Slow Motion

Neuroscience and psychology researchers have found, over the years, that our judgements are influenced by our capacity to process information we take in and recall.

We seem to have an in-built positive bias toward information we can more easily parse as we perceive it—information for which we have high "processing fluency"—and we tend to have the same toward information we more capably recall later, as well.

One theory as to why this might be the case is that our positive affect toward more casually grokkable information is the result of an internal reward system that encourages us to understand things: we take pleasure in acquiring new information, working through that data to derive meaning, and in recalling that information later as we use it for (ostensibly) survival- and procreation-related purposes.

Thus, we may tend to prefer things that are easy to understand and recall because such things grant us the dual benefit of triggering that intrinsic, information-related reward system, alongside our more holistic reward system related to saving energy (all else being equal we will generally prefer things that require we expend less energy, including cognitive energy).