Research finds that moviegoers will eat popcorn even if it's stale.

Luke Burgis' "The One and the Ninety-Nine" explores how context silently influences our creative behavior.

He points to Ornette Coleman, who built spaces that removed cues, freeing creators from audience pressures.

Liminal spaces break feedback loops, but work best as temporary resets rather than permanent states.

As the lights go down in the movie theatre, you reflexively reach into the bucket of popcorn on your lap and start eating. You notice that the first bite is a bit stale, but you persist. By the time the previews are over, you look down and are shocked at what you see. How did you consume half the bucket without a thought?

The answer, in short, is the power of context.

A 2009 study at Duke University found that habitual moviegoers would eat popcorn in a theater regardless of whether they were full, and regardless of whether the popcorn was any good. Researchers intentionally made some of it stale. Didn't matter. In a movie theater, habitual popcorn eaters ate popcorn.

But when those same people were moved to a school library, the spell broke. They rejected the popcorn when they were full. They rejected it when it tasted bad. As the research paper distills, "People, when they perform a behavior a lot, outsource the control of the behavior to the environment."

The context cues the behavior, the behavior reinforces the context, and before long, we've handed over the keys without realizing we were ever holding them. This is true of snacking, and it's true of something considerably more consequential: how we create.

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