Pivotal Point

We’ve all heard of jokes like this one by Groucho Marx:

“One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don’t know.”

Julia Galef wrote this awesome blog on how our mind switches perspectives to “get” the joke:

“You can almost hear the gears grinding as we shift from “I, in my pajamas, shot an elephant” to “I shot an elephant who was wearing my pajamas.”

Apparently, there’s even a term for cases like this “whose latter half surprises us, forcing us to go back and reconsider the assumptions we’d made about what was going on in the first half”: paraprosdokia.

You’re probably thinking only a nutjob analyzes the process behind a joke, right? Hang on because Galef points this is usually how theories change in science, except much more slowly than when you got that joke!

“As you collect more observations that don’t seem to fit your theory, you either dismiss them as an anomaly, or find a way to shoehorn them into the framework of your theory, or you go back and try to re-interpret your original data in the framework of an alternate theory that will fit all your data, both old and new. The third option becomes increasingly compelling as the incongruities mount.”

Galef then points out such a flip can also happen with music!

“Each musical key signature contains a different subset of all the sharps, flats, and naturals on the scale. Use a note that’s not in your key, and the result is dissonance, which we interpret as tension, or ugliness, or as something being “off.” But since every note is shared by multiple different key signatures, you can use shared notes as pivot points to transition from one key to another. The resultant effect is similar to paraprosdokia: having initially interpreted the pivot-point as belonging to the original key, you’re momentarily disoriented to hear it followed by notes which don’t belong to that key, until you shift your mental framework to a new key in which those notes “make sense.”

Rudolf Arnheim, a writer on the psychology of aesthetic perception, wrote:

“The transitional moment generates a slight sensation of seasickness, unwelcome or exhilarating depending on the listener’s disposition, because the frame of reference is temporarily lost.”

I so agree with that: that moment when the pivot happens is when you either drop out or find yourself being transported to a whole new level, both in intellectual as well as artistic fields.