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Dead or Alive
From the exhaustive analysis of the Sopranos finale, The Definitive Explanation of the End, which is also an exhausting endeavor to read (even for a hardcore Sopranos fan),
The POV pattern [established in Hosten's Diner in the final episode] caused the viewer to expect to see who was coming through the door from Tony’s POV. When the bell rang, Tony looked up. Our brains were conditioned by Chase to think that we were going to see Meadow . In a sense this was a Pavlovian type response. The fact that so many thought the last shot was Meadow is a tribute to David Chase and how effective his POV pattern really was.
It isn’t really Pavlovian, though, because that’s a matter of overt conditioning. The more precise description for what happened there takes us back to probabilistic prediction.
This is how the brain works – show it something and it’ll create a pattern. Sopranos-watching brains followed the POV pattern, remembered it, and made the prediction that Meadow was walking through the door. When she didn’t, many of us noticed a striking dissonance. The rest of us just filled in the missing information and “saw” her as they thought they were going to.
From Jeff Hawkins’ On Intelligence,
When you listen to a familiar melody, you hear the next note in your head before it occurs. When you listen to a favorite album, you hear the beginning of each next song a couple of seconds before it starts. What’s happening? Neurons in your brain that will fire when you hear that next note fire in advance of your actually hearing it, and so you “hear” the song in your head. The neurons fire in response to memory.
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When listening to people speak, you often know what they’re going to say before they’ve finished speaking – or at least you think you know! Sometimes we don’t even listen to what the speaker actually says and instead hear what we expect to hear. [...] Of course, we don’t always know all the time what others are going to say. Prediction is not always exact. [...] Sometimes we know exactly what is going to happen, other times our expectations are distributed among several possibilities.
And that last sentence can pretty neatly be applied to the many varied interpretations of what exactly happened in the conclusion of the Sopranos. However, I’m with “Master of Sopranos”. Tony’s dead.