Mind & Brain / Senses

In Darwin, Minnesota, the modern pilgrim can observe what is claimed to be the world’s largest ball of twine made by one person. Eleven feet tall, weighing in at 17,400 pounds, the ball is displayed in a Plexiglas gazebo. The callow sophisticate, passing afternoons in Paris museums amid roomfuls of Ming vases or dinosaur pelvises, might guess that a ball of twine, however large, could have only limited public appeal. But the town of Darwin knows better, making the display the centerpiece of its annual Twine Ball Days festival. This sort of thing is not an anomaly. Consider the display in Branson, Missouri, of the world’s largest twine ball produced by group effort, a whopping 41.5 feet in circumference. In Jackson, Wyoming, you can find the world’s largest ball of barbed wire, all 5,290 pounds of it.

Why should anyone in his right mind want to see these things? Why are cheesy performers advertised as “the one and only”? Why is a one-in-a-million postage stamp with an airplane accidentally printed upside down worth hundreds of thousands of dollars? And why is it impossible to resist looking at a picture in the Guinness Book of World Records of the world’s longest mustache? It’s not because it makes us reflect on the folly that is human. It’s not the challenge—“That’s it; I’m going to stop shaving today.”

Why are we attracted not only to the biggest version of almost anything but also to the smallest, the weirdest, the first, the last, or the only? Why does something gain value merely because it is rare and authentic—the odd voyeuristic pleasure that comes from seeing on display the salt and pepper shakers from the mess kit George Washington may have clutched as he crossed the Delaware? Is it mere curiosity, or is it something more?

To make sense of this appetite, consider whether it has adaptive advantages, a question that takes us from the ball of twine in Darwin, Minnesota, to that other Darwin. A selective responsiveness to rarity and contrast seems to be a feature of our sensory systems, a phenomenon called contrast enhancement. Experience the same odor repeatedly or hear a constant background sound, like a noisy air conditioner, and the relevant sensory system begins to habituate, becoming sluggish and unresponsive. Then, suddenly throw in something really different and that sensory system comes alive, probably even exaggerating the difference between that new stimulus and the previous, repetitive one. Walk into a brightly lit room in the middle of the day and it’s no big deal. Sit in the dark for an hour and then go into that room and it’s blinding.

Contrast enhancement may have some advantages in the realm of predatory behavior. Consider the archetypal way the hyena hunts. It provokes a bunch of zebras into running and picks out the one that’s different—the slowest. Predators have what psychologists call a search image for the outlier. A number of decades back, a researcher in the Serengeti was trying to study the individual behavior of wildebeests. The problem was to recognize individuals—wildebeests all look alike. The researcher hit upon a clever idea: to tear around the savanna in a jeep fast enough to get close to a wildebeest, and using a paintbrush attached to a long pole, splatter paint on one of the animal’s haunches, leaving a unique and random pattern. What the researcher discovered, to his dismay, was that each splattered wildebeest soon became a target of predators. It’s called the oddity effect. A predator has to be good at picking out the old and the weak or, with no additional information to go on, the different. As any butterfly collector can tell you, it is easier to net a yellow butterfly in a swarm of brown ones than to get a single brown one.

The functioning of our sensory systems and their relevance to predatory behavior may tell us something about why we are responsive to rare sensory events. But that doesn’t explain why we are so deeply intrigued by them. Nor does it tell us anything about the pull toward rare extremes of ideas and facts, as opposed to sensations—the preciousness imparted to a piano, say, by the knowledge that Beethoven once pounded those very keys.

Our fascination with a hallowed piano moves us into the uniquely human domains of philosophy, psychology, language, and culture. In these realms, studying the rare and the extreme yields important information. It gives a range, the knowledge of just how much or little some measure can be, which is often very useful. Suppose that you can’t swim, but you have to wade into a murky lake. It is useful to know that, on average, the lake is two feet deep. But it is more useful to know about an extreme—a 10-foot drop over a spring about 40 feet from shore.