Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. Time to go into the vault for an older episode of the show. This one originally published on January two, and it was part one of our series about the coolest shov effect and interesting psychological effect having to do with film editing. Alright, let's jump right in. Hey, everybody, Joe here, I'm just cutting in before the music with a brief editorial insert it's happened before it happened again. This is one of those episodes that went long. Rob and I originally planned it to be one standalone chat, but it started taking on an unwieldy form while we were recording, so we decided to go ahead and chop it up into two parts. So this is why in a few minutes you might hear me make references to things I'm going to bring up later in the episode, but we actually won't get to them until part two, So apologies for any confusion on that front. As a general outline, and we're going to introduce and illustrate our central topic in part one here and then we'll be going deeper into the weeds of subsequent research in part two. So without any further delay, I'll now plunge you back into the show. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. And my name is Robert Lamm and I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're gonna be talking about a concept known as the coolest Shop effect. This is an idea from film theory. But I think this will make a really interesting episode because it's, first of all, it's at that that weird intersection space, you know, the midnight at the crossroads of of art and science. And then uh, Secondarily, I think it's one of those great observations that is simple, almost obvious in its implication, ends when when you first grasp it, but you the more you think about it, the weirder and more powerful it gets, especially in a historical context. Yeah, this is an interesting topic and one I have to admit that I don't think i'd ever really absorbed before. I don't know if it ever came up in um, any of like the film classes that I took, like in college. Um, same here and uh and and at the same time, Yeah, I read about this and then went out and actually watched um um, I watched a film and watched you know, probably a couple of TV shows over the weekend, and so I had it fresh on my mind looking for it. And on one hand, you do see it everywhere, but then you don't like, it's, uh, it's this thing that that when you're when you first read about it, it sounds like, oh, well, this is like part of the blueprint of how film works. And that's kind of that's kind of one of the arguments that's made for it. And yet it's not necessarily as a parent as you might expect it to be, but there are some wonderful examples to be to be dwelt upon. Well, the way I'd put it, after having done all the research for this episode, is that I think it is sort of part of the blueprint of how film works, except in the way it's usually explained, it's just a few degrees off. Yeah, yeah, that would I think that would make sense. But I'll explain more about that as as we go on. Another thing that's interesting about this though, is it's something that's originally from the realm of art and esthetic criticism. You know, it's from film theory, but it also has a sort of mixed research history within the fields of experimental psychology and neuroscience. You know, there's some empirical experiments that seem to find evidence of the effect and others do not find it. And I think part of the part of the difference there is how you ask the question and what kind of stimula you use. But it could be interesting to see what the difference is there as well. But I guess we should get straight to explaining what the coolest Jov effect allegedly is. So, in the words of the authors of a two thousand six neuroscience paper by mobs at All that I'll refer to later in the episode, the coolest Jov effect is the following proposition. It is that quote, the manipulation of context can alter an audiences perception of an actor's facial expressions, thoughts, and feelings. Yeah. Yeah, And this is something that is at at the very root of everything. Is is based on theory of mind, that we as humans look at another person and we simulate what's going on in their head, what what are their thoughts, what are their motivations, what are their intentions, etcetera. Um uh so, Yeah, it's theory theory, theory of mind at heart, but it's not just the face. It's also something else. And basically this gets into just an into filmmaking and editing. Right, it's the the idea of montage. That's the word that's often used here, but that would probably give us ideas of a very specific technique of like, you know, you're like the training montage and Rocky film or something. You should actually be thinking of montage when we say it in this episode. More broadly, it's not just that. It means the the arrangement of different shots into a sequence through editing. No matter what kind of technique you're using there, if you're taking different shots and putting them into a sequence, that is montage for today's purposes. Yeah, and and again it all comes back to editing. The way the footage is put together. You can basically think of it as like face p O V shot face um. For instance, Alfred Hitchcock described it once as being a situation where okay, again, think of three shots. First shot, he says, his man looking out the window. Shot number three is a man smiling. Now what you put in that second slot, whatever, that second shot is that you insert that changes the context entirely. Now, uh, as we were discussing before we recorded here, this Alfred Hitchcock example, the widely cided is also a little imperfect because if you want to get right down to the like the core theory, it's just it's Shot one should be a man looking out a window. Shot number three should just be that man looking out a window, no smile. But it still comes down to what is shot number two, because that changes how you think about that man in shot three, right, you seem to see something different in the man, even though you could use the exact same footage of him. So the editing context changes what we think we see in a previous or a subsequent shot, even though you're using the exact same shots. So one of the funny in Hitchcock's example, he uh, he talks about this in a famous interview I think he did with maybe it was with the CBC or somebody, but but he was using the example of Okay, in the first sequence, imagine that the middle shot that's intercut there is like a mother playing with a baby, and in that case, oh, he's a kindly old grandfather man. And then the second option is that the middle shot is a woman in a bathing suit, in which case, he says, then you perceive his smile as being that of a dirty old man. And I guess it kind of helps because it's actually Alfred Hitchcock they use in the visual example. Now we'll come back to more about what this idea is and what it might mean, but maybe first we should just do a little bit of biography on the namesake of this idea. So the Kolashov effect is named after a guy named Lev Kulashev, who was a Russian filmmaker and film theorist who I think, I don't know, you could say it was like a major force in the history of film theory and uh, and is primarily responsible for popularizing this alleged effect. Yes, Lev Kulashev, who lived seventy Russian director film theorist who started out in art, direction and some acting before moving increasingly into directing, experimental editing, and scholarship. He was one of the founders of the world's first film school, the Moscow Film School. And yeah, he introduced the American film concept of montage into Soviet cinema based on examining the works of directors such as DDA be Griffith, and as David Gilevskie points out in his book Early Soviet Cinema, he quote played a more significant part in the development of the Golden Age of Russian cinema than any other figure with the exception of Eisenstein. And this would refer to Sergei Eisenstein, another big name and film a big big name Russian film director of the time period, theorist of the day who listeners might know from such films as a Battleship Attempkin from that's the old baby Stroller down the Stairs movie right now. One thing I do remember from actual film classes that I took in college was that a lot of early Soviet cinema does make use of the montage, more in the sense of the specific film technique where you're like taking a bunch of different images and and putting them together to suggest a kind of, uh, a kind of sequence or progression, more like the training montage. But the main example I remember there is a movie we watched by or TV called The Man with the Movie Camera, which is basically the whole movie is just a montage of of you know, Russian public life by the way, if anyone out there wants to hear us talk even more about silent film. We did an episode of Weird How Cinema UM at some point in the last year where we did like a silent film double feature where we we picked out just a couple maybe three different silent films and talked about what was neat about them and just talked about sort of the the challenges to the modern viewer that that silent film poses, but also the rewards of watching them. So what one of the main things Kolashov was doing here was that he was he wasn't even um even even shooting new footage in these experiments. UH, he was taking pre existing footage silent film footage usually um Czarist era silent film, and re cutting them to to see what could be done with this montage feature like how how to arrange the uh the footage to get different, um you know, emotional results. And a lot of it was based again and looking at what was going on and what seemed to be working in uh in in in Western film, in American film specifically again like the work of d. W. Griffith, and UH just in general. Kulashofice was it was somewhat controversial at times, apparently in in these uh, these experiments, you know, he's looking at American models, Western models, So he was accused by Communist Party members at times of appealing to Western ideas and forms too much. And he's also apparently been accused of living it up during tough times in Russia and destroying archives silent era films during this editing work, which again the work that wasn't really based that so much in shooting new footage and experimenting with how you might added them together, but taking pre existing footage from the archive and adding it together. Now, as a director, Kulashov is apparently and I'm speaking largely of a director that I really didn't know anything about before, so me neither. But he's apparently best known for ninety four's The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr West in the Land of the Bolsheviks. He also adapted the works of Jack London and Oh Henry, but especially for this show, we should really highlight that he also made a death Ray spy thriller. I thought this was really interesting. Somehow, I guess this never came up when we did our invention episodes on the Death Ray or if it did, I've forgotten about it because this seemed new to me. But it fits right in there, because if you haven't heard our episodes of the Invention podcast on the death Ray, those were some of my favorites that we did, especially because we got to talk about an invention that never really existed and yet was the subject of a popular fervor. You know that, like people were really excited about death rays for the nineteen twenties and that just there was never any such thing. Yeah, yeah, the invention it's of never existed, but you had kind of a global death ray fever going on, and this is so it's right smack dab in the middle of it. A film titled lut Smirty or the Death Ray. Galepsi describes it as quote a relatively violent film about international espionage. So I had to look in. I looked at footage the available footage that I could find out. It wasn't wasn't super great to watch, but there's some impressive stills that The plot is spot on for what you might expect from a Soviet death ray movie at the time period. We follow a socialist revolutionary who has to flee an unnamed fascist capitalist country, the socialist revolutionary has to flee to the Soviet Union, and once there he is introduced to the new technology of the death ray, which can explode gunpowder at a distance, which is a key detail because that's exactly, uh that the sort of thing that was part of the death ray fever that we discussed in the Invention episode. That's right. So the brief top line on that is that, uh, basically a lot of this death ray fever came from reaction to the horrors of long range bombing aerial bombing in World War One, and people wanted the idea of something that could shoot bombers out of the sky from a great distance before they got to your cities, and the death ray filled in that gap exactly. So basically, the evil spy follows them and steals the death ray technology so that they can use it to suppress labor strikes. But don't worry, the labor strikers steal the death ray technology back and use it to blow up their oppressors bomber aircraft which is about to be used against the strikers. This almost makes me want to compile and watch a list of all the death ray movies of the nineteen twentys. Just put them all together and see see what kind of picture emerges. Yeah, yeah, or and I'm curious, like, what is the best death ray movie? I'm I'm assuming the best death ray movies came later. Um came in the way of films such as this, Thank thank Okay, Well, so that's love kol Ashov and I wanted to get a little bit into the background of this idea of the cool Ashov effect by consulting his own words. So I found a book called cool a Shov on Film Writings. This was published by the University of California Press in nineteen seventy four. I'm not positive. I think this might be a reprint of some earlier writings of Kola Shovs, but the context is um. I was consulting an early section of this book where he's discussing a series of investigations he and his colleagues carried out in the late nineteen teens and into the twenties, essentially to try to figure out how film actually works. That they were asking questions like how do audiences make meaning out of the images they see over the course of a film? Which is a great question, and it is something that early filmmakers really had to fe guar out. We we can take a lot of film meaning making for granted these days, because uh, you know, film techniques are so well honed these days that they're often invisible to us. You know, you you if you watch a professionally made movie, you will you will not even notice the fact that, say, all of the eye lines and it have been aligned correctly so that when a character looks at something and then it cuts to that thing, it's lined up so that it's not confusing. But that's like a technique that had to be learned, and there are tons of things like that. They're just invisible to us now, as as a lot of good filmmaking techniques are I mean ideally, I guess, well, I mean there are different ideas of this, but you know, a common view I think among a lot of filmmakers is that techniques should not call attention to themselves, but instead should disappear and allow you to just become totally absorbed in the narrative to help bring about the raw experience quality of modern cinema. Yeah. Yeah, and that's I mean, that's something I like to stick to. I mean, unless the film is so uh poor. It's a execution that you can't help but but notice it, you know, well when yeah, And certainly there's plenty of examples of that. But so Kolashav and colleagues are trying to investigate how does film work? What what are the techniques that that cause an audience to think or feel a certain way? And so famously Kolashov feels that he has achieved a breakthrough when he starts to discover the power of montage or editing. He starts to think of editing as a sort of master key behind the power of cinema, and he believes that montage has a power greater than simply showing you a series of moving images in sequence so that you think, well, one follows the other. Instead, he comes to think that by ordering shots in a sequence, you actually change the meaning of the shots themselves, or change the perception of what is contained in the shots. And there's a memorable example that Kolashov describes in the book. I'll just read it directly. He says, I saw this scene I think in a film by Razumni, a priest's house with a portrait of Nicholas, the second hanging on the wall that though that would be the czar right uh, the village is taken over by the Red Army. The frightened priest turns the portrait over, and on the reverse side of the portrait is the smiling face of Lenin. However, this is a familiar portrait, a portrait in which Lenin is not smiling. But that spot in the film was so funny, and it was so uproariously received by the public that I, myself scrutinizing the portrait several times, saw the portrait of Lenin as smiling. Especially intrigued by this, I obtained the portrait that was used and saw that the expression on the face in the portrait was serious. The montage was so edited that we involuntarily imbued a serious face with a changed expression characteristic of that playful moment. In other words, the work of the actor was altered by means of montage. In this way, montage had a colossal influence on the effect of the material. It became apparent that it was possible to change the actor's work, his movements, his very behavior in either one direction or the other through montage. I thought this was a great example, because I haven't seen the film in question. But but I can understand exactly the effect he's describing here with this portrait of Lenin because of the tone of the scene. The context makes it darkly comedic, like it's funny, but it's also threatening, that a serious or neutral face could be perceived as having a kind of wicked grin. M. Yeah, you know, this reminds me just in general, of any time you have kind of a a kind of a portrait he had a painting or a photograph. Um, I guess that. You know, just in general outside of film, it can seem to take on different dimensions based on what you are doing or what your mindset is. If you're sort of imagining that the that the subject of the painting or picture can see you, or you're leaning into that sort of interpretation, like why is Vigo the Carpathian staring in there like that? Is he? Is he proud? Is he angry at me? Is he smiling? Oh? That makes me wonder did they when the film Ghostbusters too, did they have multiple paintings of Vigo with slightly different expressions on his face or did they just use one portrait and and rely on the cool a shov effect? For I read emotions into it. I wish I thought of this earlier. Well, anyway, so we're about to get to the description of the main alleged experiment that establishes the this that we're about to get into canonical cool Ashov effect territory. So, following this realization about the power of editing or montage to change what is perceived within the shot itself, there's this famous story about an experiment cool a Shov supposedly carried out to put the idea to the test. And I want to flag at the beginning here that multiple sources I have read raised questions about whether this test ever actually took place in the way it is described. Um, but I'd say it doesn't especially matter, because we're going to be just using this story to illustrate an idea. Then we can look at other tests later not to provide evidential force that it must be, as Kolashev says, So whether or not this event actually took place exactly like this, this is how it's described in a book called How Movies Work by Bruce Kawen. This was University of California Press. Kawen writes as follows about Kolashev's experiment. He found some old footage of a pre revolutionary actor named Yvonne mujukin a single long take, probably a makeup test, in which the face showed an unvarying neutral expression. Kulashev then cut three different shots into this take, one of a child playing with a toy, one of a bowl of soup, and one of an old woman in a coffin the sequence when as follows face child face, soup face, woman face. When he showed this short film to an audience, although this may be a bit of cinematic folklore, they remarked what a great actor Masukan was. They enjoyed the subtle way he expressed affectionate delight at the child's playing, hunger for soup, and grief at the death of the woman whom they assumed was his mother. The Masoukan experiment, as it has since been called, had a permanent impact on the theory of screen acting. It showed that audiences will read shots in terms of each other, and therefore that a film actor who ought ideally to under act could allow the montage to suggest some of his or her emotions and thoughts. The point for our immediate purposes, however, is simply that the impression of continuity is often generated by the audience. Now will come with some additional history of research to build upon this later, But Kulashov used this alleged experiment in support of his broader theory of how film worked, one of the main points of which was that the soul of a film was in the editing process, and that the edit of the film actually had more power over the film's effect than the contents of any individual shot. I think another way of phrasing this is that the way you edit your footage together is ultimately more important than what an actor does while the cameras rolling, because the meaning of an actor's performance can be totally changed by the editing context. And in fact, Kolashov allegedly carried out a couple of other experiments along these lines that are known sometimes as creative geography and creative anatomy. Creative anatomy would be using shots of parts of different bodies from different actors, creating the illusion that they all belonged to the same person. So you and show a different person's hands, lips, legs, and so forth, and create an imaginary composite person that doesn't exist. He also did the same thing with physical geography, so he would have, for example, a shot of people walking along a street in Moscow and then maybe going up a staircase and then going to a mansion that was actually the White House in Washington, d C. Creating the illusion that they're all there's just one continuous walk, all in the same place, but they're on different continents, which at the time they looked at that discovery as revelatory. They're like, oh wow, like you actually don't need to shoot stuff that's in the same geographic place in order to suggest being in the same geographic place. You can invent geographies that don't exist out of different parts, which, of course now it's just this is just how you make films. You know, you you you have one exterior and maybe the interior is a set or it's somewhere on the other side of the country. You know. Um, you know, you read you read any behind the scenes making just any of your favorite films, and you'll find stuff like like the Library and Ghostbusters the first Ghostbusters film, I think parts of that are and just you know, they're from all over depending on whether you're outside or your inside you you're in the basement. And then uh, and then also when it comes to the anatomy question here, I mean it's it's why you have stunt doubles, body doubles. It's why you can finish a film. Uh, even though Bell Leghosi died whilst shooting it. Right, So that's probably you're getting into the poor example of it, and that that does specific example no. Plan nine for matter space is a is a wonderful example of of what you can do with the magic of cinema editing. But but to get back to the core idea here, these spitting and I think it'll be important for us to think about the coolest off effect in a couple of different ways. One is just the broader idea that editing context can radically change the meaning of individual shots, which I think we just all know from experiences is obviously true. This is a fact about how movies work. But the other thing is the more specific claim of the alleged MOSU can experiment that you can take a totally neutral shot of an actor's face displaying no emotion whatsoever, and by intercutting it with other footage you can change what the audience perceives. In those shots of the actor's face, you can the audience will come to think that, you know, a neutral face intercut with the image of a child playing is like a happy parental uh, you know, and like a bowl of soup means they're they're they're filled with pangs of hunger, even though it's the exact same neutral footage of the face. So that's the more specific claim. And I think it's that second one that's more questionable but but also interesting in its own regard. And we're gonna look at at least a couple of papers about that as we go on, but I thought it might be good to just discuss a few examples that this uh thinking about this effect calls to mind from uh from movies that you and I have seen. And one thing I find very interesting is that, at least personally anecdotally, I feel a kind of experience of the coolest Shov effect, even the more specific version, with neutral faces in movies that don't actually involve real faces. A really great example I came across was mentioned on the TV Tropes website for the coolers Shov effect. If you never never been to that website, it's a great it's like a wiki style, you know, user submitted content. But it just includes big lists of different sorts of conventions of of TV and movies and things like that, narrative conventions, filmmaking conventions, uh, cliches and such. And so they've got a page on the cooler shov effect and it mentioned how in two thousand one of Space Odyssey, which I thought was a fantastic example. Oh, I absolutely agree, and I wouldn't have thought of it at first myself. But yeah, you just have that red light that how has no face at all, not even the semblance of the face exactly. So yeah, it's not even a computer screen that kind of looks like a face. It's just a red light. Uh. And so that completely removes the possibility of picking up on queues and micro expressions based on the feelings or mind state of a human actor. House face is just the light. And yet the editing context, at least for me, absolutely causes me to read emotional expression and emotional content into the red light. So sometimes, depending on what it's being intercut with, the light looks calm. Other times the red light looks suspicious or even paranoid. Yeah, Yeah, that's I think. This is this is a this is a great read. Um. It reminds me of another example that I ran across. I was I was just looking for at first, I was just looking for mainstream examples, you know, and h I ran across um a video from king star Wars dot net that points to some examples in Star Wars, the first of which is is just pretty pretty standard. I imagine, Um, you have the scene where Luke is surveying the destruction of his aunt and uncle's home, shots of devastation, shots of of Luke's face. Uh, you know, so they inform each other. But the more impressive examples, I thought, we're discussions of how you have shots of Darth Vader during the final confrontation in UM the Return of the Jedi. Uh, this is this is where uh, Emperor Palpatine has has had Luke Invader fight, and then Luke refuses to kill his father, and so, uh, the Emperor is just going to force lightning him to death in front of Vader. And we of course, you know later in the film we see Vader's face, but you don't see Vader's face. You just see this, uh, this emotionless bug skull helmet. But in that scene where we're seeing what he's seeing, we're seeing shots of Luke's suffering, writhing under the agony of the force lightning. Um we we we we see that change Invader, even though we don't see his face. I totally agree. I think this is another great example. Yeah, it's just the mask, so you can't be picking up on human expressions. But yeah, you read expression into the mask face based on what's happening to Luke, you start to almost see him feeling compassion. Yeah. Another example they bring up is the Mandalorian TV show where through most of it, the title character of the Mandalorian does not remove his helmet. And you probably have more room to even explore how this works in that TV show because you know Vader Vader's you know, you're generally dealing with severe situations. But in the over the course of the Mandalorian TV show, you have him interacting with with light and cute things, with comedic things as well as serious things, and so there's plenty of opportunity for that. Again, this you know, emotionless Mandalorian helmet in this case uh to to seem to convey uh for an emotions. Uh. And of course that's not to discount body language and plenty of other you know, cues that enable us to lean into it. But but still, you know, all these things work together to help us form that theory of mind. What's going on inside Vader's mind, what's going on inside the Mandalorian's mind, or Howe's mind. Absolutely, Yeah, another great example. Now, one example I was I was looking into and thinking about two brings us back to Hitchcock. I was thinking about Psycho, which of course has has a number of scenes that are very iconic, and you know, we that easily come to mind, and you may even be able to picture even if you haven't seen the film. Um, but there's there's one scene in particular where Janet Lee's Marian Crane is changing clothes in her room at the Bates Motel. Norman Bates played by the handsome Anthony Perkins, Uh, is in an adjacent room. He approaches a picture frame, he removes it and reveals a peephole. Uh. He puts his eye to the peepole, and we switched to a p O V shot of his voice rhythm. Here's Marion Crane undressing. Then a close up of his eye eyeball like side view of his eyeball staring through the peephole. She moves out of you in the in the p o V shot, and then he places the picture frame back over the peephole, back still turned to us. But then he turns and we see his face, and he in his face is very interesting in this performance and particularly in the scene because it is I mean, it's it's hard to to to register exactly what he's feeling like. It's not like it's kind of blank. I mean, I end up reading into it if i'm you know, I'm thinking about it, like what's he thinking? Obviously I know what's about to happen. He's going to go in there and kill her while she's in the shower. So it's easy to read in like grim determination. But he's not like, you know, snarling and snickering with with with fiendish desire in this scene or anything. Um. And it's also interesting to think about this in terms of of subversion, because you know, we think of Anthony Perkins now, we think of Psycho. We think of him playing this um, this very troubled, uh murderous individual. But prior to this film, he was like a Jimmy Stewart esque leading man in a former teen heartthrob. So, so Hitchcock was averting this image in Psycho. So it's it's interesting to think about that watching a scene like this. Yeah. So I also have to add that having your character look through a peopole like this is is hardly like neutral. That gives us a different idea. I mean, in the scene earlier, he's he's got a very boy next door kind of energy. He seems, uh, you know, just kind of like a sweet, shy, handsome young guy. Yeah. But yeah, once he's looking through the people, that does charge the way we read his face very differently. Right now, speaking of Hitchcock and uh and voyeurism, it's also worth worth noting that Rear Window, starring the actual Jimmy Stewart, has plenty of examples of this sort of thing, where, you know, a lot of that movie is Jimmy Stewart's character looking through a telescope and then we have po V shots of he is seeing in other apartments and then he and then cuts back to him. Yeah, now one one more sort of it's sort of an example of it, but also kind of a subversion of it. Is a Spielberg face. This is the close up of awe and wonder on an actor's glazed face in reaction to something they're looking at, like a like a big old shark or a UFO or a field full of dinosaurs or something. Well, in the more specific sense, generally, I would say, these are not neutral faces, but they are faces that are clearly they're having some kind of powerful inner experience. But it sometimes might be ambiguous if you were to just see the face by itself, But then when it's inter cut with what they're looking at, it's it's very often awe, right, And and sometimes this is actually manipulated to uh, to a comedic effect online. For instance, in the Jurassic Park sequence where they're you know, they're awe, they're getting out of the car. They're just you know, completely zombified by something utterly amazing and holy before them. You don't know what it is yet. I mean, you know it's going to be dinosaurs, but you haven't seen it yourself yet. And so I feel feel like there's been a number of of comedic debts where someone has has inserted something else there, uh, you know, something maybe more mundane than than gigantic dinosaurs brought back to life through science the new Taco Bell menu item exactly. All right, Well, we ended up having a lot to say about the cool As shov effect. Actually, so I think we're gonna have to call part one there. But when we come back, we can talk about some uh, some attempts to replicate the original cool As show, study, some interpretations of what maybe lying behind it to the extent that it's true, and then maybe a little more research about ambiguous spaces in general. In the meantime, if you would like to listen to other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you can find them in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed with core episodes on Tuesday and Thursday, listener mail on Monday, artifact on Wednesday, and hey, we're talking about film, so be aware that on Fridays that's weird how cinema. That's our time to outside most serious concerns and just talk about a weird or unusual film. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello, You can email us at contact Got Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. Time to go into the vault for an older episode of the show. This one originally published on January two, and it was part one of our series about the coolest shov effect and interesting psychological effect having to do with film editing. Alright, let's jump right in. Hey, everybody, Joe here, I'm just cutting in before the music with a brief editorial insert it's happened before it happened again. This is one of those episodes that went long. Rob and I originally planned it to be one standalone chat, but it started taking on an unwieldy form while we were recording, so we decided to go ahead and chop it up into two parts. So this is why in a few minutes you might hear me make references to things I'm going to bring up later in the episode, but we actually won't get to them until part two, So apologies for any confusion on that front. As a general outline, and we're going to introduce and illustrate our central topic in part one here and then we'll be going deeper into the weeds of subsequent research in part two. So without any further delay, I'll now plunge you back into the show. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. And my name is Robert Lamm and I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're gonna be talking about a concept known as the coolest Shop effect. This is an idea from film theory. But I think this will make a really interesting episode because it's, first of all, it's at that that weird intersection space, you know, the midnight at the crossroads of of art and science. And then uh, Secondarily, I think it's one of those great observations that is simple, almost obvious in its implication, ends when when you first grasp it, but you the more you think about it, the weirder and more powerful it gets, especially in a historical context. Yeah, this is an interesting topic and one I have to admit that I don't think i'd ever really absorbed before. I don't know if it ever came up in um, any of like the film classes that I took, like in college. Um, same here and uh and and at the same time, Yeah, I read about this and then went out and actually watched um um, I watched a film and watched you know, probably a couple of TV shows over the weekend, and so I had it fresh on my mind looking for it. And on one hand, you do see it everywhere, but then you don't like, it's, uh, it's this thing that that when you're when you first read about it, it sounds like, oh, well, this is like part of the blueprint of how film works. And that's kind of that's kind of one of the arguments that's made for it. And yet it's not necessarily as a parent as you might expect it to be, but there are some wonderful examples to be to be dwelt upon. Well, the way I'd put it, after having done all the research for this episode, is that I think it is sort of part of the blueprint of how film works, except in the way it's usually explained, it's just a few degrees off. Yeah, yeah, that would I think that would make sense. But I'll explain more about that as as we go on. Another thing that's interesting about this though, is it's something that's originally from the realm of art and esthetic criticism. You know, it's from film theory, but it also has a sort of mixed research history within the fields of experimental psychology and neuroscience. You know, there's some empirical experiments that seem to find evidence of the effect and others do not find it. And I think part of the part of the difference there is how you ask the question and what kind of stimula you use. But it could be interesting to see what the difference is there as well. But I guess we should get straight to explaining what the coolest Jov effect allegedly is. So, in the words of the authors of a two thousand six neuroscience paper by mobs at All that I'll refer to later in the episode, the coolest Jov effect is the following proposition. It is that quote, the manipulation of context can alter an audiences perception of an actor's facial expressions, thoughts, and feelings. Yeah. Yeah, And this is something that is at at the very root of everything. Is is based on theory of mind, that we as humans look at another person and we simulate what's going on in their head, what what are their thoughts, what are their motivations, what are their intentions, etcetera. Um uh so, Yeah, it's theory theory, theory of mind at heart, but it's not just the face. It's also something else. And basically this gets into just an into filmmaking and editing. Right, it's the the idea of montage. That's the word that's often used here, but that would probably give us ideas of a very specific technique of like, you know, you're like the training montage and Rocky film or something. You should actually be thinking of montage when we say it in this episode. More broadly, it's not just that. It means the the arrangement of different shots into a sequence through editing. No matter what kind of technique you're using there, if you're taking different shots and putting them into a sequence, that is montage for today's purposes. Yeah, and and again it all comes back to editing. The way the footage is put together. You can basically think of it as like face p O V shot face um. For instance, Alfred Hitchcock described it once as being a situation where okay, again, think of three shots. First shot, he says, his man looking out the window. Shot number three is a man smiling. Now what you put in that second slot, whatever, that second shot is that you insert that changes the context entirely. Now, uh, as we were discussing before we recorded here, this Alfred Hitchcock example, the widely cided is also a little imperfect because if you want to get right down to the like the core theory, it's just it's Shot one should be a man looking out a window. Shot number three should just be that man looking out a window, no smile. But it still comes down to what is shot number two, because that changes how you think about that man in shot three, right, you seem to see something different in the man, even though you could use the exact same footage of him. So the editing context changes what we think we see in a previous or a subsequent shot, even though you're using the exact same shots. So one of the funny in Hitchcock's example, he uh, he talks about this in a famous interview I think he did with maybe it was with the CBC or somebody, but but he was using the example of Okay, in the first sequence, imagine that the middle shot that's intercut there is like a mother playing with a baby, and in that case, oh, he's a kindly old grandfather man. And then the second option is that the middle shot is a woman in a bathing suit, in which case, he says, then you perceive his smile as being that of a dirty old man. And I guess it kind of helps because it's actually Alfred Hitchcock they use in the visual example. Now we'll come back to more about what this idea is and what it might mean, but maybe first we should just do a little bit of biography on the namesake of this idea. So the Kolashov effect is named after a guy named Lev Kulashev, who was a Russian filmmaker and film theorist who I think, I don't know, you could say it was like a major force in the history of film theory and uh, and is primarily responsible for popularizing this alleged effect. Yes, Lev Kulashev, who lived seventy Russian director film theorist who started out in art, direction and some acting before moving increasingly into directing, experimental editing, and scholarship. He was one of the founders of the world's first film school, the Moscow Film School. And yeah, he introduced the American film concept of montage into Soviet cinema based on examining the works of directors such as DDA be Griffith, and as David Gilevskie points out in his book Early Soviet Cinema, he quote played a more significant part in the development of the Golden Age of Russian cinema than any other figure with the exception of Eisenstein. And this would refer to Sergei Eisenstein, another big name and film a big big name Russian film director of the time period, theorist of the day who listeners might know from such films as a Battleship Attempkin from that's the old baby Stroller down the Stairs movie right now. One thing I do remember from actual film classes that I took in college was that a lot of early Soviet cinema does make use of the montage, more in the sense of the specific film technique where you're like taking a bunch of different images and and putting them together to suggest a kind of, uh, a kind of sequence or progression, more like the training montage. But the main example I remember there is a movie we watched by or TV called The Man with the Movie Camera, which is basically the whole movie is just a montage of of you know, Russian public life by the way, if anyone out there wants to hear us talk even more about silent film. We did an episode of Weird How Cinema UM at some point in the last year where we did like a silent film double feature where we we picked out just a couple maybe three different silent films and talked about what was neat about them and just talked about sort of the the challenges to the modern viewer that that silent film poses, but also the rewards of watching them. So what one of the main things Kolashov was doing here was that he was he wasn't even um even even shooting new footage in these experiments. UH, he was taking pre existing footage silent film footage usually um Czarist era silent film, and re cutting them to to see what could be done with this montage feature like how how to arrange the uh the footage to get different, um you know, emotional results. And a lot of it was based again and looking at what was going on and what seemed to be working in uh in in in Western film, in American film specifically again like the work of d. W. Griffith, and UH just in general. Kulashofice was it was somewhat controversial at times, apparently in in these uh, these experiments, you know, he's looking at American models, Western models, So he was accused by Communist Party members at times of appealing to Western ideas and forms too much. And he's also apparently been accused of living it up during tough times in Russia and destroying archives silent era films during this editing work, which again the work that wasn't really based that so much in shooting new footage and experimenting with how you might added them together, but taking pre existing footage from the archive and adding it together. Now, as a director, Kulashov is apparently and I'm speaking largely of a director that I really didn't know anything about before, so me neither. But he's apparently best known for ninety four's The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr West in the Land of the Bolsheviks. He also adapted the works of Jack London and Oh Henry, but especially for this show, we should really highlight that he also made a death Ray spy thriller. I thought this was really interesting. Somehow, I guess this never came up when we did our invention episodes on the Death Ray or if it did, I've forgotten about it because this seemed new to me. But it fits right in there, because if you haven't heard our episodes of the Invention podcast on the death Ray, those were some of my favorites that we did, especially because we got to talk about an invention that never really existed and yet was the subject of a popular fervor. You know that, like people were really excited about death rays for the nineteen twenties and that just there was never any such thing. Yeah, yeah, the invention it's of never existed, but you had kind of a global death ray fever going on, and this is so it's right smack dab in the middle of it. A film titled lut Smirty or the Death Ray. Galepsi describes it as quote a relatively violent film about international espionage. So I had to look in. I looked at footage the available footage that I could find out. It wasn't wasn't super great to watch, but there's some impressive stills that The plot is spot on for what you might expect from a Soviet death ray movie at the time period. We follow a socialist revolutionary who has to flee an unnamed fascist capitalist country, the socialist revolutionary has to flee to the Soviet Union, and once there he is introduced to the new technology of the death ray, which can explode gunpowder at a distance, which is a key detail because that's exactly, uh that the sort of thing that was part of the death ray fever that we discussed in the Invention episode. That's right. So the brief top line on that is that, uh, basically a lot of this death ray fever came from reaction to the horrors of long range bombing aerial bombing in World War One, and people wanted the idea of something that could shoot bombers out of the sky from a great distance before they got to your cities, and the death ray filled in that gap exactly. So basically, the evil spy follows them and steals the death ray technology so that they can use it to suppress labor strikes. But don't worry, the labor strikers steal the death ray technology back and use it to blow up their oppressors bomber aircraft which is about to be used against the strikers. This almost makes me want to compile and watch a list of all the death ray movies of the nineteen twentys. Just put them all together and see see what kind of picture emerges. Yeah, yeah, or and I'm curious, like, what is the best death ray movie? I'm I'm assuming the best death ray movies came later. Um came in the way of films such as this, Thank thank Okay, Well, so that's love kol Ashov and I wanted to get a little bit into the background of this idea of the cool Ashov effect by consulting his own words. So I found a book called cool a Shov on Film Writings. This was published by the University of California Press in nineteen seventy four. I'm not positive. I think this might be a reprint of some earlier writings of Kola Shovs, but the context is um. I was consulting an early section of this book where he's discussing a series of investigations he and his colleagues carried out in the late nineteen teens and into the twenties, essentially to try to figure out how film actually works. That they were asking questions like how do audiences make meaning out of the images they see over the course of a film? Which is a great question, and it is something that early filmmakers really had to fe guar out. We we can take a lot of film meaning making for granted these days, because uh, you know, film techniques are so well honed these days that they're often invisible to us. You know, you you if you watch a professionally made movie, you will you will not even notice the fact that, say, all of the eye lines and it have been aligned correctly so that when a character looks at something and then it cuts to that thing, it's lined up so that it's not confusing. But that's like a technique that had to be learned, and there are tons of things like that. They're just invisible to us now, as as a lot of good filmmaking techniques are I mean ideally, I guess, well, I mean there are different ideas of this, but you know, a common view I think among a lot of filmmakers is that techniques should not call attention to themselves, but instead should disappear and allow you to just become totally absorbed in the narrative to help bring about the raw experience quality of modern cinema. Yeah. Yeah, and that's I mean, that's something I like to stick to. I mean, unless the film is so uh poor. It's a execution that you can't help but but notice it, you know, well when yeah, And certainly there's plenty of examples of that. But so Kolashav and colleagues are trying to investigate how does film work? What what are the techniques that that cause an audience to think or feel a certain way? And so famously Kolashov feels that he has achieved a breakthrough when he starts to discover the power of montage or editing. He starts to think of editing as a sort of master key behind the power of cinema, and he believes that montage has a power greater than simply showing you a series of moving images in sequence so that you think, well, one follows the other. Instead, he comes to think that by ordering shots in a sequence, you actually change the meaning of the shots themselves, or change the perception of what is contained in the shots. And there's a memorable example that Kolashov describes in the book. I'll just read it directly. He says, I saw this scene I think in a film by Razumni, a priest's house with a portrait of Nicholas, the second hanging on the wall that though that would be the czar right uh, the village is taken over by the Red Army. The frightened priest turns the portrait over, and on the reverse side of the portrait is the smiling face of Lenin. However, this is a familiar portrait, a portrait in which Lenin is not smiling. But that spot in the film was so funny, and it was so uproariously received by the public that I, myself scrutinizing the portrait several times, saw the portrait of Lenin as smiling. Especially intrigued by this, I obtained the portrait that was used and saw that the expression on the face in the portrait was serious. The montage was so edited that we involuntarily imbued a serious face with a changed expression characteristic of that playful moment. In other words, the work of the actor was altered by means of montage. In this way, montage had a colossal influence on the effect of the material. It became apparent that it was possible to change the actor's work, his movements, his very behavior in either one direction or the other through montage. I thought this was a great example, because I haven't seen the film in question. But but I can understand exactly the effect he's describing here with this portrait of Lenin because of the tone of the scene. The context makes it darkly comedic, like it's funny, but it's also threatening, that a serious or neutral face could be perceived as having a kind of wicked grin. M. Yeah, you know, this reminds me just in general, of any time you have kind of a a kind of a portrait he had a painting or a photograph. Um, I guess that. You know, just in general outside of film, it can seem to take on different dimensions based on what you are doing or what your mindset is. If you're sort of imagining that the that the subject of the painting or picture can see you, or you're leaning into that sort of interpretation, like why is Vigo the Carpathian staring in there like that? Is he? Is he proud? Is he angry at me? Is he smiling? Oh? That makes me wonder did they when the film Ghostbusters too, did they have multiple paintings of Vigo with slightly different expressions on his face or did they just use one portrait and and rely on the cool a shov effect? For I read emotions into it. I wish I thought of this earlier. Well, anyway, so we're about to get to the description of the main alleged experiment that establishes the this that we're about to get into canonical cool Ashov effect territory. So, following this realization about the power of editing or montage to change what is perceived within the shot itself, there's this famous story about an experiment cool a Shov supposedly carried out to put the idea to the test. And I want to flag at the beginning here that multiple sources I have read raised questions about whether this test ever actually took place in the way it is described. Um, but I'd say it doesn't especially matter, because we're going to be just using this story to illustrate an idea. Then we can look at other tests later not to provide evidential force that it must be, as Kolashev says, So whether or not this event actually took place exactly like this, this is how it's described in a book called How Movies Work by Bruce Kawen. This was University of California Press. Kawen writes as follows about Kolashev's experiment. He found some old footage of a pre revolutionary actor named Yvonne mujukin a single long take, probably a makeup test, in which the face showed an unvarying neutral expression. Kulashev then cut three different shots into this take, one of a child playing with a toy, one of a bowl of soup, and one of an old woman in a coffin the sequence when as follows face child face, soup face, woman face. When he showed this short film to an audience, although this may be a bit of cinematic folklore, they remarked what a great actor Masukan was. They enjoyed the subtle way he expressed affectionate delight at the child's playing, hunger for soup, and grief at the death of the woman whom they assumed was his mother. The Masoukan experiment, as it has since been called, had a permanent impact on the theory of screen acting. It showed that audiences will read shots in terms of each other, and therefore that a film actor who ought ideally to under act could allow the montage to suggest some of his or her emotions and thoughts. The point for our immediate purposes, however, is simply that the impression of continuity is often generated by the audience. Now will come with some additional history of research to build upon this later, But Kulashov used this alleged experiment in support of his broader theory of how film worked, one of the main points of which was that the soul of a film was in the editing process, and that the edit of the film actually had more power over the film's effect than the contents of any individual shot. I think another way of phrasing this is that the way you edit your footage together is ultimately more important than what an actor does while the cameras rolling, because the meaning of an actor's performance can be totally changed by the editing context. And in fact, Kolashov allegedly carried out a couple of other experiments along these lines that are known sometimes as creative geography and creative anatomy. Creative anatomy would be using shots of parts of different bodies from different actors, creating the illusion that they all belonged to the same person. So you and show a different person's hands, lips, legs, and so forth, and create an imaginary composite person that doesn't exist. He also did the same thing with physical geography, so he would have, for example, a shot of people walking along a street in Moscow and then maybe going up a staircase and then going to a mansion that was actually the White House in Washington, d C. Creating the illusion that they're all there's just one continuous walk, all in the same place, but they're on different continents, which at the time they looked at that discovery as revelatory. They're like, oh wow, like you actually don't need to shoot stuff that's in the same geographic place in order to suggest being in the same geographic place. You can invent geographies that don't exist out of different parts, which, of course now it's just this is just how you make films. You know, you you you have one exterior and maybe the interior is a set or it's somewhere on the other side of the country. You know. Um, you know, you read you read any behind the scenes making just any of your favorite films, and you'll find stuff like like the Library and Ghostbusters the first Ghostbusters film, I think parts of that are and just you know, they're from all over depending on whether you're outside or your inside you you're in the basement. And then uh, and then also when it comes to the anatomy question here, I mean it's it's why you have stunt doubles, body doubles. It's why you can finish a film. Uh, even though Bell Leghosi died whilst shooting it. Right, So that's probably you're getting into the poor example of it, and that that does specific example no. Plan nine for matter space is a is a wonderful example of of what you can do with the magic of cinema editing. But but to get back to the core idea here, these spitting and I think it'll be important for us to think about the coolest off effect in a couple of different ways. One is just the broader idea that editing context can radically change the meaning of individual shots, which I think we just all know from experiences is obviously true. This is a fact about how movies work. But the other thing is the more specific claim of the alleged MOSU can experiment that you can take a totally neutral shot of an actor's face displaying no emotion whatsoever, and by intercutting it with other footage you can change what the audience perceives. In those shots of the actor's face, you can the audience will come to think that, you know, a neutral face intercut with the image of a child playing is like a happy parental uh, you know, and like a bowl of soup means they're they're they're filled with pangs of hunger, even though it's the exact same neutral footage of the face. So that's the more specific claim. And I think it's that second one that's more questionable but but also interesting in its own regard. And we're gonna look at at least a couple of papers about that as we go on, but I thought it might be good to just discuss a few examples that this uh thinking about this effect calls to mind from uh from movies that you and I have seen. And one thing I find very interesting is that, at least personally anecdotally, I feel a kind of experience of the coolest Shov effect, even the more specific version, with neutral faces in movies that don't actually involve real faces. A really great example I came across was mentioned on the TV Tropes website for the coolers Shov effect. If you never never been to that website, it's a great it's like a wiki style, you know, user submitted content. But it just includes big lists of different sorts of conventions of of TV and movies and things like that, narrative conventions, filmmaking conventions, uh, cliches and such. And so they've got a page on the cooler shov effect and it mentioned how in two thousand one of Space Odyssey, which I thought was a fantastic example. Oh, I absolutely agree, and I wouldn't have thought of it at first myself. But yeah, you just have that red light that how has no face at all, not even the semblance of the face exactly. So yeah, it's not even a computer screen that kind of looks like a face. It's just a red light. Uh. And so that completely removes the possibility of picking up on queues and micro expressions based on the feelings or mind state of a human actor. House face is just the light. And yet the editing context, at least for me, absolutely causes me to read emotional expression and emotional content into the red light. So sometimes, depending on what it's being intercut with, the light looks calm. Other times the red light looks suspicious or even paranoid. Yeah, Yeah, that's I think. This is this is a this is a great read. Um. It reminds me of another example that I ran across. I was I was just looking for at first, I was just looking for mainstream examples, you know, and h I ran across um a video from king star Wars dot net that points to some examples in Star Wars, the first of which is is just pretty pretty standard. I imagine, Um, you have the scene where Luke is surveying the destruction of his aunt and uncle's home, shots of devastation, shots of of Luke's face. Uh, you know, so they inform each other. But the more impressive examples, I thought, we're discussions of how you have shots of Darth Vader during the final confrontation in UM the Return of the Jedi. Uh, this is this is where uh, Emperor Palpatine has has had Luke Invader fight, and then Luke refuses to kill his father, and so, uh, the Emperor is just going to force lightning him to death in front of Vader. And we of course, you know later in the film we see Vader's face, but you don't see Vader's face. You just see this, uh, this emotionless bug skull helmet. But in that scene where we're seeing what he's seeing, we're seeing shots of Luke's suffering, writhing under the agony of the force lightning. Um we we we we see that change Invader, even though we don't see his face. I totally agree. I think this is another great example. Yeah, it's just the mask, so you can't be picking up on human expressions. But yeah, you read expression into the mask face based on what's happening to Luke, you start to almost see him feeling compassion. Yeah. Another example they bring up is the Mandalorian TV show where through most of it, the title character of the Mandalorian does not remove his helmet. And you probably have more room to even explore how this works in that TV show because you know Vader Vader's you know, you're generally dealing with severe situations. But in the over the course of the Mandalorian TV show, you have him interacting with with light and cute things, with comedic things as well as serious things, and so there's plenty of opportunity for that. Again, this you know, emotionless Mandalorian helmet in this case uh to to seem to convey uh for an emotions. Uh. And of course that's not to discount body language and plenty of other you know, cues that enable us to lean into it. But but still, you know, all these things work together to help us form that theory of mind. What's going on inside Vader's mind, what's going on inside the Mandalorian's mind, or Howe's mind. Absolutely, Yeah, another great example. Now, one example I was I was looking into and thinking about two brings us back to Hitchcock. I was thinking about Psycho, which of course has has a number of scenes that are very iconic, and you know, we that easily come to mind, and you may even be able to picture even if you haven't seen the film. Um, but there's there's one scene in particular where Janet Lee's Marian Crane is changing clothes in her room at the Bates Motel. Norman Bates played by the handsome Anthony Perkins, Uh, is in an adjacent room. He approaches a picture frame, he removes it and reveals a peephole. Uh. He puts his eye to the peepole, and we switched to a p O V shot of his voice rhythm. Here's Marion Crane undressing. Then a close up of his eye eyeball like side view of his eyeball staring through the peephole. She moves out of you in the in the p o V shot, and then he places the picture frame back over the peephole, back still turned to us. But then he turns and we see his face, and he in his face is very interesting in this performance and particularly in the scene because it is I mean, it's it's hard to to to register exactly what he's feeling like. It's not like it's kind of blank. I mean, I end up reading into it if i'm you know, I'm thinking about it, like what's he thinking? Obviously I know what's about to happen. He's going to go in there and kill her while she's in the shower. So it's easy to read in like grim determination. But he's not like, you know, snarling and snickering with with with fiendish desire in this scene or anything. Um. And it's also interesting to think about this in terms of of subversion, because you know, we think of Anthony Perkins now, we think of Psycho. We think of him playing this um, this very troubled, uh murderous individual. But prior to this film, he was like a Jimmy Stewart esque leading man in a former teen heartthrob. So, so Hitchcock was averting this image in Psycho. So it's it's interesting to think about that watching a scene like this. Yeah. So I also have to add that having your character look through a peopole like this is is hardly like neutral. That gives us a different idea. I mean, in the scene earlier, he's he's got a very boy next door kind of energy. He seems, uh, you know, just kind of like a sweet, shy, handsome young guy. Yeah. But yeah, once he's looking through the people, that does charge the way we read his face very differently. Right now, speaking of Hitchcock and uh and voyeurism, it's also worth worth noting that Rear Window, starring the actual Jimmy Stewart, has plenty of examples of this sort of thing, where, you know, a lot of that movie is Jimmy Stewart's character looking through a telescope and then we have po V shots of he is seeing in other apartments and then he and then cuts back to him. Yeah, now one one more sort of it's sort of an example of it, but also kind of a subversion of it. Is a Spielberg face. This is the close up of awe and wonder on an actor's glazed face in reaction to something they're looking at, like a like a big old shark or a UFO or a field full of dinosaurs or something. Well, in the more specific sense, generally, I would say, these are not neutral faces, but they are faces that are clearly they're having some kind of powerful inner experience. But it sometimes might be ambiguous if you were to just see the face by itself, But then when it's inter cut with what they're looking at, it's it's very often awe, right, And and sometimes this is actually manipulated to uh, to a comedic effect online. For instance, in the Jurassic Park sequence where they're you know, they're awe, they're getting out of the car. They're just you know, completely zombified by something utterly amazing and holy before them. You don't know what it is yet. I mean, you know it's going to be dinosaurs, but you haven't seen it yourself yet. And so I feel feel like there's been a number of of comedic debts where someone has has inserted something else there, uh, you know, something maybe more mundane than than gigantic dinosaurs brought back to life through science the new Taco Bell menu item exactly. All right, Well, we ended up having a lot to say about the cool As shov effect. Actually, so I think we're gonna have to call part one there. But when we come back, we can talk about some uh, some attempts to replicate the original cool As show, study, some interpretations of what maybe lying behind it to the extent that it's true, and then maybe a little more research about ambiguous spaces in general. In the meantime, if you would like to listen to other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you can find them in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed with core episodes on Tuesday and Thursday, listener mail on Monday, artifact on Wednesday, and hey, we're talking about film, so be aware that on Fridays that's weird how cinema. That's our time to outside most serious concerns and just talk about a weird or unusual film. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello, You can email us at contact Got Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.