Fair warning: I’m writing about this question with my “ordinary guy” hat, not my “psychology writer” hat. Over at Macrumors they’re talking about whether just anyone can program a computer, or if it takes a special kind of mind to do it. The first poster has struggled his whole life with programming, and still doesn’t believe himself to be successful at it. He just can’t “get it.”

I’ve dabbled in programming over the years, all the way back to the days when I developed a primitive drawing program for my Commodore 64. I figured out a way to move a tiny dot around the screen with the cursor arrows, and then draw a line to it when the user pressed the “enter” key. It was a simple program, fairly easy to write, and glacially slow. It took hours to draw a recognizable picture of anything, and I typically got bored after making a triangle or two. On the one hand, if I hadn’t had some aptitude, I wouldn’t have ever written the program, but I don’t think this shows I’ve “got what it takes” to be a programmer. A real programmer would have kept coming back to that program, improving it. If I was a real programmer, I would have added a feature to change colors, or to draw different shapes, or to save the drawings I created.

Some of the responses to the initial question on MacRumors were clearly written by programmers. They’re easy to spot, because they go something like this: “sure, anyone can program, all they have to do is break the problem down into five simple steps. Once you master those, the rest is easy.” Or “C++++ is easy once you realize that every argument (except integral functions) must be enclosed with curly brackets, and don’t forget to write inequalities using the tilde and the double-backslash key.” The non-programmers write “No, no way. It’s got to be in the blood.”

I’d like to believe that if I absolutely needed to, I could learn to program a computer well (I’m talking serious programming, not dabbling in HTML or CSS). After all, I love computers. I love the Internet, and I love the power computers give me to do things like write, or edit photos, or make books. What I absolutely hate is when computers stop working (see my Aaaaaaaaaagh post from last week). If I was born to be a computer programmer, these moments when computers stop working correctly would be the good times: after all, they offer a chance to solve a problem, and that’s what any good programmer loves.

So am I saying that programming ability is innate? I don’t think so. But if you’re not particularly good at it, or if you don’t particularly like it, then why try to make a career out of it? Let someone else pull their hair out trying to figure out why their latest app keeps returning a “divided by zero” error.

Most schools of literary criticism suggest that it’s fruitless to attempt to consider what the intentions of the author are; we can only examine the “text” itself: it is the only solid evidence we have. Similarly, critics toss up their hands when trying to comprehend the experience of the reader of a text. While the notion of “author” becomes even more complex when we consider film, examining the experience of the film viewer does seem to be attainable: since films are experienced in real time, we can compare the experiences of different viewers while they watch the same portions of a film. We can even chart and compare their body and brain functions across the course of an entire movie.

Monika Suckfüll of University Jena tries to do that in the research she reports in her article “Film Analysis and Psychophysiology: Effects of Moments of Impact and Protagonists” (Media Psychology, 2000). Suckfüll chose to study Jane Campion’s film The Piano, showing it to 62 observers while charting their movements and heart rate. She divided the film into 30-second segments and analyzed it according to Peter Wuss’ theory of film narrative, identifying seven key “moments of impact” in the film, such as when Sam Neill cuts off Holly Hunter’s finger. Suckfüll hypothesized that these moments would be periods of increased attention by film viewers. Previous research has noted that participants’ heart rates tend to decline when they are trying to focus their attention, so monitoring viewers’ heart rates should help confirm or disprove Suckfüll’s hypothesis.

Suckfüll was surprised to find that participants’ heart rates behaved quite unpredictably at these key moments. She did find a correspondence between heart rates and events on the screen, but rather than corresponding to “moments of impact,” they coincided with “topic lines” or motifs. Heart rates rose (signaling anxiety or the “defense reaction”) when the “angel motif” occurred — typically when Anna Paquin was about to betray Hunter. Heart rates declined during the naughty parts (the “sex motif”).

Suckfüll’s discussion seems to indicate disappointment in her results, but they do offer some interesting insight into viewers’ response to film. It seems to me that our physiological reactions to film are occuring over a much shorter time frame than our intellectual reactions. We can determine “moments of impact” in a film only after viewing the whole thing, so real-time analysis of viewers’ responses to the film can never offer a complete explanation of the whole. It is interesting to recall that much of the critique of the film, when it was released, centered on the idea that it was thinly-veiled soft-core porn. Perhaps this reaction could have been predicted, had the filmmakers performed an assessment of the film similar to Suckfüll’s study.