Violins, Patterns and Context

The Washington Post recently published an article on a little social experiment they did. In short, they asked a violin player to stand at a DC subway station and play for 45 minutes during the morning rush. They wanted to see how many people would stop and listen and/or throw some money into the open violin case. The catch is that the player was Joshua Bell, arguably the finest classical violin player in the world, playing one of the most difficult compositions ever created, on a $3 million violin wearing jeans and a t-shirt. Seats at his concert will routinely fetch well into the hundreds of $$$.

The results of the experiment are in the article, but the upshot is that very few people stopped, fewer gave money and only 1 person recognized him. The discussion in the article focuses quite a bit on context. Does context matter when experiencing a work of art? Is it genius if nobody notices? In further questioning, some people didn’t even notice a violinist on their way from the train.

Why do I care about this experiment? It’s all about patterns. The brain is a pattern making machine, for better and for worse. It absorbs data and categorizes it according to previous experience. All of this happens at a pre-cognition level so we don’t even know it’s happening. This is a good thing because it means we don’t have to evaluate every piece of data we encounter in our day to day lives. The over-stimulation would render us practically useless.

The flip side of this amazing phenomenon known as the human brain is that it becomes difficult to absorb new information when we are engaged in a familiar pattern. That’s why some people didn’t even notice the genius of Josh Bell as they went past.

That’s why it’s so difficult to think creatively when engaged in familar patterns. It’s important to put people in unfamiliar surroundings with fresh stimulation in order to get them to come up with new stuff, make new connections and break out of old patterns. The old phrase, “we tried that two years ago and it didn’t work” is partly borne from the fact that the person saying that is sitting in the same physical location when it didn’t work two years ago. Put that person in a fresh environment and it is more likely for that person to pick up on a new piece of information that will encourage them to say, “even though it didn’t work two years ago, here’s why I think it’ll work now…”

I’ll let the philosophy majors flesh out the debates of Leibniz, Hume and Kant about the nature of beauty but I can tell you that if you want creativity, innovation and new direction people have to be physically and cognitively moved out of comfort zones that reinforce old patterns and power structures. In events that I design I will often introduce elements that are meant to do both. Holding collaborative events at art galleries, zoos or patios overlooking Whistler Mountain are all designed to remove people from their typical patterns. Playing punk music to indicate the end of an activity is designed to disrupt patterns and highten observational powers. It’s all part of the experience.