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The Science of Successful Things: Invigorate Your Audience with “Aha” Moments, with Derek Thompson, Senior Editor, The Atlantic and Author, Hit Makers
Two of the favorite terms that I learned in writing this book are fluency and disfluency. And these terms relate to the idea that we have feelings about our thoughts. And that sounds hippy dippy, but some thoughts feel easy. It feels easy to listen to a song for the 50th time. It feels easy to watch a rerun or easy to read an article that we already agree with. Those are fluent thoughts. Those are thoughts that feel good and easy. But there are also all sorts of experiences, all sorts of types of thinking that feel difficult. And that’s what we call disfluency.
So, being lost in a foreign country and trying to figure out what all of the signs mean, that is disfluent. Reading an article that is trying to express a position that you consider morally abhorrent, that is disfluent too. But what’s most fascinating about fluency and disfluency is how they exist together.
So, imagine that you’re in that foreign country, and you’re trying to read all of these signs and it’s in some Slavic language that you don’t speak. And you feel lost and anxious, and your brain is hurting with all of these sort of thoughts that are going through it. And suddenly you turn around and you see an old friend from high school that you immediately recognize, knows that foreign language. That is an aha moment. That is a moment where you transition from disfluent thinking, to fluent thinking.
And there’s all sorts of studies that have said that we love these aha moments. We love them in art. We love figuring out art. We love them in storytelling. We love the disfluency of not knowing who the murderer is. And then, that moment when ding, we got it, we know who the murderer is. We even love it, I think, in ordinary, say, political opinion writing. When someone takes a complex subject and expresses it in such a beautifully clarifying way that it’s like solving a crossword puzzle for politics, we have, click, an aha moment.
And I truly think that people are looking for aha moments across the cultural landscape. I think that aha moments are a large part of what we want from storytelling, what we want from a great education, what we want from a great article or a great book. We are looking for both fluency and disfluency, yielding to each other so that we can feel those transition moments that are invigorating. And that make us feel like the act of thinking is worth it.