And Now For Something Completely Different
Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the first broadcast of Monty Python's Flying Circus. Today the NYTimes gave me a reason to boast about owning all the shows on DVD. In an article titled "How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect" the author discusses recent research into how people make sense of the world; how they find meaning in the absurd; and, how incomplete and dissonant bits of stories caused their brains to work overtime to find patterns otherwise invisible or nonexistent. One result of the exercise was to tune up their pattern-recognizing abilities so that they thereafter performed better on tests of implicit learning: knowledge gained without awareness.
I'm not sure that this means you should work a dead parrot into your next voir dire but you should probably be aware of the tendency of jurors to fill in holes in your narrative in ways that you might find nonsensical.
