Solving the Mystery

Bruce Wilson, PhD

“Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man's desire to understand.”- Neil Armstrong

The known is finite and the unknown is infinite. As humans, we are captivated by the unknown because it is a mystery. What we know is a given and what we do not know yet is infinitely more compelling. The price of ambiguity and uncertainty does not repel our passion to solve the mystery.

What drives this curiosity to fill in the blanks of life? What motivates our desire to solve the mysteries of writers like Agatha Christie, Stephen King, Franz Kafka, or artists like Vincent Van Gogh or Jason Pollack?

What stimulates scientists to find answers to every possible modern enigma? Why is NASA looking for answers to the universe that have never been asked? The reason to all of these curiosities could be that answers are known, at least for now, while questions always remain unknown, which makes them a mystery and keeps us searching.

"No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point." - Jean-Paul Sartre

A Search for Meaning

Mystery is about so many different types of unknowns. Am I puzzled? Is this a secret? Is this a riddle? Is this an enigma or a contradiction? These questions create a gap in knowledge or awareness that starts with cognitive dissonance.

But cognitive confusion is not the only disturbance for humans. Emotional confusion may also become prominent. When cognitive and emotional confusion surfaces, action becomes mandatory. The discomfort catapults humans into action. Our curiosity is ignited with energy to solve the awareness gap. What is this all about? We must know. Mystery is the catalyst to our search for meaning.

In the 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey", the ape-man that discovers a bone that can be used as a weapon demonstrates how our gap in awareness must be resolved. The ape-man’s curiosity leads to his imagination and eventually to awareness and then action. He attacks his rivals. The mystery is solved. Meaning has been established.

Mysteries Engage Us

Every level of human experience can be engaged through mystery. Our interpretive skills will be challenged. Our imagination is ignited. Our emotional tension can be manipulated.

We can experience vicarious fear or excitement, sometimes within a few seconds. Our perceptions can be altered. Mystery takes us on a journey toward a multiple of psychological encounters.

Intellectual Payoffs

Uncertainty, at least mentally, is an uncomfortable place for most of us. Mystery gives us that feeling of not knowing what we need to know and that leaves us with that uncertainty mindset.

To resolve this uncertainty requires our problem-solving skills, which we love to engage. Humans have advanced over eons due to this very skill.

We long to put these skills into action. The intellectual payoff is not only engaging in the analysis but in finding the solution to the unknown.

“I get called an adrenaline junkie every other minute, and I'm just fine with that.”
Steve Irwin

Adrenaline Payoffs

Excitement is triggered when the unknown is being revealed. Think of your first Easter egg hunt as a child. Your excitement was during the chase to find the unknown location of the eggs before the others on the hunt.

This motivation applies to any mystery that has our curiosity and imagination within its grasp. We cannot help but join the chase to reveal the unknown.

Even NASA with the latest James Webb telescope has admitted the excitement- seeking goals of unravelling the mysteries behind the farthest galaxies ever observed. These galaxies appear to have drifted too far away for only 13.5 billion years since the Big Bang.

The mystery behind this discovery has even posed questions of when the universe began. Excitement reigns at proving or disproving this timeline.

In mystery novels, the discovery of the murderer can be enjoyed in the safe environment of your reading chair. Here the rush is when the reader figures out the perpetrator, which they predicted 50 pages earlier.

The adrenaline rush is also present in the early days of a new relationship. The mystery of the unknown partner is the excitement that lights this candle. The longer this mystery can be maintained, ironically, the greater the attraction. This might be one of the few examples where solving the mystery does not necessarily work. The relationship benefits from holding on to some of the mystery and keeping the candle lit.

Emotional Mystery

One of the mysteries of human emotion is a parapathic emotion. Here we see people slowing down at an accident on the freeway for a gapers gawk. The emotional motivation here is sometimes to get a peek of someone suffering a horrific injury. Psychologists are mystified by this human emotion. It is similar to schadenfreude, which is when my pleasure is your pain.

Another example of a parapathic emotion is when people, especially children, put their hands over their eyes in a horror film. However, when the most horrific scene is projected onto the screen, the viewer opens their fingers. This mystery of human emotion illustrates how even empathic people may have some mystery buried in their psyche, unknown even to them.

“I think sometimes people really require the satisfaction of closure.”- Diablo Cody

Closure

To untangle the chaos of the unknown mystery is true satisfaction. Closure is a celebration of taking the unresolved to the ultimate place of being resolved. The drive to reach closure is about resolution but also an accomplishment, a credited success, a feeling of achievement, and a sense of reward.

The discomfort of uncertainty and the ambiguity of the mystery is removed. We can acknowledge through solving the mystery that the unknown has now become part of the known, which feels a lot better. That is, until the next mystery attracts us.

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