the wrong ecology of the mind lead to a sort of nihilism,

where well, what does it matter finishing anything? What does it matter attaining goals? Now, from a neuroscientific point, Nicola Lists said he want on to point out that the brain and all of this is not a passive decoder, of course obviously, Yeah, that that is an obsolete view the brain as a quote, self adapting complex system, and this is all built atop physics, of course. But but he pointed out that you know, he he connects brains to machines for a living. That's that's pretty much an

exact quote on that. Uh. And there's a there's a tendency to discredit the unique aspects of human consciousness in all of this. So if you try and work with the brain as if it's a digital computer, it doesn't work. Well. You have here is a probabilistic turing machine, a hyper computer that's an order above digital computers or normal touring machine that relates to some to something we talked about in our P versus NP episode with probabilistic machines versus

deterministic machines all all of our computers today or deterministic machines. Yeah, And so as such, any experience of beauty, it all depends on experience as a As Nicolas points out, a functional brain involves exchanges at various levels. So there's no truth, there's only this just this best approximation of the truth

that our minds can make. So even our mind states are ever changing, ever evolving, and of course ever incomplete, and therefore it makes perfect sense that that incompleteness is sometimes part of the design, as in these incomplete works of art. Well, let's take a look at some of these incomplete works of art. So there are obviously a lot of different reasons that you could have a work

of art that isn't finished. I mean, we're we're talking here about this nonfinite technique where it's intentionally sort of left unfinished in order to convey something. But there's a lot of accidental unfinished nous too, right, Yeah, And some of these are pretty obvious like that, Like you can easily imagine, oh, well, if this work was incomplete at the time of the artist's death, and that happens a lot. They just don't get around to finishing it and it

never gets done. Um. But then other times that's they abandon it. It was just kind of a sketch to begin with, Maybe they never intended to finish it. Other times, especially with with with with portraits, Uh, there's a financial disagreement with a patron, there's a political disagreement, personal issuing in about that mole on my lip, yeah, or you know, or or illness or death ends up taking the patron or at least the subject of the painting out of

the picture and just can't picture it finish it. Um. And it was one of the interesting things in that the exhibit, too, is just how often you sel patron problems with with artists that would go on to just be too you know, complete famous names like you wouldn't think of this individual ever having a situation where their painting is rejected like two or three times by the patron,

But but it occurs. I believe that that in particular, there was one by Gustaf Clint uh and uh and you just you don't think about someone saying, I don't know, goof staff, this just doesn't look great. Can you take another another crack at it and then get back to me. All of our listeners out there, you who are graphic designers and have this frustrating experience over an over, that's not what I want. Yah, take comfort in this, Yeah,

in the company of Clint. Yeah. No matter how how skilled you are during your life, you're gonna be You're gonna have your your work returned multiple times. It's only after you've you've died that everyone will take every little scrap of paper that you did a doodle on and start selling it. Now, one of the examples you included here in our outline for for this is really interesting. I was not familiar with this painting, but I think

it is gorgeous and awesome. I love it. Yeah, Okay, So the painting and question is the Puniment Punishment of Marcia's also known as the Flaying of Marcillas by Italian Late Renaissance artist Titian. And I had seen this one before because it's grizzly, and that tends to be my main entry point into classic words of art is if

they're violent and weird. And this one has like a number of of fauns and staters standing around, and so somebody being there's in they're inverted and they're being flayed alive. So Marcias is actually a sadder, right, He supposed to be like a fawn kind of creature who who gets into a he has he has beef with Apollo, right, Yeah, that they for some reason have a contest of playing music,

I believe, is that right? Yeah? And Apollo wins, and uh, and whichever whichever contestant wins gets to do whatever he wants to to the other one. And I guess what Apollo wants to do to this poor sat Or is flay him alive? It's um. You know, you see this a lot in in Greek mythology, right, You have an individual who challenges a god to or accept the god, accepts the god's challenge to some sort of a competition, or they just end up in a in some sort of a spat with a deity. Always a bad devil

went down to Georgia. Yeah, like devil went down to Georgia's like that actually ends up okay. But if that, if the devil went down to Georgia was a was an ancient Greek myth, he would have you know, wound on, Yeah, and the devil would play him with a pill. Right. That was it was, That was the That was how their cosmolo she worked. So this particular painting is one of several that Titian produced later in life that displays horrific scenes of murder, misery. Um. And here recreated all

of these with the intentional imperfect detail. So I guess the idea is that the mind can't quite take it all in because it's just so grizzly, just so depressing, just so mind rending, lee awful, that things kind of blur out. Yeah, I think it accomplishes that well. Now, there are obviously different ways that paintings can have an unfinished style, and I think this one is considered unfinished just in the level of sort of resolution of detail.

It's blurry, it's not like there's a missing corner or something, but there's stuff like that too. Yeah. Yeah. And and another key example and one of my favorites from the piece, because it definitely gets into some discussions here we can have about literature and film and other media, but it's

it involves another work by Titian. Uh, And what we have here is an unfinished portrait of an unknown lady and her daughter, probably mens of Titian's family, but it was it was left uncomplete, incomplete at the time of

his death. So what happened, Well, this particular painting was setting around and then um, somebody came along and decided to finish it for him, somebody who maybe wasn't as good an artist as definitely not as good as good maybe I'm probably thinking of it, you know, as you know, somebody else working in the studio and underlying came along and says, oh, well, look this is almost completed. Um, but I feel pretty talented. I'm gonna take this, complete it and then I can sell it. Right then it's

going to be a value. And so the painting was altered in the studio to depict Tobias and the Archange del raphael um. So it doesn't look up pictures of this, Yeah, the original one that's kind of striking, the redone one? What could it looks insipid? Yeah? It clearly even to untrained, you know, mostly untrained eyes such as my own, you can tell that there's a big dip in quality. It goes from you know, looking like an unfinished masterpiece to uh,

just another paintings. Yeah, just another painting of an angel

and a boy, uh, just standing there. Uh. So it wasn't until the second half of the twentieth century, uh that they were able to restore and this is kind of this is kind of crazy, restore the completed work to its original incomplete status um, which is which is lovely because what does this say about our first of all, about our desire to complete works, But then about our feelings regarding a completed work, especially if it's completed by

someone other than the artists. Well, I feel like this is very different between an artist who is still living and an artist who has been dead for a while, Because once an artist has been dead for a while and becomes part of art history, I think maybe that there is a different motivation and interacting with each of

their works. It's less to experience a single completed work, but to get a complete and true view of the artist's career, in which case the unfinished work that's a true reflection of the artist is more a part of this completeness paradigm we want than a truly finished portrait that doesn't look like that artist style. Yeah, because in many cases an incomplete painting it it gives us insight into their technique, how they went about creating these particular paintings,

Like what did they complete first? What? Whether did they do the background? Did they do the foreground, did they do some sort of you know, scaffolding blueprint underneath it? You know, it's all tremendously interesting when you're trying to figure out who this artist was and how they conducted their craft. Yeah, but tying into what I just said, I mean, that's sort of lets us know that there

are different levels of completeness we seek. Do you want completeness at the individual works scale, or do you want completeness at the artist's biography scale? Or do you want complete this from a historical periods understanding scale? You know, you want to see this as part of the Italian Renaissance. I don't know what all the eras of paintings are, but uh, you see what I mean. Yeah, But like a literary example that I can't help it come to is that of Frank Herbert's Dune saga Oh Boy, which

we discussed a little open talking about today. So this, the Dune Saga was of course left incomplete at the time of Frank Herbert's death. Now, how many books did Herbert himself, right, what is it? Five or six? I don't have the list in front of me, and I they begin to kind of bleed together from me towards the end, but he wrote several. But then, yeah, the

saga itself was left incomplete. He had notes, and then his son Brian Herbert and co author Kevin J. Anderson, they picked up the work years after his death and finished the Saga based on his notes, and of co wrote a ton of other Dune notes. I mean, at this point Brian Herbert has written at Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson have written more Dune books than than Frank Herbert ever wrote um which is which is interesting.

But it's also one of these areas that is very divisive because you have Dune fans that you know, refer to themselves as orthodox Dune fans. They're only going to read the the Frank books, only the prophet himself, right, But then you have but then you have plenty of fans who embrace the Brian Herbert Kevin J. Anderson books in this expanded view of the universe. But but yeah, at the at the at the heart of it, like the complete saga is not a Frank Herbert creation. It's

a Frank Herbert, Brian Herbert, Kevin J. Anderson creation. Like it becomes a different thing right by by completing it, they have sort of transformed into something else. But also is a franchise ever completed, That's true. I think of our age of Star Wars, what if George Lucas were to have gotten to a point where he said, Okay, maybe imagine an alternate universe George Lucas makes nine Star Wars movies or whatever, and then he says, Okay, we're done. Um I would the fans be okay with that? Or

would they keep wanting more Star Wars stuff? Well, I mean it seems to me that now that we're in Disney's hands, there is going to be Star Wars until the end of time, right, there will never not be new Star Wars stuff. Yeah, but but yeah, what what would have happened if he was if he just did the three movies and said him done? Or what if or what if something had happened and he didn't get something past the Empire strikes Back? Like what if Empire

Strikes Back had been a bomb? Just no, But nobody loved it at the time, and we only grew to love it, say in recent years we said, hey, this is a masterpiece. What I wonder what the next installment would have been? Like, what would have happened if we had actually followed Luke through and and you know, actually figured out kind of come back the rebels were going to have. Lucas's son would write it and well, why

it often does seem like it's an hereditary enterprise. Didn't the same thing happen with Tolkien after Tolkien's death, didn't his son takeover? Well, that's an interesting example to bring up, And I, you know, I don't. I don't know a lot about that because my Tolkien experience is basically um basically revolves around just the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit. But I understand that a lot of of his of the subsequent work has been sort of a

mix of like it's been a little bit literary. It's kind of like commentating on and well, yeah, I think he's edited together took some of his father's notes and

edited them into books or something. Yeah. But then there was that there was like a complete saga that came out and I never read it, Pose of the Children of Hurine or something, no idea, but certainly that you could see that as a as a as a as an example with this though it would have been more I think clearly in a example, I say, you know, he had not actually finished The Lord of the Rings and someone had to come along and finish it. And we we do find other examples of fantasy saga's uh

ending up incomplete. Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, for example, was actually completed by Brandon Sanderson. Uh. And this was by the deceased author's design, like he picked the individual to finish these books. And UH, I have not read them, but I was reading about them. I was actually talking to our coworker Tyler, who has read them. And UH. It seems like most of the reactions to this are far more positive. There's less um schism among the Wheel

of Time fans. Um. Most people say that the new authors style you know, shines through and some applaud has increased. Increased pace is willingness to tie up loose ends, which of course is important when you're trying to finish a saga. Uh. Some add point out that maybe he didn't have the knack for descriptions and detail that Jordan had, But for the part, it seems like everyone embraced this completion of

the incomplete work. Well, I know what all of you are yelling at your ear budget now, germ right, it's all about what's going to happen with Game of Thrones, A Song of Ice and Fire, George R. Martin's currently incomplete UH series of novels and the slightly more complete HBO series based on those novels. Yeah, so the show, the TV show you probably already know this, but the TV show Game of Thrones is actually outpaced, uh Martin's novels.

It's ahead of the novels that it's based on. He has not released the one that he was planning on releasing that would contain some of the same stuff as the current season of the show Winds of Winter, I believe. Yeah, and so, so how old is George R. Martin. He's sixty seven years old and he's taking about ten thousand years to write each book. So people have I mean not to be I wish him great health and long life, but people do speculate, like what if he dies before

he finishes writing these books? Yeah, and everybody wants to know the end? Yeah, I mean, I mean the reverse is also true. I feel with any book or film series, what if I die before I get to complete watching or reading this thing? I mean, so it's it's coming from that place of us craving completeness in our works. But yeah, if he if he dies before completing the books, will fans uh you know, embrace whoever the chosen writer

is to to finish it. How will we feel about the the the the the HBO series as it completes the soka before the books? What if? What if the what if the book series remains incomplete, um, you know, for the foreseeable future. What if artificial intelligence has to finish it later on? You know, Oh, it won't do a very good job, will it. Uh? Well, I mean,

who knows. Maybe maybe, as long as it can make good, solid descriptions of Western oast food while you know, laying out with a bunch of political details, I think you can do a good job. I am firmly of the opinion that any artificial intelligence good enough to write an entertaining and compelling work of fiction will eradicate the human species. Now this being said, you know, there are plenty of examples of incomplete works out there, and and most of

them it seems like we're pretty okay with them. We're probably getting more into that territory of an incomplete work by a master who has been dead for a while. But some of the works that come to mind A hundred and twenty Days of Sodom by the Marquis assad Billy Bud, the Mysterious Stranger The Pale King by David Foster Wallace. Um The Mysterious Stranger, of course, being um

Mark Twain's story. And I believe they're like three different drafts. Um, all of them are kind of incomplete, and you can sort of cobble together a finished product from that, but it's still ultimately incomplete. You know, Charles Pickens The Mystery of Edwin Drew, that's an unfinished work of fiction. That and crazy that it's unfinished because it's a mystery. Oh so, so nobody knows? How how ads you don't know the

solution to the mystery? Well, in the musical version of the Mystery of Edwin Drew, it actually allows the audience to select the ending, So the audience gets to vote on who the who the murderer turns out to be? And then what about music? Are there musical? Is there a musical equivalent to an either an incomplete or intentionally incomplete work? Well, yeah, I think there are. I mean, I I'm a big fan of the going back to my nineties catalog, the album B thousand by Guided by Voices.

A lot of the early Guided by Voices songs, uh, they sound like half of a song, like so the song will come on and it plays one verse and one chorus and that was about, you know, seventy five seconds long, and then it moves on to the next song and it never comes back. That's just it. That's all there is. And this was published during the artist lifetime.

I mean, so it's it's not a matter of them of some coming along and saying, oh, here are some recordings around finished it, let's make a few bucks off of it. It's just what the song is. Huh. Okay, So that would but that would seem to be more than an intentionally incomplete um mode of creation then, But like the sketch as art, I think that it creates a good effect. I mean, one reason I think I

love that album is that no song gets tiresome. None of them last long enough for you to like really say, okay, I've heard the chorus four times now. It just doesn't happen. And so every time a song is over, you kind of wish it was still going on. Interesting, and I'm sure that our listeners out there will come up with the numerous examples of unfinished art, fiction, music, etcetera. To

share with us. We're gonna take a quick breaking when we come back, we're gonna get into the psychology of this why our brains while our why our minds crave that complete work? All right, we're back, So Robert it what why do we crave completion enclosure? Why do we have to see the end of a thing? Well, that's the big question, right, I mean, because, as we've discussed,

our lives are these unfinished stories. But then we read these finished stories and then we sort of think about our own lives in terms of a story, and we imagine ourselves as the central character in this story. Um. One uh. One description that I think helps shine a little light on it is that from a cognitive point of view, we're all quote, information seeking, prediction loving cognitive systems. So this gets into the whole idea that we're trying to survive in this world, and in order to do so,

we want to understand our our situation. We want to know what came before, we need to know what comes after. So this particular quote comes from Flora Lichtman, co author of Annoying The Science of What bugs U and Uh. This is a book that deals with the number of just you know, all the various pet peeves and what sort of the psychological or scientific underpinnings where them happens

to be. But one thing that she particularly brings up is that overhearing another person's phone call is inherently engaging and mindlessly irritating because we're tuning into an incomplete conversation, we can only hear part of it, and then we have to just maddeningly guess at what the rest of it consists of, indeed, like what the point of the

entire call happened to be to begin with. Yeah, so that's crazy because I I would tend to think that because of that, in completeness, hearing half of a phone call is way more distracting than hearing a complete conversation going on in the room with you, with both parties, And I wonder if that's born out well indeed, Yeah, there's a Cornell University study that actually looked into this idea.

Uh Andy. They conducted it by taking a conversation, garbling half the words so that the subjects only heard half of the conversation, and they found the overhearing half a conversation a half a log, as they referred to it, is more distracting than other kinds of conversations because we're missing that other side of the story and we can't predict the flow of the conversation because if you overhear somebody just you know, a couple of people talking about

a TV show you don't watch, say you, you can very quickly realize, oh, they're just talking about this episode of the show. I know exactly what they're talking about it and about and I don't care. I can I can see exactly how this is going to play out. But what if you just here, oh yeah, yeah, he he dies in that episode? Uh huh? And then you're like, what what what show did I have? Is it a show I watched? Did they just spoil me? Do I dare listen more? Because what if it's a show I

haven't watched yet? And then you just start screaming no spoilers, no spoilers like a madman. But yeah, so I'm very basically of our brains require complete information because you know, at risk of getting into uh um in perfect comparisons to a computer, our brains are that hypercomputer that that needs data input in order to choose its next move. And if we're getting incomplete data in there, it just

starts going a little Haywire. Right. Yeah, So another psychology concept that I think might be relevant to our our relationship with incompleteness and unfinished things is something we've actually talked about a little bit on the show before, the Zygarnic effect, which we mentioned it briefly in our two part episode about the science of Tetris, and it played into that because we were, I think picking up on somebody else had made this point and we were we

were sort of repeating the idea that um Tetris has something to do with the Zigarnic effect. Now, the Zigarnic effect, it's a phenomenon that was identified by the Russian psychologist bloom Movie Zygarnic. She lived nineteen hundred to night, and it posits that we tend to have better recall for unfinished tasks than we do for finished ones. Uh. And so that, of course that would figure into Tetris because Tetris is never finished. There's no end of the game.

It is a perpetually unfinished job. They just play to tell extinction playing. So, yeah, what a Tetris and gambling have in common. There's only one way for it to be over, and it's when you cannot conject when you have lost uh so, yeah. So a standard evaluation of the Zigaronic effect would go something like this. You get test subjects and you ask them to complete a number of mental and or physical jobs, for example, solving jigsaw

puzzles or stringing beads. So if they're solving jigsaw puzzles, there might be details on the jigsaw puzzle that they're solving. Maybe it's a picture of a bunch of dinosaurs writing on jet skis, or you know, whatever it is. And in half of the tasks, the subject will be allowed to finish, and in the other half, the subject will be interrupted and asked to move on to another task

before the one they're currently working on is completed. And then they get asked to remember details about both types of jobs. And you can express this differential recall as an I see ratio the number of details remembered about incomplete tasks versus the number of details remembered about completed tasks, and Zigarnick herself found this ratio to be more than one point. Oh, people had a better memory for incomplete

and unfinished things. But why so a number of different interpretations have been offered throughout the years that you people have said that ambition plays a role in the extent to which people have differential recall. Here people positive, well, maybe interruption by the experiment or causes a feeling of irritation that heightens the emotion, and that heightened emotion causes a greater recall. Who who knows exactly what it is?

There are a lot of interpretations, but there have been many subsequent evaluations of this effect throughout the years which have sort of complicated the picture because we don't all always remember incompleted tasks better so, according to the Dictionary of Theories, Laws, and Concepts in Psychology by John A. Rock Aline uh studies have indicated that the Zigaric effect is less likely to take place if the subject is quote ego involved in the task, and more likely to

take place if the subject thinks the task is ultimately possible, of possible to achieve, or possible to finish. And hill Guard in nineteen sixty six found that the I S memory differential is short term, like it lasts for only a period of less than twenty four hours, and apparently

it also doesn't work for all types of tasks. Now, there's one study I looked at from nineteen nine one by uh, Seifert and Padalano called memory for incomplete tasks a re examination of the Zigarnic effect, And so essentially that said that zigarnics original findings have been both replicated and not replicated by subsequent studies, so that that seems to suggest there's a sort of complex effect going on.

The different variables are interacting with it in different ways, and the results have been explained a lot of times in terms of social psychological variables. But Seiford and Patalano attempted to replicate these effects adjusting variables affecting cognitive problem solving, like the nature of the interruption what happens when somebody comes in and interrupts you, or the time spent during processing the job, and the set size of the the

number of tasks. So in the first experiment they did, they found that in solving word problems, interruption after a short interval of active problem solving actually lead to better memory for completed tasks than uncompleted ones. Actually the opposite of Zigonic if you don't spend much time on the tasks. But this kind of makes sense, right, Uh, Intuitively, that sounds right to me if I'm not spending much time on a problem, I'd remember the problem better if I

finished it. Uh. And and they sort of acknowledge that that that seems kind of obvious, but all right. And the second experiment replicates Zigarnic. They found that if you allow subjects to take as long as they need and then abandoned problems they're unable to solve, it does hold that they have a better memory for the ones that they weren't able to complete. Uh. Thus, here's piece of evidence that our recall is better for things for unfinished tasks that we gave up on than for unfinished task

we were sort of ripped away from by circumstances. So I send this zigarnic effect presents a complicated picture. It depends on the subject, It depends on the type of task. But another difference is that it applies to tasks and like problems to be solved or jobs to be completed. And I wonder if our relationship with art, fiction, music, et cetera, and the way we've been talking about is like this when we're the audience, And thus does the Zigarnic effect in any way have any sway over our

participation with work of art? Yeah, I can't help but think that it does. Because on one hand, I'm thinking about the experience of reading a book. So if you're just like a couple of pages into a book and you set it down, like generally, it's pretty easy to not pick that book up again, to just leave it on the table or on the shelf. But if you've read a half or you know, or even you know a good two thirds of the book, there's often that just maddening uh compulsion to complete it, even if you're

not digging it anymore. It's like, I've put so much time into it, You've got to finish it. Or I've encountered that with TV shows before. TV shows that you know go multiple seasons and I'm not going to name any in particular, but but they go multiple seasons and then you really are losing interest. But there are the remaining mysteries. There's you've got to know if they make it to their their destination, and you keep watching just out of the that the need to finish it. Yeah,

I I can totally agree. I mean, I think I'll call out one TV show lost put its hooks in me this way. I This is a controversial position. A lot of people who like the show will probably want to tear my head off. But I don't think Lost was actually all that great of a show, you know. I think that it had a lot of storytelling problems, uh, and some of its characterization was kind of shallow and and obvious looking back on it, But it had its

hooks in me. I couldn't stop. I had to keep going to see the completion of this narrative because they had set up tons of unfinished problems in it. The show was just a litany of of setting up a problem that was not resolved, and and you'd continue thinking that it would be resolved. I'll leave that up to you two if you ever want to watch the show to find out if these things are resolved or not. But I will just say that personally, I've found myself

very frustrated in the end. You know. It's interesting to think of this in terms of TV, because that's the classic TV model is very cyclical. A classic sitcom formula involves a complete reset at the end of each episode, so there's there's no zigaronic reason to come back and watch it the next week, except that you're going to get the more or less the same experience, experience, everything's going to reset to the same place, and there's virtually

no overarching narrative that you need to concern yourself with. Yeah, though, I think we should also be aware of the possibility that we are just misapplying this concept and that it really has to do more with jobs you're working on than than participation with narratives. But I don't know. I mean, i'd be interested to hear from you psychologists out there, like, do you do you think the zigaronic effect, in any way, to whatever extent it does hold true for humans, applies

to our participation with works of art and and external narratives. Indeed, now, at the same time, is there anything that is we're discussing all this if we're taking in incomplete stories, complete stories, cyclical and linear stories. Um, the brain is writing tons

of incomplete stories itself. Of course. According to philosopher cognitive scientists Daniel Dennett, the human brain, as a computational device is constantly processing all sorts of information at different rates and in different locations, and this produces what he refers to as multiple incomplete narrative drafts, and these are all just continually synthesized into a coherent but highly unstable narrative equilibrium.

And it's within this unstable narrative that we devote our sense of of we we develop our sense of eye and self. I really love Daniel Dennett's analogies for cognitive cognitive philosophy and philosophy of mind. I feel like that

they're often very helpful. Yeah, it's it's it's interesting to to to to look at this argument, and especially after just talking about TV, to think of our basic variance of ourself and our immediate reality is like a flimsy TV narrative that's cobbled together from a number of bad scripts that did all land on the showrunner's desk and they're like, all right, a little of this one, a little of that one. Uh, let's run with this script, Joe.

And then and then everyone's saying, well, this doesn't really make sense. There's some big story problems here. Who is this main character. It seems that on one hand that he thinks he's some sort of a hero, but then he's this and as well, and then just run with it, just let's film it and call it a day, And that's kind of what we do. But it's sort of like a script for a lost episode is just got tons of it's got a polar bear there, and you're like,

surely I'm going to find out where this thing came from. Yeah, I mean at the end, it is still this continual journey. Um and uh And I mean maybe that's part of it too. We we like our stories, We like our fiction the most when it is in the journey phase, when it's incomplete but has the promise of completion. Well, how many examples can you think of where where there's a narrative that's as much fun once you've finished it as it was to be in the middle of it.

It's a rarity. I mean, that's the work. That's the mark of a really great work of fiction, right, is that you know all the twists and turns, but you just want to experience it again because you want to

experience that world, You want to experience those characters. Um. Because there are plenty of lesser works, I guess you could say, and ctently that's a that's very subjective, but they're lesser works of fiction out there that once you've once you've taken the journey, once you've ridden the ride, you know the twists and turns you have no desire to write it again because it's just gonna feel kind of flimsy afterwards. Uh. Though sometimes that first ride is amazing,

but it's just impossible to to experience it again. Quite the same way. I'm thinking particularly of of films and works where you end up with a very unreliable narrator. You have sort of sort of like a without getting a despoiler's like a memento uh experience, or a fight club experience or um, what was the uh, the switch Switchblade romance horror film that came out years ago, the French one High Tension, Yes, high tension. Um, great film. The first viewing, that's all I'll say. Yeah, but that

great That first viewing was it was tremendous. So yeah, great film in my opinion, just not the kind of ride you want to do over and over again. But back to incompleteness. Completeness. We we crave a linear story, and we have a tendency to chafe at anything that doesn't give us that. The The offending work might be a non linear book or nonlinear film. It might be uh,

an intentionally incomplete or unfinished work. University of California Santa Barbara Professor h. Porter Abbott calls the preference for linear storytelling a fundamental operating procedure of the mind. So essentially it breaks down like this. At three years of age, our brains began to compartmentalized sensory information in the world around us into an ongoing narrative which each of us

then places ourselves at the center. It's set the kind of story that the same thing that Daniel Tennett was discussing earlier. And uh, there's a there's an interesting paper that looks at this two thousand fifteen Yeshiva University paper the Power of and of the Picture, How narrative film captures attention and disrupts goal pursuit, And this was published

in Plos one. So, in this particular experiment, participants were that they viewed either an intact version of an engaging twenty minute film Bang You're Dead by Alfred Hitchcock, or a version of the same film with the scenes presented out of order. And so they called this the contiguous condition versus the non contiguous condition, non contiguous meaning out

of order exactly. Yeah, I don't, I don't think. Both are available on the DVD release but maybe the blur rate right, so that they were in this experiment, they weren't told that this was about you know, narratives in our experience, they were told that this was about gun violence and film, and then they had to raise their hands anytime someone said gun in the film. So those who view the linear film, they were far less likely to follow these orders because they were essentially just ensource

sold by the fiction. Yeah, that makes perfect sense to me. And so these results illustraight the idea that that we have an innate preference for linear narrative, though there is of course a you know, an artful balance to maintain there, because we can all think of non linear narratives that work to varying degrees, sometimes exceptionally well. And of course I think that the very fact of linear narrative that's so compelling is that it promises a conclusion. It's exactly

the thing that makes it seem linear. Yeah, you want to see the hero, when you want to see the villain get their come up, and you want to the line segment is the shortest distance between two points. If you don't have a second point, you're in trouble. Right now, all of this being said, Uh, we have visual works

of art that have metten story to them. We also have works that represent decisive segments of an incomplete linear narrative, and the viewer has to sort of has to fill them out with his or her own mind, deciding how we came to this place and where we go from there. Um. Like one example that comes to mind here, and this is not something that I saw at the met um is uh uh ilya repins haunting five masterpiece, Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan. You've seen this one before, right,

I don't know if I have seen it before. Maybe I have, but I'm looking at it now and wow, yeah, it's a that is some pathos in a painting. Yeah, it's it's Uh. It's Ivan the Terrible having brained his son with believe a hammer or recepter, I can't remember the exactly. It's based on a historical occurrence. Uh. And he's just staring up his cradling is bleeding adult son and just staring with these haunted eyes into the middle distance.

So we we know that it depicts an historical occurs We we know that this depicts one murder of Ivan's own son, and we know how to fit it within a rough linear narrative. But it's not like we have a sequence of paintings filling out the rest of the narrative. We have this one potent, potent segment, and it forces us to envision everything else. And we see that in works of fiction too, right to capture our imagination with an incomplete glimpse of a wider, maybe weirder world, And

that's often I think it certainly is for me. I assume it is for other people. A point of specific pleasure in fiction is the sense that you are getting a feeling for a much broader world or a much broader story through a kind of key hole. Yeah, a little narrative people into the world, and that that feeling of there being so much more is one of the

great pleasures of fiction. Yeah. So, I guess like some of my closing questions here um for this segment would be, how do all of these factor into our understanding of income leader unfinished works? Why are some fragments sort of ideal mental seeds while others are larval forms that we have to to grow. Why are some partial work sacro sanct and why are others? Why are others things that just must be completed by skilled hands at all costs.

And granted there's you know, there's consumer elements here, their market forces involved, as well as just personal taste. But but there, you know, there's this interesting division between the works that that can and should remain incomplete and those that just have to be fleshed out. We have to have the complete specimen. I think it's a fascinating question, and I don't know if we've come across the answer today. I mean, it's it's obvious that our brains are very

strongly driven by narrative. Narrative is very highly motivated by the desire for completion enclosure, uh that that we do tend to via the sigaronic effect. Whether that applies truly to fiction and art, I mean, it's certainly clear that we tend to return mentally to things that are unfinished. Um. Yeah, I don't know. Well, it's an open question, and we certainly invite our listeners to uh to attend to it

as well. Yeah, and if you feel compelled that they're absolutely must be an ending to the story of the three brothers in the prison, feel free to write that and send it in. All right, So there you have it uh incomplete, complete works, unfinished works. Let us know what you think. As always, you can speak us at at stuff to about your Mind dot com. That is our homepage. That's where you'll find all the blog posts, podcast videos, links out to our social media accounts such

as Facebook and Twitter. And then Joe, if they want to make direct contact with it, perhaps with an ending to your story fragment from the beginning, how can they get in touch with it? Well? Of course, as always you can email us that blow the mind of how stuff works. Got for more on lest thousands of other topics. Isn't house stuff works dot com any big st