Now we know why we fall asleep at the movies. It's the math.
A cognitive psychologist from Cornell University studied over 150 films from the past 70 years, shot by shot, to find out just what makes one a snoozer and another an edge-of-the seat thriller.
And the answer, says James Cutting, is neither Brad Pitt nor Halle Berry.
It's chaos theory.
"Sometimes I'll be watching a film, get halfway through it, and ask myself, 'Why am I watching this?' But I'm riveted to the screen, I can't tear my eyes away. It's because it's giving you the movie at a certain pace, and you find it very engaging."
Cutting studies film, art, and culture, not to mention the perception of motion and depth and the functional analyses of perceptual stimuli. He used the tools of modern perception research to deconstruct the pacing of 70 years of film.
He speculated that, like the golden ratio Renaissance painters and architects praised so highly, there may be a mathematics underlying filmmaking -- if not a formula for aesthetics, at least something that determines how much attention people pay to films.
And Cutting has found it in something called the 1/f pattern.
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