More Than You Want to Know?

Dissertations nurtured for seasons spontaneously unravel in single moments: "We spent a long time on the theory that there was no plane crash, that everyone had been knocked unconscious, flown to the island and arranged on the beach," says Jay Glatfelter, a spoiler site regular and college student who created "The Lost Podcast" with his father, Jack. A later episode showed the crash from an outsider's perspective; the Glatfelters realized they were wrong.

There is a lot of being wrong in the guessing business. Most of the regulars visiting these sites are average viewers; they have no insider knowledge of the show's master plan. They analyze bits of dialogue but cannot verify their predictions. When real spoiler info does appear on the sites, filtered down from people who know people, or lifted from "Lost" cast member interviews, such morsels often have nothing to do with the show's mysteries: Someone is going to kiss someone else this episode!

No, we want more than that. We want answers, not breadcrumbs.

But why?

After all, the mysteries people "solve" have never really been mysteries but rather things that the writers intended to reveal all along. And now that producers have announced that the series will end in two short years, why can't we just let ourselves sit back and be entertained?

The answer to that lies, partly, in the phenomenon that psychologists and behavioral economists call "dynamic inconsistency" -- our brain's inability to reconcile what we want now with what we will want later.

"Right now, you feel this overwhelming desire to know the outcome of something," says Jonathan Cohen, who researches dynamic inconsistency at Princeton. "In the future, when you're actually reading the last chapter you wonder why you couldn't wait."

This field of study is still new, but Cohen's team postulates that the drive for immediate gratification is located in our "lizard brains" -- the instinctual part that believes our needs must be met now. The uniquely human part of our brains, the patient part that can recognize the value of waiting and savoring and saving, often loses out to the reptile, even now, even after all this evolution.

Blame the desire to read the last page first on your caveman ancestors.

Or, blame it on the Internet.

"This is really about unfolding narratives and our decreasing ability to live in the unknown," says M.J. Ryan, author of "The Power of Patience."

While humans may have always wanted to know what happens next (See: rabid readers of Charles Dickens's "The Old Curiosity Shop," released in installments in 1840), Ryan says the Internet has transformed that feeling from a desire to an entitlement.