Thursday, Feb. 11

The Way That Stories End Matters

Though talking about colonoscopies, Daniel Kahneman, in his recent TED talk, explains the difference an ending can have towards a story’s meaning:

Your remembering self is a “story teller. What we keep from our experiences is a story.” To illustrate, Kahneman showed pain-over-time charts of two colonoscopy patients who reported the intensity of the pain they were experiencing each minute during a colonoscopy. One patient experienced severe pain for 10 minutes. The other experienced the same level of pain for 10 minutes, followed by gradually decreasing pain for an addition 10 minutes. When each patient was later asked to recall the experience, the first patient said his experience was more painful, even though he experienced less pain than the second patient. “The way that stories end matter.” The first patient’s pain was at its peak at the very end, so it made for a worse story.

Of course, screw up a story’s ending and it’ll feel to the audience as if you have shoved something up their backside.