The following is not an article written by me. It was written by Orving Bierderman, a USC Psychology and Computer Science professor. It is a little dry but really holds some good insight.
Why we call something interesting?
Irving Biederman, USC psychology and computer science professor tries to explain why we find one thing more "interesting" than another.
According to his new theory we tend to be interested in things that are new to us but at the same time still connected to what we already know." New, but not too new...
Biederman proposes a simple mechanism by which the brain seeks to "maximize the rate at which it acquires new but interpretable information."
His idea rests on the observation that in the cerebral cortex - the brain's outer envelope where our "highest" levels of cognition are based - enkephalin-releasing cells are distributed in a gradient.
(Enkephalins are one of the brain's own natural opiates, the neurochemical basis of pleasure.)
Biederman's idea is that the more pleasure cells that are activated at once, the more little subconscious, attention-grabbing pings of pleasure we get. And because these pleasure cells are densest in the association areas, our attention is automatically biased toward complex percepts that have the most meaning. People's preference for some experience is related to the amount of activity that's created in certain brain areas. It keeps us efficiently attuned to the world in a way that feels really intelligent, yet it's so simple."
When information about something very familiar gets in there, not much activity is needed, so there is not much pleasure associated with it. On the other hand when our brain deals with something totally unfamiliar there is also little activity, because the brain cannot associate it to any known experience.
The advertising world takes advantage of this phenomenon. The most interesting ads are those that show a familiar object in a new setting. It may be a new environment or a new use.
For example, I recently saw an ad for a car rental company portraying a car as a fetus under an ultrasound photograph. The message was, "We treat our cars as if they were babies".
When flying an airplane, we are much more interested in looking down at the surface when flying over a familiar territory than when flying over an unfamiliar one. We are interested in seeing a
familiar territory from a new angle.
We find interesting ideas, stories, arts, objects and artifacts that represent a balanced blend between the known and the unknown, the familiar and the unfamiliar, the existing and the new.
The interesting thing is that it takes a very talented human being to PRODUCE this balanced blend.
Most people find it easier to operate at the two extremes of the familiar - unfamiliar spectrum. They can easily repeat known and hackneyed patterns or, slightly less easily, create new things that are not connected to anything known (think about how easy it is to utter a sentence that has never been uttered before).
