The Probability of Eating Chapstick: What a Multiverse Film Taught Me About Human Cognition
In 2022, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert released Everything Everywhere All at Once, a film that won seven Academy Awards and quietly introduced millions of viewers to one of the most useful cognitive frameworks I have encountered in two decades of designing creative thinking activities. The mechanic is called verse-jumping. To access the skills of an alternate version of yourself in a parallel universe, you must perform an action in your current reality that has the lowest possible statistical probability of occurring. Eat chapstick. Get a paper cut between your fingers. Say something deeply inappropriate at a funeral. The universe's probability engine stutters, and your consciousness syncs with a timeline where that absurd action was the normal thing to do.
What struck me was not the absurdist comedy, though the hot dog fingers and raccoon puppeteers are genuinely inspired. What struck me was that the film had accidentally dramatized a problem I had been circling for years through the Grandomastery platform: the human brain's catastrophic inability to distinguish between different degrees of improbability.
There is a concept in cognitive science called surface level knowledge, where a person memorizes isolated facts without grasping meaning, context, or application. It is the kind of understanding that lets you pass a multiple choice test but falls apart the moment you need to apply what you know to a novel situation. I see a parallel phenomenon in how people handle randomness and creative spontaneity. Most learners, when asked to do something "random" or "improbable," default to what I would call performative weirdness. They pick the most socially shocking option available and call it creative. But social shock is not the same as statistical impossibility.
A person screaming in a library is weird, but it happens every week in every major city. A person attempting to legally subpoena the concept of acoustics for a noise violation has never happened and will never happen, because it requires treating an abstract branch of physics as a sentient legal entity.
This distinction matters enormously, and it is the distinction that the Grandomastery EEAAO activity was designed to train.
The activity drops participants into inescapable, high-stakes social predicaments, the kind of mundane nightmares that actually happen to real people. You have accidentally sent a deeply personal voice note to your entire department Slack channel. You have called your boss by your ex's name during a performance review. You have waved enthusiastically at someone who was waving at the person behind you. These are not life or death scenarios. They are the small, crushing embarrassments that make you wish the floor would open up and swallow you whole.
The task is to identify, from four options, the single least probable action that would allow you to verse-jump out of the situation, with two attempts and detailed diagnostic feedback on failure. The options are carefully calibrated across a spectrum of improbability. One option is usually a logical, highly probable damage control tactic, the kind of thing most people would actually do. Another is a bizarre but physically possible panic response. A third might be a transparent lie or an extreme overreaction that is still within the bounds of physical reality. And the correct answer is always something that violates a fundamental law, whether biological, physical, conceptual, or legal. It treats an inanimate object as a sentient being with legal rights. It attempts to biologically transform a human body through willpower alone. It conducts a financial transaction with a weather phenomenon.
The reason this works as a cognitive training tool connects to something Abraham Flexner wrote about nearly a century ago in his essay on the usefulness of useless knowledge. Flexner argued that curiosity-driven exploration without immediate practical application is what fuels long-term creative breakthroughs, because it builds a broad base of knowledge from which novel connections can emerge. The EEAAO activity forces participants to think about probability at a granular level that has no immediate practical application in their daily lives. Nobody needs to calculate whether suing a glass door for assault is less probable than pretending to inspect its hinges. But the mental process of making that calculation, of distinguishing between social absurdity and conceptual impossibility, develops exactly the kind of higher-order thinking skills that transfer to complex problem solving across domains.
This connects to what researchers in the non-algorithmic capability framework identify as intrinsically human cognitive processes that resist automation. Humor, intuition, spontaneity, creative irrationality, these are the domains where human minds still outperform machine intelligence. An AI can generate a list of "random" actions, but it struggles with the nuanced judgment of whether pretending to be a malfunctioning audio guide robot is more or less probable than attempting to telepathically download silence into the auditory cortex of everyone in a library via Bluetooth frequencies. That judgment requires understanding physical possibility alongside conceptual coherence, legal frameworks, biological constraints, and the subtle social norms that govern human behavior in specific contexts.
I have noticed something else through running this activity with advanced learners. Many second language speakers, and indeed many native speakers, suffer from what could be called identity flattening and low conceptual layering. They produce single-layer thoughts with minimal subtext or complexity. When faced with a creative or improvisational task, they default to the safest, most generic response available. The EEAAO activity, by forcing participants to evaluate four options that all sound superficially absurd, pushes them past that flatness. They have to articulate why one form of absurdity is fundamentally different from another. They have to build arguments about the nature of reality, about what constitutes a legal entity, about whether sound waves have physical mass. This is palimpsest thinking in action, layering multiple perspectives and knowledge domains on top of one another to create new meaning.
The film itself arrives at a surprisingly similar philosophical conclusion. In a multiverse where every possible outcome exists and therefore nothing matters, the most radical, statistically improbable thing a person can do is choose to be kind, to stay present, to do laundry and taxes with the person they love. The verse-jumping mechanic is ultimately a metaphor for breaking free of deterministic patterns, for refusing to let probability dictate your choices. The Grandomastery EEAAO activity operationalizes that metaphor into a trainable cognitive skill.
There is a concept from Deleuze and Guattari called rhizomatic learning, where knowledge grows in non-hierarchical, networked patterns, and any point can connect to any other point. The activity embodies this. A participant might enter thinking about probability and leave having accidentally learned something about contract law, human biology, the physics of sound waves, and the nature of corporate governance, all because they needed to figure out why you cannot legally adopt a sneeze as an employee.
That is the kind of learning that sticks. It emerges from genuine curiosity and the pleasure of absurdity rather than from a curriculum map. It is, to borrow from the Four C Model of Creativity, a bridge between little-c everyday creative problem solving and pro-c deliberate practice in domain mastery. The participant is developing cognitive flexibility, bisociation, and the ability to think at the level of process and function rather than just substance.
The film's creators understood something that educational designers often forget. Structured engagement with chaos is one of the most reliable catalysts for the kind of deep, transferable thinking that prepares people for genuinely complex challenges. The Grandomastery platform has been exploring this territory since 2004, building activities that use randomness as a cognitive engine rather than a gimmick. The EEAAO module is simply the latest iteration, one that happens to owe its conceptual architecture to a movie about a laundromat owner fighting a bagel-shaped nihilist across infinite dimensions.
If that sounds absurd, I would refer you back to the core mechanic. The most useful thing you can do in a universe governed by probability is sometimes the least probable thing. The question is whether you can tell the difference between genuinely improbable and merely weird.
References
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. A24. View on IMDb
Grandomastery platform and activities: grandomastery.com
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