What Writing A Book Has Taught Me About Life: The Ending

Creating a good story arc in a book can teach us a lot about how to interact in our every-day lives. In this article, I'd like to talk about the ending of the book.

In the ending of the book, there should be a sense of closure. The different threads of the story all get tied up into a nice, enclosed finale, where the event being written about comes to its final resting place (unless it's a cliff-hanger). There aren't many situations in normal life where events get such a polished sense of closure... so why is this type of story ending so popular?

It's popular because people like to have closure in their lives: because leaving something open-ended gives them stress. It's another thing they have to try to remember or even worry about. Giving people a cliff-hanger in a book can sometimes be effective, but a lot of the time, people can resent you for giving them the stress of not having closure.

What can we learn from this for every-day life? Have a finishing message with your interactions that signify closure with that action. This finishing message could take many different forms, depending on what the action was. I recently helped someone out with a task, but didn't receive a thank you. I wasn't particularly bothered about "not being appreciated" - I'm sure I was - rather, I was actually worried I hadn't done a good job. The lack of closure that I take from not being told, "thank you", leaves that action open-ended for me.

You've got to think about what was meant to be accomplished with each action. Another example is the dating scene. What is the reason for going on a date (let's say: first date)? To see if you like someone enough to continue seeing them. So at the end of the date, saying, "I really enjoyed this, I'd like to see you again", gives a sense of closure.

On the other hand, saying, "my schedule is pretty busy, I'll see if I can fit you in in the future", gives a big cliff-hanger for the other person. Will you see them again? Won't you? The door is left open, and a lot of people struggle with that. I think that some people consciously use this sense of non-closure, because by leaving it open means that the other person (person two) is forced to go back to think about that unresolved issue, in hopes of closure. This means that the person two almost feels compelled to think about person one every now and again.  From there, it could go one of two way: down the path of increased energy being input into the relationship, or closing the door emotionally to gain some form of closure.

Another form of not finding closure is in earworms. Earworms are songs that get stuck in your head. Scientists believe that they get stuck in your head because you might know the chorus and first verse, but you can't remember the middle and end of the song enough to finish it. In this way, earworms get stuck in your working memory, the part of your brain responsible for holding information on tasks that aren't complete. If you can finish the song, your brain may deem the "task" complete and the song will be forgotten. Another line of research that scientists have gone down is getting rid of earworms through other methods. Interestingly, researchers have found correlation between doing anagrams and removing earworms. This is because it is believed that we have limited working memory and a five-letter anagram is usually the perfect size to use up most of our working memory: forcing out the earworm.

In the end, whether closure has been found is how the two phrases, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder”, and “out of sight, out of mind”, can still be resolved without being contradictory - depending on whether good closure has been found: either two possibilities could be true. 

Limitations With The Scientific Method

A friend of mine was talking to me on MSN/Lync, today. At one point, I used the acronym, 'tbf'. He didn't know what it meant and decided to reply back saying, "to be frank?", "I like it".

Now, I use it as "to be fair", but it can just as easily be used as "to be frank". And here's the interesting bit... you can use it as both, simultaneously. If you write the acronym, people will take it however they want to take it. It's only when they ask what you mean that you'll have to pick the three words you're associating the acronym with.

It's at the point that the other person asks that you collapse the waveform. Before asking the question, all possible options for what the acronym can be can exist simultaneously.

In quantum mechanics, collapsing the waveform is the act of observing an electron. The electron can have many different energetic states and can be said to exist in all of those states at once. However when a scientist decides to observe the electron, it can be seen that the electron then has the characteristics according to only one energetic state. I.e. The scientist asks what the acronym means, and the electron has to chose a specific set of words that resolves the equation (this is the same phenomenon as the one being investigated in the famous "Schrodinger's Cat" thought experiment, BTW (and yes, I did use an acronym on purpose)).

There's a problem with observing the electron, though. With all scientific tests, and tests conducted according to the Scientific Method, we set a theory first. We set an idea of what we expect to see, and then we test, controlling all variables that could negatively affect our outcome, so that we set up a "yes" or "no" answer to whether our theory is correct. But in this way, we give ourselves blinkers. We only allow ourselves to see what we can only comprehend. I didn't think that "tbf" could be be "to be frank", so I wouldn't even think to set up a test for it. But it can still exist as the set of words, "to be frank".

In this way, the extent of scientific discovery through the Scientific Method is limited. We are limited by how we can imagine something else to behave like. And as we get deeper and deeper into the weird world of Quantum Mechanics, things start behaving in ways that are less and less intuitive to us. So the scientific method becomes less and less useful. Rather, we need to reverse the way we study things.

The problem with observing before creating a theory around what we can deduce from our observations, is that there's so many things we can look at. I'm looking at electronic devices at the moment. There are hundreds of properties of that device based on how you look at it. How powerful is the device? How big is the device? How big is the screen? How many buttons does it have? What is the colour of the device? And some of these properties will be unknown to the observer - at least in the beginning: What is the photo-response non-uniformity of the camera? What is the dielectric breakdown voltage within the insulators of the transistors?

For example, categorizing by colour will be a useless variable to use if we want to try to work out how powerful the device is. You can get the most powerful computer to the most pathetic calculator in most colours.

Correlating size to power might start yielding more useful information. Categorizing type of electronic device: phone, laptop, desktop, computer - will also be useful.

But we're always limited to the tests and categories we can imagine and comprehend in our own minds. What if the universe works in a way that is outside our own perspective of what is possible, or what is possible to imagine? How will we ever be able to understand those mechanisms?

I guess the ultimate question is, is there a way - a framework - that allows us to realise correlations that are outside of what's possible for us to imagine? Because right now, the Scientific Method is getting more and more inadequate.