Let me sing, o Muse, about the time I accidentally killed Fibonacci and unlocked powerful insights into the secrets of storytelling. It is a tale of woe and broken youthful dreams, of science’s cruelty, and how we can rise over it by being stubborn. Noble. I meant noble, and resourceful. And stuff.
This is the first in a series of posts about the Golden Ratio in language, cognitive parsimony, and the awe-inspiring power of our brains to turn laziness into an art.
Let’s start from the dawn of time. Thirty or so years ago, about a semester into my AI degree, I already knew what my thesis would discuss: the effects of the Golden Ratio on literature to distil the universal rules that make good stories beautiful.
After all, the Parthenon. The Fibonacci spiral. The perfect alignment of mathematics and nature, cracked by the ancients in the form of phi. It was obvious, I just had to put some data in there and derive the precise configuration to unlock the secrets of beauty.
In a perfect storm of youthful arrogance, limited data, and restricted cultural contexts, I knew there was a connection there. After all, the rule of threes is in everything. Sure, always a little different, but the fact that respecting the divine ratio (roughly 3/2), led to the creation of buildings we all recognize as masterful, it helps us frame photographs, and it helps us make convincing arguments.
From architecture to the visual arts, all the way down to rhetoric and music, the proportions of the grid of phi seemed to bring harmony to everything. It was a ratio with near-mystical properties because it encoded beauty itself, and I knew this to be true because of Dan Brown and the Fibonacci spiral, and because of all I could observe.
It’s OK to smile. The thing is, to my hungry mind, the coincidences piled up higher and higher. Proportions of phi cropped up in architecture across all world cultures for millennia. When I got to learn a little about language and syllogism, there is was again, the magical power of thirds, and that tantalizing representation of perfection.
Unfortunately, that came to an end last year. Another perfect storm, of excess free time and powerful LLMs, finally gave me a chance to investigate this phenomenon a little more fully. I wish I hadn’t. So, in the greatest tradition of disseminating knowledge, I am going to shatter your childhood just as mine was shattered. For science.
There is nothing magical about phi. It’s not related to the rules of thirds at all. The fact that it occurs over and over in architecture and art is simply the consequence of phi and thirds being objectively convenient.
That’s it, you can go have a cry now. Science is mean and there is no discussing the results of research. People have been digging into this for decades and found no connection between phi and beauty, in architecture or language of any kind. It’s really quite absolute, and you can’t get away from such a clear sentence.
This is not a wide field of study so it’s hard to talk about consensus. But of just under 30 papers that set off to investigate phi and its recurrence in architecture and arts, there was nothing even remotely suggesting a mystical connection. Which sucks. I mean, you can find Chinese studies that “prove” human head transplants are viable, but nothing about this. It’s a dead end.
Except, that “objectively convenient”. Digging into the concept of “objectively convenient” yielded some interesting results.
You see, there is a purely architectural aspect of phi that simply makes it easy to subdivide and tile stuff. That’s why it comes up a lot, universally. However, this doesn’t apply to my pseudo thesis about how we latch on to logical constructs like syllogisms, the rule of three in rhetoric, and framing photographs.
So after I ruined your Christmas, let me present you with an insight to make up for my cruelty. I do this because I am way cooler than science.
The insight is called cognitive parsimony, and it rocks. Because I was right after all, just not for the reasons I pictured.
Our brains are spectacularly complex pattern recognition machines. Our wetware is magical. The only thing in nature that outclasses how powerful our brains are is how lazy they were designed to be. You see, brains love patterns. They do not love to work too hard. It’s a biology thing.
It turns out that phi and the rule of thirds have something in common: they meet in a particular sweet spot of cognitive parsimony. They are the first, easiest, laziest possible pattern. One is an element, two is a line, three is a pattern the brain can latch on to.
It turns out that there is magic in syllogisms and rules of thirds: it’s spark of being a snack the human brain can process, feel awesome because it recognized something cool, and then spend the rest of the second watching TV.
The secret of the golden ratio, the supersecret spark of beauty that I’ve been thinking about for years is laziness. It’s a beautiful testament to lazy our minds are, and how easy they can be to trick.
There is nothing spectacular about lists of three in public dialogue. There is nothing transcendent about a syllogism. They work because our brains have the propensity for work of a teenager who already put one sock on.
The realization made me grin. I’d done science, I had learned something new, and I’d been right all along. And forgive me for the Homer reference at the start of this article, that’s the most epic journey of all. At least to my lazy brain.
In the coming pieces on this topic, I will discuss how this insight aligns with about three decades of professional storytelling in half a dozen mediums, how it connects to old tropes connected to telling stories, and how it can help you wield the magical power of tricking your brain into feeling clever.
Just you know, give me a minute.