This is Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
In the early days of Soviet cinema, a filmmaker conducted an experiment
that would change our understanding of the human mind.
Lev Kuleshov showed an audience a short film featuring a famous actor.
The footage of the actor was always the same, a single, unmoving, and entirely neutral expression.
But the filmmaker intercut the shot with three different images, a bowl of hot soup,
a child in a coffin, and a woman reclining on a sofa.
Even though the actor's face never changed, the audience was mesmerized by his performance.
When paired with the soup, they saw a man gripped by hunger.
When paired with the coffin, they saw a face transformed by grief.
They didn't see a sequence of unrelated pictures.
They saw an integrated story.
The human brain is wired to make connections like this.
We want to see the frames as part of a narrative, and so we invent the connective tissue.
We turn frame one and an unrelated frame two into a cohesive story.
This psychological tendency also shapes how we see our own lives.
We are the editors of our own personal documentaries,
constantly splicing together random, chaotic events into a narrative.
Depending on our personalities and temperaments, our documentaries might be comedies or tragedies.