A perfect example of This American Life at its best: a thoughtful collection of essays built around a simple, straightforward topic. Although I felt like they started to run out of steam a bit by the end, the first several entries were remarkably strong and incredibly interesting. At first I was most fascinated by the guy who makes maps of all sorts of things, and his contention that "there isn't anything you can't map."
But then I got to the part about mapping sound, and I started to get a bit uncomfortable when the interviewee began explaining how different chords are associated with different moods and how the Catholic church, among others, has decided what different sounds "mean." As the narrator explained:
Now that I can't stop hearing it, I wonder if every exercise in mapping is really such a good thing. When I sat at my keyboard composing these lines, the computer hum and fan were droning a minor third at me, an interval associated with sorrow. Before Columbus's day, the old maps simply showed an arrow pointing to the mysterious West, and then the words, "there dragons be." Maybe not every terra incognita needs discovering. But, of course, this is America. We don't just explore, we profit. Any day now, I expect a house tuner to be ringing my doorbell, some failed telemarketer who'll promise to harmonize the whir of my toaster with the flush of the toilet, and thereby guarantee me an inner peace worthy of the millennium.To which the interviewee replies, "And you could obviously select from -- like you might select from paint chips -- from a variety of different house moods, happy, sad, active anguish in a context of flux." Funnily enough, I had already started thinking about paint colors before he said this, because while a lot has been written about how painting a room different colors can affect mood, a lot of the more recent research on this topic has shown that this is almost purely contextual -- that reaction to color has more to do with individual differences and less to do with overarching generalities. So my question is this: can we ever successfully generalize how things like color, light or sound make people feel?
I have more of a comment than a question here, mainly about his point that "research extends what we know." Surely this is true, but I would go one step further and say that "research extends both what we know and what we don't know." That is, all research isn't going to produce the answers we're expecting or, for that matter, any answers at all. But not getting any answers to a question can be as informative as getting a bunch of them, possibly more so. And it isn't necessarily because we looked in the wrong place, or asked the wrong question, or deduced an incorrect motive -- maybe there's no answer because of wicked problems. Childress, while mentioning them, doesn't really address how they could end up causing an impasse (though, admittedly, this isn't the point of his article). Would a de facto conclusion be that any research question which attempts to address wicked problems is doomed from the start? This is where he loses me a little bit.
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