I’ve been thinking about movies a lot lately… well, ok, nothing new. But still, I was thinking, it’s pretty amazing that we’re able to watch movies, or tv, or read books, or watch theater, wahtever – and even though we know that what we’re watching isn’t really happening, that it isn’t real, we’re still able to be emotionally affected by the events that we see.
It’s amazing that the human mind can do that, understand that something isn’t true on one level, but then still let those same things have such a profound impact on us. Imagine that an alien came to our planet who couldn’t do this for whatever reason. They would see a movie and just not believe it, they would not comprehend the true characters, and they would only see actors. Most art would be irrelevant to this alien, because it could not suspend belief, even emotionally to understand anything that’s happening.
Speaking of actors – it’s even more amazing that we can see the same actors in dozens of movies and still believe them to be different characters and people every time, while still knowing that they’re still acting. This dual-minded ability, whatever you call it is so much a part of our society and how we interact within it. Graphical user interfaces on computers are also based on this idea – they try to replicate things in real life – a button in a computer program is based on a buttons in real life – but what if we couldn’t comprehend the fact that those pixels were a button, and we couldn’t get past the fact that we KNOW it’s not a real button?
Weird.
Wonderful thoughts! The suspension of belief is one of the greatest wonders in being a homo sapian. We don’t need to go to aliens to appreciate its magic. Our own cousins– the chimpanzees also have no such capacity.
This ability extends to other art forms—the visual arts, dance and music. We extend our thoughts in another direction, contemplate another experience and apprecate each form in an emotional way. And we don’t know how or why.
Grandpa