Performing Brains on Screen

Springer eBooks, 2017

This chapter reviews movies from Hollywood that illustrate the effects of many diseases on the brain. These movies cover developmental disorders, disease in the spinal cord, brain stem, and cerebrum. The causes of these disparate injuries include congenital malformations, genetic abnormalities, trauma to the brain, vascular insufficiencies, tumors and infections. All of these selected movies are very entertaining and informative. 22.1 Neuroanatomists, Anatomists, Neurosurgeons, and Neurologists The Neuroanatomy Lesson. Film: Young Frankenstein (1974) In this film directed by Mel Brooks, a professor of neuroanatomy and neurosurgery (played by Gene Wilder) who also is the grandson of a famous and notorious physician lectures to the medical students on the brain stem. Refer to Chap. 2 (5′13″ to 9′ 20″). Subsequent areas of interest related to the abnormal brain occur in the neuropathology laboratory. Refer to Chap. 10 (39′ 30″ to 40′53″). The Provision of Cadavers for Dissection. Film: The Body Snatcher (1945) This film was based on a Robert Louis Stevenson story. In Scotland during early 1800s, a surgeon and anatomist played by Henry Daniell needs bodies for dissection both for teaching purposes and for the development of surgical techniques. Unfortunately, he is forced to deal with two nefarious characters of the title played by Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi who procure freshly buried bodies or perhaps the bodies never even got to be buried. The procurement of bodies for medical education remained problematic in that era. In America the recently opened medical school at Yale was besieged by the citizens of New Haven over this issue. In Massachusetts, the Anatomical Bodies Act finally provided for the provision of the bodies of unclaimed paupers and of unclaimed criminals for the purposes of medical education. A series of films which depict the effects of various disorders on the brain. *Indicates more significant films from a medical standpoint. The chapters and times indicated in some of the citations refer to points on the actual DVD where the critical scenes may be found. The Activities of the Neurosurgeon. Film: The Man with Two Brains (1983) Several of the films below such as Dark Victory detail the role of the neurosurgeon in the treatment of neurological disease. This film stars one of the outstanding comedians and writers of recent years Steve Martin as he manages successfully a traumatic brain injury. Refer to Chaps. 2 and 3 (5′10"to 7′25″). The Creativity of the Neurologist. Film: Freud (1962) This film, directed by John Huston, dissects the early professional career of Sigmund Freud in the practice of neurology in late 1800s, Vienna. Freud played by Montgomery Clift had already significant contributions in the area of neuroanatomy and neuropathology, when he encountered patients with hysterical paralysis. He described these patients in a monograph with an older colleague Joseph Breuer played by Larry Parks. These early studies led to Freud's development of the theories of psychoanalysis, psychosexual development, defense mechanisms, etc. The Neurological Examination. Film: The Fortune Cookie (1966) This film was directed and written by Billy Wilder. The two stars, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, were to appear together in a number of comedies over the years. Lemon is a TV cameraman covering a professional football game. He is run over on the sidelines by a star running back and sustains a concussion. His brotherin-law played by Matthau is an ambulance chasing lawyer who sees many more exciting possibilities of a million dollar settlement from the insurance company. It is in this context that Lemmon encounters the several neurologists who exam him. One "cynical" neurologist suggests in the asides commentary that Lemon may be malingering. Refer to Chaps. 6 and 7 (46′40″ to 52′ 15″). 22.2 Developmental Disorders Neurological Disorder: Reduced Intellectual Capacities. Film: Charly (1968) In this film a man with limited intellectual functions, Charley (Cliff Robertson, Academy Award), develops remarkable intelligence after experimental brain surgery, but then begins to slip back to his former state. Claire Bloom plays his case worker with whom the intelligent Charly has a romance. The movie is based on the novel by Daniel Keyes: Flowers for Algernon.

Mark Changizi has argued that we will understand the mind/brain only when we have an accurate description and inventory of the tasks it must perform. He calls this the teleome. Until we know what a mechanism is built to do, we have no way of understanding the functioning of its parts. The same is true of the mind/brain. I extend Changizi's argument by noting that the appreciation of works of art calls on a full range of human capacities and is thus a rich source of insight into neuro-mental mechanisms. Moreover we have every reason to believe that we can develop sophisticated ways of describing works of art, verbal art and films are my particular focus and interest. Those descriptions will be invaluable for interpreting observations about the brain activity supporting those aesthetic objects.

This text suggests reading of the story of science fiiction films as a leap from space to the mind. This change of direction reveals the way our culture and science have explored the confines of reason, starting outside the body and moving inside it, and the way science fiction films have continued to protect and champion what is truly human: subjectivity.

PAGE PROOFS (please see Projections for finished article): Murray Smith's book "Film, Art, and the Third Culture" makes a significant contribution to cognitive film theory and philosophical aesthetics, expanding the conceptual tools of film analysis to include perspectives from neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. Smith probes assumptions about how cinema affects spectators by examining aspects of experience and neurophysiological responses that are unavailable to conscious, systematic reflection on experience and aesthetic techniques. This article interrogates Smith's account of emotion, empathy, and imagination in cinematic representation and film spectatorship, placing his work in dialogue with other recent interventions in the fields of cinema studies and embodied cognition. Smith's contribution to understanding the role of emotion in screen studies is vital, and when read in conjunction with recent publications by Carl Plantinga and Mark Johnson on ethical engagement and the moral imagination, this new work constitutes a notable advance in film theory.

This article argues that the mid-1960s saw a dramatic shift in how 'brainwashing' was popularly imagined, reflecting Anglo-American developments in the sciences of mind as well as shifts in mass media culture. The 1965 British film The Ipcress File (dir. Sidney J. Furie, starr. Michael Caine) provides a rich case for exploring these interconnections between mind control, mind science and media, as it exemplifies the era's innovations for depicting 'brainwashing' on screen: the film's protagonist is subjected to flashing lights and electronic music, pulsating to the 'rhythm of brainwaves'. This article describes the making of The Ipcress File's brainwashing sequence and shows how its quest for cinematic spectacle drew on developments in cybernetic science, multimedia design and modernist architecture (developments that were also influencing the 1960s psychedelic counter-culture). I argue that often interposed between the disparate endeavours of 1960s mind control, psychological science and media was a vision of the human mind as a 'cybernetic spectator': a subject who scrutinizes how media and other demands on her sensory perception can affect consciousness, and seeks to consciously participate in this mental conditioning and guide its effects.

MIT Press: Embodiment, Enaction, and Culture, 2017

In the first section of this chapter we will review different approaches to the ways that we cognitively engage with film (e.g. by highlighting certain neural responses to different filmic means; means that include the use of cuts, and of different camera and lens movements to portray scenes) and provide a basic embodied interpretation of recent research in this area. In the second section we will address philosophical claims regarding our embodied engagement with film stemming from phenomenological film theory and will provide an initial taxonomy of the roles visual cultural artifacts play in 4EA approaches to the mind. In the third section, we will focus on a more positive claim, namely that familiarization with the filmic medium might change our experience of film as well as our extra filmic perceptual routines over time, a process that has led to the emergence of a filmic body. Cognitive film theory, as portrayed in the first section of this chapter, considers certain filmic techniques to be closer to our preexisting bodily habits than others, and it is because of this vicinity to our natural perceptual routines that such techniques succeed in creating seemingly more realistic situations (e.g. by engaging certain motor components of the brain), or so they argue. We will entertain a thought that stands in opposition to this, namely that we entertain a filmic body in the movie context that adheres to its own rules. When we therefore engage with the medium in bodily terms (in order to have an illusory experience and immerse ourselves in its narrative), this engagement is not simply premised on what could be called our natural body (i.e. a fixed set-up of perceptual mechanism), but on novel skills and habits of perceiving that we have developed through our exposure to the conditions and syntax of film.

ECREA Film Studies Section Conference ‘Research Methods in Film Studies: Challenges and Opportunities’, 2019

The beginning of the 21st century saw the emergence of neurocinematics, the nneuroscience of film, as a new interdisciplinary field that investigates the effect of free viewing of films on the spectators’ brain-activity, searching for similarities in their spatiotemporal responses. This new methodological approach has opened new opportunities for audience research and has provided us with insight on the level of control that aspects of the film language, such as the narrative and the editing, can have over the viewer’s brain states. At the same time, the proliferation of new brain-imaging techniques and technologies, such as the Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs), that enable the interaction, individually or collectively, of the brain of audiences and/or performers with the moving image, has led to the production of interactive videos, films and works of live cinema. A growing number of researchers and filmmakers use these interfaces, not only as creative and storytelling tools, but also as methods of conducting neuroscientific audience research in real-life settings. In this context, this paper presents a review and methodological analysis of relevant studies, following categorisations that are crucial for the interpretation of the results obtained, such as the brain-imaging techniques applied, the environment of the study, the number, type and role of the participants (audience versus performers), and the film form among others. The paper also focuses on how the use of BCIs is changing previous conventions, including discourses of authorship/co-authorship, mise-en-scène and editing, and the reinvention of the film language as embodiment of the audience’s cognitive state. Lastly, a way forward is proposed by looking at the potential of live brain-computer cinema as a new film form that combines live cinema, neurocinematics and the use of BCIs for studying and enabling collective audience interactions in a cinema theatre environment.

Cognitive Neuro film is the very young academic discipline in media studies, which deals about brain relation and response while we watching films. Understanding a film is an astonishing feat of neural and cognitive processing. A series of still pictures are projected quickly on a screen, accompanied by a stream of sound and a viewer has an experience that can be as engaging, emotionally affecting, and memorable as many experiences in real life. Neuro and social scientist are underline the relation of film and neuroscience. The astonishing discovery and the modern innovative and theoretical domains open the fascinating linkage for the neurocinematic of neuro filmic context. The study will explore the relation and its relative context of mirror neuron and Embodied simulation in film narration.

Projections, 2022

In the last decades, the contribution of cognitive neuroscience to fi lm studies has been invested in at least three diff erent lines of research. The fi rst one has to do with fi lm theory and history: the new attention, inspired by cognitive neuroscience, to the viewer's brain-body, the sensorimotor basis of fi lm cognition, and the forms of embodied simulation elicited by the cinematic experience has stimulated a profound rethinking of a relevant part of the theoretical discourse on cinema, from the very beginning of the twentieth century to the most recent refl ections within cognitive fi lm studies and the phenomenology of fi lm. The second line has to do with the intersubjective relationship between the movie-its style, rhythm, characters, and narrative-and the viewer, and it is characterized by an empirical approach that yields very interesting results, useful for rethinking and problematizing our ideas about editing, camera movements, and fi lm reception. The third line concerns a possible experimental approach to the new life of fi lm, focusing on the digital image, the innovative forms of technological mediation, and the inscription of a new fi lm spectatorship within a completely diff erent medial frame. The goal of this special issue is to off er insights across these lines of research.

The connection between film elements and brain responses has been suggested by a number of neurocognitive studies. The studies of event segmentation, in particular, support that film editing conditions cognitive responses. After discussing the findings of these studies, this article draws on Münsterberg and Arnheim's classical cognitive approaches to film as well as on poststructuralist film theory to argue that the event segmentation approach still falls short of accounting for the impact of noncontinuous film stimuli on the brain's event segmentation, while it shares with other neurocognitive film research the tendency to naturalize narrative and continuity editing. Finally, the article points out that by approaching the findings of event segmentation studies from the perspective of complex systems neuroscience, new hypotheses can be drawn on how noncontinuous and complex film stimuli condition our brains by mediating (enabling or disrupting) event segmentation and cognitive patterning.