The great unknowns

Have you heard about the invention that cures your smartphone addiction? Whereas normally you can’t go more than a minute or two without checking your phone, this invention allows you to sit with the thing safely tucked away in your pocket or bag, not giving it a second thought. The invention is known as the ‘quiz’.

You’d have thought that smartphones would have killed off this British institution. A pub quiz, with the answer to every question in the world just a fumbled, sneaky glance away? Surely cheating would become rife, rendering the whole exercise pointless? But that hasn’t happened. There’s something about a quiz that returns us to our pre-smartphone mindset, where if we didn’t know something, we didn’t know it. In fact we like being in this position. We love, to borrow Donald Rumsfeld’s phrase, a ‘known unknown’. There is a joy in for once having to wait to find out. In a world of instant answers, the pub quiz shows that we still have the capacity to delay our gratification.

‘The avocado,’ for instance, ‘derives its name from which part of the body?’ Ask that in a quiz, and despite the fact that Wikipedia is sitting on everyone’s phone, itching to give them the solution, they will instead sit there enjoying the challenge of working it out. What’s more, that effort is undertaken as part of a team: there’s something very social about a quiz. ‘After which 20th century person is Cristiano Ronaldo named?’ You might start to consider famous Christophers, but then one member of your team will point out that Ronaldo is a given name as well, and your reasoning will go in a different direction.