In Chapter 13 of Brain Briefs by Art Markman and Bob Duke, the authors discuss how movie goers miss continuity errors on the big screen.* Such errors result from editing scene takes. Some are glaring; others unnoticed. Guys generally notice the discontinuity in a scene in Fatal Attraction in which Glen Close is alternatively covered and uncovered by a sheet. Maybe women not so much. The actors perform well, so the director and editor chose to keep the discontinuity in the film. Since all movie-watching requires some suspension of disbelief and since, with a blind spot in each eye, every viewer misses some details in favor of others, our brains don’t record everything. Our eyes “jump” from point to point in saccades (watch the eyes of someone who is reading), also, so the brain has “to build” by extrapolating what the eyes miss. That extrapolation gives us a sense of continuity in every scene, and it has much to do with assumptions and with the weakness we have during magicians’ tricks. That’s a point Dukeman and Mark make in their book: We don’t pay attention to all the details. Generally, we don’t have to. We get the sense that we’re in a forest without looking at every tree. Oh! And by the way, did you notice that I changed the authors’ names?
The problem of continuity isn’t a small one. Is the universe discontinuous or continuous? We know, for example, that between the nucleus of an atom and the electron “cloud” there is “empty space.” Take out all that emptiness from your atoms, and you shrink to a sand grain of a person because the overall size of an atom is 100,000 times larger than its nucleus. And physicists give us all kinds of comparisons: “If the nucleus were the size of a football (soccer ball), then the rest of the atom would be a half mile away.”** Of course, not satisfied with that emptiness, quantum physicists had to go looking into vacuums, where they found “virtual particles” springing into and out of existence and quarks inside protons and neutrons. Empty space isn’t what it used to be. Now we might ask whether or not there’s an emptiness between two quarks or within one quark. After all, how can we identify something unless it has a separate existence. Isn’t that the way we recognize you? Continuous universe? Discontinuous?
We seek continuity all the time through memory. You as a five-year-old, you as a teen, you as a young adult, you as a middle-age adult, you as a senior citizen: Which is the real you? You recognize yourself as a continuity all the while you recognize the discontinuities in your life. We have expressions for it: “That seemed like another lifetime”; “I was a different person then.”
We fill the void between the remembered “selves” with virtual realities because we can’t retain—and didn’t always know—the many details through which we moved and of which we were composed. We wonder about our identities at times and what we accept to be who we are. We are, in a sense, the directors and editors who choose to go with scenes because they turned out the way we wanted regardless of the discontinuities. We’re about the business of ignoring gaps or filling them when we want to establish an identity. But, on occasion, we recognize a discontinuity where the gap is too large to ignore.
And the same search for continuity and recognition of discontinuity operates in our relationships. We’re that arrow in flight, at any moment occupying a particular place along the flight path; at any moment isolated from the last and the next positions. Is the only continuity in our lives a string of discontinuities?
In their collection of essays entitled The Discontinuous Universe, editors Sallie Sears and Georgianna W. Lord write, “The writers here agree that man must impose some kind of order upon reality if he is to survive without being overwhelmed by confusion and inner disintegration. Yet, the structures he has evolved in his efforts to render the world intelligible seem to them more a series of metaphors that anything else—interesting, effective, even magical perhaps, but arbitrary, interchangeable, with their ideal aim of corresponding to structures that ‘really’ exist in the universe forever unverifiable” (v).
Look at the continuity of your life. Is it the product of metaphors? Would another set of metaphors make you a different person while still tying together that string of discontinuous identities you call “You”? Are you, as I hint, a director and editor of your life?
*New York. Sterling. 2016. Pp. 86-90.
**BBC Documentary with Jim Al-Khalili. Atom: Clash of Titans. At 21:25 Online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOJFznzSZhM Accessed on December 26, 2018.
***The Discontinuous Universe: Selected Writings in Contemporary Consciousness. New York. Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1972.
The problem of continuity isn’t a small one. Is the universe discontinuous or continuous? We know, for example, that between the nucleus of an atom and the electron “cloud” there is “empty space.” Take out all that emptiness from your atoms, and you shrink to a sand grain of a person because the overall size of an atom is 100,000 times larger than its nucleus. And physicists give us all kinds of comparisons: “If the nucleus were the size of a football (soccer ball), then the rest of the atom would be a half mile away.”** Of course, not satisfied with that emptiness, quantum physicists had to go looking into vacuums, where they found “virtual particles” springing into and out of existence and quarks inside protons and neutrons. Empty space isn’t what it used to be. Now we might ask whether or not there’s an emptiness between two quarks or within one quark. After all, how can we identify something unless it has a separate existence. Isn’t that the way we recognize you? Continuous universe? Discontinuous?
We seek continuity all the time through memory. You as a five-year-old, you as a teen, you as a young adult, you as a middle-age adult, you as a senior citizen: Which is the real you? You recognize yourself as a continuity all the while you recognize the discontinuities in your life. We have expressions for it: “That seemed like another lifetime”; “I was a different person then.”
We fill the void between the remembered “selves” with virtual realities because we can’t retain—and didn’t always know—the many details through which we moved and of which we were composed. We wonder about our identities at times and what we accept to be who we are. We are, in a sense, the directors and editors who choose to go with scenes because they turned out the way we wanted regardless of the discontinuities. We’re about the business of ignoring gaps or filling them when we want to establish an identity. But, on occasion, we recognize a discontinuity where the gap is too large to ignore.
And the same search for continuity and recognition of discontinuity operates in our relationships. We’re that arrow in flight, at any moment occupying a particular place along the flight path; at any moment isolated from the last and the next positions. Is the only continuity in our lives a string of discontinuities?
In their collection of essays entitled The Discontinuous Universe, editors Sallie Sears and Georgianna W. Lord write, “The writers here agree that man must impose some kind of order upon reality if he is to survive without being overwhelmed by confusion and inner disintegration. Yet, the structures he has evolved in his efforts to render the world intelligible seem to them more a series of metaphors that anything else—interesting, effective, even magical perhaps, but arbitrary, interchangeable, with their ideal aim of corresponding to structures that ‘really’ exist in the universe forever unverifiable” (v).
Look at the continuity of your life. Is it the product of metaphors? Would another set of metaphors make you a different person while still tying together that string of discontinuous identities you call “You”? Are you, as I hint, a director and editor of your life?
*New York. Sterling. 2016. Pp. 86-90.
**BBC Documentary with Jim Al-Khalili. Atom: Clash of Titans. At 21:25 Online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOJFznzSZhM Accessed on December 26, 2018.
***The Discontinuous Universe: Selected Writings in Contemporary Consciousness. New York. Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1972.
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