Mimetic Theory & the suspension of disbelief

  By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc.  /   lmmiami.com

Last week I ranted about the so-called Mimetic Theory.*

• Conceived by the late René Girard, an anthropologist and Stanford university professor, its premise is quite simple: it is impossible for us humans to make fully informed decisions and, therefore, we proceed to imitate other people’s behavior.
• Here’s a brief description I borrowed from author Taylor Pearson:
• “The Mimetic theory’s key insight is that human desire is not an autonomous process, but a collective one. We want things because other people want them. As more and more people want something and that object remains scarce, there is a conflict.”
• As you can see, this is in broad terms one of the rocks on which the marketing and advertising edifice is built.
• Let’s not confuse the Mimetic theory with “mimesis” though.
• They are related, obviously, but they are not the same thing.
• Mimesis is our ability to represent reality in artificial ways.
• Art in the broadest sense of the word.
• Which leads us to the “suspension of disbelief”.
• That’d be the strange mental mechanism that leads us to believe that Leonardo di Caprio is actually a cute stowaway floating in the freezing waters of the Arctic.
• Which is the same delusion pushing us to buy overpriced apparel items due to the fact that Lionel Messi or Lebron James claim to wear them.
• Almost every piece of advertising ever created would be rendered useless absent this uncanny psychological operation.
• Fascinating, huh?
• It is one of those human behavioral traits, like laughter, which science cannot seem to fully understand.
• Here’s a description of the phenomenon by Norman N. Holland, author of Literature and the Brain:

“Although we know a fair amount about the brain activity linked with reading, no one has isolated the mechanisms tied specifically to suspension of disbelief. (…) Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the term “suspension of disbelief” in 1817, but almost two centuries would lapse before we could infer how the brain might support this puzzling phenomenon. Coleridge asked readers of his fantastical poems, including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, to give him “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” That phrase, “poetic faith,” encapsulates what our brain is doing. It isn’t that we stop disbelieving—it’s that we believe two inconsistent things. We accept that we are sitting and reading or watching a movie. We also believe or, more accurately, feel that what we are reading or viewing is happening. Action is the key. When we are reading a story or watching a movie, we know that we cannot or will not act to change what is occurring, a phenomenon philosopher Immanuel Kant called disinterestedness. Yet because we are not going to act, the brain economizes. We turn off the neural processes that tell us we might need to do something about what we are seeing. The prefrontal cortex does not try to assess the reality of what we are seeing, nor does it trigger motor impulses. That is why when we are sitting in a theater, we do not jump out of our seats to save the blond starlet even though we know she is about to get chopped up by a chainsaw-wielding fiend. Losing ourselves refers to another element of poetic faith, when the audience is, in the psychologists’ term, “transported.” We cease to be aware of our body, our posture or our environment. No longer are we in our living room or able to see the cinema’s glowing exit sign. Perhaps most important, our limbic system causes us to feel emotions—anger, disgust, jealousy, desire, fear—about the stories we are watching or reading.”

* You can read last week’s piece CLICK HERE.