Movies I Actually Love, Part I

I have mentioned time and again how much I dislike cinema. It pretends to be art but almost always fails to live up to the claim. As entertainment, it is too authoritarian for my taste. There are, however, several films that I love and consider to be as close to works of art as any movies can be. Here they are in no particular order.

1. Before Almodovar sold himself out to Hollywood and started churning out idiotic tear-jerkers of the Hable con ella and Todo sobre mi madre variety, he was actually a great movie-maker. What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984) is, in my opinion, his greatest work. Every frame, every move of every actor, every single word are absolutely amazing. I really wish we could have the early Almodovar back, but obviously that's not going to happen.

2. Before Javier Bardem sold himself out to Hollywood and became the new favorite lap dog of the egregiously untalented Penelope Cruz, he was one of the most gifted actors of his generation. Mondays in the Sun (2002) is so professionally and beautifully made and Bardem is so incredibly good in it that I can't stop watching this film. I'm now on my second DVD because I watched the first one so many times that it became useless.

3. El verdugo (1963) or Executioner by Luis Garcia Berlanga is a classic of Spanish cinema. It is a very quiet, low-key portrayal of how easily and casually one can slip into performing acts of atrocity in the most mundane way possible. In many ways, this film is very symbolic of what the entire XXth century has been like.

4. In case you think I only like Spanish-language movies, you are wrong. Crash (1996) by David Cronenberg (not to be confused with a 2004 film by the same name) is a brilliant movie. It has been criticized by prissy viewers and film critics. Nevertheless, it is one of the most insightful cinematic analyses of sexuality that I have ever seen. The movie's tone is subdued to the point of being flat which is precisely what makes it standout against the background of regular Hollywood concoctions that attempt to deal with sex. Hollywood film-makers and audiences are so terrified of sexuality that they talk, cry, babble and prattle it to death.

5. As I said many times before, nobody knew how to make movies like the Russians. It's very difficult to choose one film that I consider to be the best among the incredible production of the Soviet filmmakers. I guess, Unfinished Piece for the Player Piano (1978) has got to be the winner from the Soviet epoch. The film is based on a play by Anton Chekhov. Chekhov is obviously a genius and making a film based on his work is a huge challenge. Nikita Mikhalkov, the director, used to be so good that he created a version of Chekhov which is better than the original. This is also the only film where Mikhalkov delivers a great performance as an actor. (His acting talents are extremely limited but here he was really good.) Forget about the plot of this movie, just observe how beautifully the director creates the ambiance. The actors are phenomenal, as usual in Soviet movies. 

6. From the post-Soviet era, I recommend Heart of a Dog (1988). This movie is based on a novel by one of the greatest Russian writers of the XXth century, Mikhail Bulgakov. Once again, as amazing as the novel is, the film manages to be almost as good. Unlike the previous movie I listed here, I don't think this one exists with English subtitles. Which is a shame because non-Russian movie-lovers are losing out on something huge here.

(To be continued. . .)

So Has the Movie Atlas Shrugged Already Been Released?

And if so, then why isn't it showing at our local movie theater? I haven't been able to find it anywhere in St. Louis either. I absolutely need to watch this movie, people. Even if I have to schlep all the way to Springfield. And yes, I'm sure that the book must have been mangled horribly in the course of making the movie, but still I have to see it for myself.

Has anybody seen it? Any impressions to share?

A Weird Classification of Transgressions

The movie Sex and the City is on television right now, and I find it as mysterious as when I watched it the first time. One friend's husband cheats on her, and all her friends insist that it's not a big deal and she should forgive him. Another friend's fiance doesn't show up for some stupid, super elaborate wedding ceremony, and everybody supports her in dumping him for that. The second friend (who's in her forties, mind you) starts a huge melodrama because of this silly botched wedding and everybody treats her ridiculous suffering with respect. The first friend doesn't seem to be entitled to a similar (or any) bout of depression because of what happened to her.

Isn't it ridiculous when people earnestly see formalities as more important than the actual content of a relationship? 

The Motorcycle Diaries: A Review

The Free Dictionary offers the following definition of the word "hagiography":

1. Biography of saints.2. A worshipful or idealizing biography

Both these definitions fit Walter Salles's film The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) perfectly. I can only imagine how much Che Guevara would have hated this cheesy, saccharine movie that presents him as a Christian saint / eunuch. 

Gael Garcia Bernal who plays the young Ernesto Guevara is an extremely talented actor. However, he is the last person in the world who should have been cast as Che. Garcia Bernal has a non-macho masculinity that helped him give the performance of his life as a gay teenager in Y tu mama tambien. The first word that comes to my mind whenever I see Garcia Bernal is "sensitive." He is simply unsuited to play a super macho Che Guevara who raved in his diaries about the joys of never washing himself and developing a strong, manly stench.

Of course, like any good saint, Ernesto Guevara of The Motorcycle Diaries resists temptations and performs miracles. He guards his virtue fiercely, even though his best friend, played by the amazing Rodrigo de la Serna, tries to undermine his companion's chastity by offering an example of free and exuberant sexuality. Ernesto also walks on water and cures lepers with his touch in a scene whose Biblical motifs are so strong as to render the whole film unpalatable. The efforts of the creators of this movie to present Ernesto Guevara as an unblemished, sensitive, romantic character end up producing a cardboard figure without a shred of humanity. 

In many ways, Che Guevara is a terrifying figure. A middle-class guy with a good education, he could have practiced medicine and lived comfortably in Argentina. Instead, he chose to become a guerrillero. This man, who'd been trained to cure people, enjoyed participating in executions of those who were branded as counter-revolutionaries. He was fascinated with filth in the most literal sense. Even when his revolution won in Cuba, Che demonstrated that he was one of those revolutionaries who were only happy fighting and destroying. His attempts to inscribe himself into the peaceful process of post-revolutionary rebuilding was a failure.

Movies like The Motorcycle Diaries and books like the one I blogged about earlier today serve the goal of taming the image of the incomprehensible and terrifying revolutionary, transforming him from a figure that threatens the society of consumers into a convenient object of consumption.

The Adjustment Bureau: A Review

For some reason I never realized that The Adjustment Bureau was supposed to be a romantic comedy. I never watch romantic comedies because the whole genre is too saccharine and cliché-ridden for my taste. I thought that The Adjustment Bureau was more along the lines of Inception so I went to see it.

Contrary to what one expects from the genre, the movie is not half bad. None of the actors is particularly annoying or talentless, which is a rare occurrence for a Hollywood movie. There are some really funny jokes at the expense of politicians, and who doesn't like to have a good laugh over the politicians' hypocrisy and ugliness?

One thing, however, left a bad aftertaste. The female lead dumps her fiancé right in the courtroom where they are supposed to get married and runs away with a guy whom she met casually a long time ago but who is the true love of her life. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that you can't meet a person and realize within minutes that this is the most important person in your life and that you will love them forever. Of course, you can. What bothers me, however, is this idea that a person you shared years of your life with can be discarded in a matter of seconds. Even if the relationship sucked, even if you were sick and tired of the person, it still is never easy to leave behind all of the memories, the shared experiences, the traditions, the private jokes that can't fail to accumulate over the years.

I'm not suggesting that people shouldn't dump partners who bore them or whom they don't really love for the sake of a suddenly awakened passion towards somebody else. I think they most definitely should. A loveless life is a life wasted, in my opinion. However, I can't imagine what kind of an emotionally undeveloped monster could dump the previous partner for a virtual stranger without a single pang. 

What's curious, though, is that there are hundreds of movies that insist on presenting precisely this scenario as the recipe for true passion. If this sells, that should mean people are buying it. Probably, so many people are deeply miserable in their personal lives that the fantasy of running away without a second thought proves cathartic.

P.S. I'm really hoping that nobody will leave comments of the "Relationships are hard work" bent. They are not supposed to be, and I'm definitely not trying to elicit this platitude by criticizing another one.

The Almond of Horror

Remember the 90s, when No Fear stuff was cool, and when people still said "cool"?

Well, a new paper has brought No Fear back, by reporting on a woman who has no fear - due to brain damage. The article, The Human Amygdala and the Induction and Experience of Fear, is brought to you by a list of neuroscientists including big names such as Antonio Damasio (of Phineas Gage fame).

The basic story is nice and simple. There's a woman, SM, who lacks a part of the brain called the amygdala. They found that she can't feel fear. Therefore, it's reasonable to assume that the amygdala's required for fear. But there's a bit more to it than that...

The amygdala is a small nugget of the brain nestled in the medial temporal lobe. The name comes from the Greek for "almond" because apparently it looks like one, though I can't say I've noticed the resemblance myself.

What does it do? Good question. There are two main schools of thought. Some think that the amygdala is responsible for the emotion of fear, while others argue that its role is much broader and that it's responsible for measuring the "salience" or importance of stimuli, which covers fear but also much else.

That's where this new paper comes in, with the patient SM. She's not a new patient: she's been studied for years, and many papers have been published about her. I wonder if her acronym doesn't stand for "Scientific Motherlode"?

She's one of the very few living cases of Urbach-Wiethe disease, an extremely rare genetic disorder which causes selective degeneration of the amygdala as well as other symptoms such as skin problems.

Previous studies on SM mostly focussed on specific aspects of her neurological function e.g. memory, perception and so on. However there have been a few studies of her "everyday" experiences and personality. Thus we learned that:

Two experienced clinical psychologists conducted "blind" interviews of SM (the psychologists were not provided any background information)... Both reached the conclusion that SM expressed a normal range of affect and emotion... However, they both noted that SM was remarkably dispassionate when relating highly emotional and traumatic life experiences... To the psychologists, SM came across as a "survivor", as being "resilient" and even "heroic".

These observations were based on interviews under normal conditions; what would happen if you actually went out of your way to try and scare her? So they did.

First, they took her to an exotic pet store and got her to meet various snakes and spiders. She was perfectly happy picking up the various critters and had to be prevented from getting too closely acquainted with the more dangerous ones.

What's fascinating is that before she went to the store, she claimed to hate snakes and spiders! Why? Before she developed Urbach-Wiethe disease, she had a normal childhood up to about the age of 10. Presumably she used to be afraid of them, and just never updated this belief, a great example of how our own narratives about our feelings can clash with our real feelings.

They subsequently confirmed that SM was fearless by taking her to a "haunted asylum" (check it out, even the website is scary) and showing her various horror movie clips, as well as through interviews with herself and her son. They also describe an incredible incident from several years ago: SM was walking home late at night when she saw

A man, whom SM described as looking “drugged-out.” As she walked past the park, the man called out and motioned for her to come over. SM made her way to the park bench. As she got within arm’s reach of the man, he suddenly stood up, pulled her down to the bench by her shirt, stuck a knife to her throat, and exclaimed, “I’m going to cut you, bitch!”

SM claims that she remained calm, did not panic, and did not feel afraid. In the distance she could hear the church choir singing. She looked at the man and confidently replied, “If you’re going to kill me, you’re gonna have to go through my God’s angels first.” The man suddenly let her go. SM reports “walking” back to her home. On the following day, she walked past the same park again. There were no signs of avoidance behavior and no feelings of fear.

All this suggests that the amygdala has a key role in the experience of fear, as opposed to other emotions: there is no evidence to suggest that SM lacks the ability to experience happiness or sadness in the same way.

So this is an interesting contribution to the debate on the role of the amygdala, although we really need someone to do equally detailed studies on other Urbach-Wiethe patients to make sure that it's not just that SM happens to be unusually brave for some other reason. What's doubly interesting, though, is that Ralph Adolphs, one of the authors, has previously argued against the view of the amygdala as a "fear center".

Links: I've previously written about the psychology of horror movies and I've reviewed quite a lot of them too.

Justin S. Feinstein, Ralph Adolphs, Antonio Damasio,, & and Daniel Tranel (2010). The Human Amygdala and the Induction and Experience of Fear Current Biology

The Almond of Horror

Remember the 90s, when No Fear stuff was cool, and when people still said "cool"?

Well, a new paper has brought No Fear back, by reporting on a woman who has no fear - due to brain damage. The article, The Human Amygdala and the Induction and Experience of Fear, is brought to you by a list of neuroscientists including big names such as Antonio Damasio (of Phineas Gage fame).

The basic story is nice and simple. There's a woman, SM, who lacks a part of the brain called the amygdala. They found that she can't feel fear. Therefore, it's reasonable to assume that the amygdala's required for fear. But there's a bit more to it than that...

The amygdala is a small nugget of the brain nestled in the medial temporal lobe. The name comes from the Greek for "almond" because apparently it looks like one, though I can't say I've noticed the resemblance myself.

What does it do? Good question. There are two main schools of thought. Some think that the amygdala is responsible for the emotion of fear, while others argue that its role is much broader and that it's responsible for measuring the "salience" or importance of stimuli, which covers fear but also much else.

That's where this new paper comes in, with the patient SM. She's not a new patient: she's been studied for years, and many papers have been published about her. I wonder if her acronym doesn't stand for "Scientific Motherlode"?

She's one of the very few living cases of Urbach-Wiethe disease, an extremely rare genetic disorder which causes selective degeneration of the amygdala as well as other symptoms such as skin problems.

Previous studies on SM mostly focussed on specific aspects of her neurological function e.g. memory, perception and so on. However there have been a few studies of her "everyday" experiences and personality. Thus we learned that:

Two experienced clinical psychologists conducted "blind" interviews of SM (the psychologists were not provided any background information)... Both reached the conclusion that SM expressed a normal range of affect and emotion... However, they both noted that SM was remarkably dispassionate when relating highly emotional and traumatic life experiences... To the psychologists, SM came across as a "survivor", as being "resilient" and even "heroic".

These observations were based on interviews under normal conditions; what would happen if you actually went out of your way to try and scare her? So they did.

First, they took her to an exotic pet store and got her to meet various snakes and spiders. She was perfectly happy picking up the various critters and had to be prevented from getting too closely acquainted with the more dangerous ones.

What's fascinating is that before she went to the store, she claimed to hate snakes and spiders! Why? Before she developed Urbach-Wiethe disease, she had a normal childhood up to about the age of 10. Presumably she used to be afraid of them, and just never updated this belief, a great example of how our own narratives about our feelings can clash with our real feelings.

They subsequently confirmed that SM was fearless by taking her to a "haunted asylum" (check it out, even the website is scary) and showing her various horror movie clips, as well as through interviews with herself and her son. They also describe an incredible incident from several years ago: SM was walking home late at night when she saw

A man, whom SM described as looking “drugged-out.” As she walked past the park, the man called out and motioned for her to come over. SM made her way to the park bench. As she got within arm’s reach of the man, he suddenly stood up, pulled her down to the bench by her shirt, stuck a knife to her throat, and exclaimed, “I’m going to cut you, bitch!”

SM claims that she remained calm, did not panic, and did not feel afraid. In the distance she could hear the church choir singing. She looked at the man and confidently replied, “If you’re going to kill me, you’re gonna have to go through my God’s angels first.” The man suddenly let her go. SM reports “walking” back to her home. On the following day, she walked past the same park again. There were no signs of avoidance behavior and no feelings of fear.

All this suggests that the amygdala has a key role in the experience of fear, as opposed to other emotions: there is no evidence to suggest that SM lacks the ability to experience happiness or sadness in the same way.

So this is an interesting contribution to the debate on the role of the amygdala, although we really need someone to do equally detailed studies on other Urbach-Wiethe patients to make sure that it's not just that SM happens to be unusually brave for some other reason. What's doubly interesting, though, is that Ralph Adolphs, one of the authors, has previously argued against the view of the amygdala as a "fear center".

Links: I've previously written about the psychology of horror movies and I've reviewed quite a lot of them too.

Justin S. Feinstein, Ralph Adolphs, Antonio Damasio,, & and Daniel Tranel (2010). The Human Amygdala and the Induction and Experience of Fear Current Biology

The Horror, The Horror (Movies)

Previously, I blogged about how the placebo effect is at work when you watch a horror movie. As part of my... research for this post I watched quite a lot of them. Here are my thoughts on some recent ones. Roughly in order of best to worst. Some minor spoilers, but nothing worse than you'd get from the trailer.

• The Last Exorcism - Very scary, and full of surprises. The trailer makes it look like a shameless clone of The Exorcist; it isn't. Gets Neuroskeptic bonus points for the opening bit where the hero, a preacher who's lost his faith, talks about how he keeps doing "exorcisms" because it's psychologically helpful i.e. a placebo effect.
• The Broken - Inventive, intelligent and creepy. A woman starts seeing her own doppelgänger after a car crash. Neuroskeptic bonus points for mentioning Capgras syndrome, a classic neurological disorder. Well worth watching.
• The Signal - A mysterious TV glitch sends people crazy. But who's actually affected, and who's just been sent crazy by the fact that everyone else is going crazy around them? A clever twist on the zombie apocalypse genre, and manages to be both frightening and funny.
  
• Carriers - An airborne Ebola virus wipes out almost everyone. Four teens try to escape. The characters and acting are pretty blah, but the concept is good, and it's well produced.
  
• Dread - Student film-makers decide to make a documentary about people's worst fears, but one of them is a psychopath, so they end up making a Saw movie. Good, if a bit predictable.
  
• The House of the Devil - An attempt at the kind of anticipation-horror that I talked about in my past post - nothing really happens, but the build-up is tense. Up to a point. Then it goes on for another half hour and gets tedious. Missable.
  
• Tell Tale - Pretty standard slasher, except that the serial killer... is an internal organ! Actually not all that bad, but nothing special.
  
• Mutants - Zombies attack survivors holed up in a hospital. In France. Extremely generic, there is no point in watching this if you've seen, well, any other zombie movie from the past 5 years.
• Mulberry Street - "They're rat people, they're f-king rat people!" Some virus strikes New York, turning people into rat people. Who are also psychopaths. More funny than scary, unintentionally. Apparently this was done on basically zero budget: what's disappointing is that it comes across as quite polished despite that - the budget isn't the problem, the script is.

The Horror, The Horror (Movies)

Previously, I blogged about how the placebo effect is at work when you watch a horror movie. As part of my... research for this post I watched quite a lot of them. Here are my thoughts on some recent ones. Roughly in order of best to worst. Some minor spoilers, but nothing worse than you'd get from the trailer.

• The Last Exorcism - Very scary, and full of surprises. The trailer makes it look like a shameless clone of The Exorcist; it isn't. Gets Neuroskeptic bonus points for the opening bit where the hero, a preacher who's lost his faith, talks about how he keeps doing "exorcisms" because it's psychologically helpful i.e. a placebo effect.
• The Broken - Inventive, intelligent and creepy. A woman starts seeing her own doppelgänger after a car crash. Neuroskeptic bonus points for mentioning Capgras syndrome, a classic neurological disorder. Well worth watching.
• The Signal - A mysterious TV glitch sends people crazy. But who's actually affected, and who's just been sent crazy by the fact that everyone else is going crazy around them? A clever twist on the zombie apocalypse genre, and manages to be both frightening and funny.
  
• Carriers - An airborne Ebola virus wipes out almost everyone. Four teens try to escape. The characters and acting are pretty blah, but the concept is good, and it's well produced.
  
• Dread - Student film-makers decide to make a documentary about people's worst fears, but one of them is a psychopath, so they end up making a Saw movie. Good, if a bit predictable.
  
• The House of the Devil - An attempt at the kind of anticipation-horror that I talked about in my past post - nothing really happens, but the build-up is tense. Up to a point. Then it goes on for another half hour and gets tedious. Missable.
  
• Tell Tale - Pretty standard slasher, except that the serial killer... is an internal organ! Actually not all that bad, but nothing special.
  
• Mutants - Zombies attack survivors holed up in a hospital. In France. Extremely generic, there is no point in watching this if you've seen, well, any other zombie movie from the past 5 years.
• Mulberry Street - "They're rat people, they're f-king rat people!" Some virus strikes New York, turning people into rat people. Who are also psychopaths. More funny than scary, unintentionally. Apparently this was done on basically zero budget: what's disappointing is that it comes across as quite polished despite that - the budget isn't the problem, the script is.

The Horror, The Horror

You're watching a horror movie.

The characters are going about their lives, blissfully unaware that something horrifying is about to happen. You the viewer know that things are going to end badly, though, because you know it's a horror movie.

Someone opens a closet - a bloody corpse could fall out! Or they're drinking a glass of water - which could be infected with a virus! Or they're talking to some guy - who's probably a serial killer! And so on.

The effect of this - and a good director can get a lot of mileage from it - is that scenes which would otherwise be entirely mundane, are experienced as scary, purely because you know that something scary is going to happen, so you see potential horror in every innocent little thing. An expectation as to what's going to happen, leads to you interpreting events in a certain way, and this creates certain emotions.

In a medical context, that would be called a placebo effect. Or a nocebo effect when expectations make people feel worse rather than better.

The horror movie analogy is useful, because it shows that placebo effects don't just happen to other people. We all like to think that if we were given a placebo treatment, we wouldn't be fooled. Unlike all those silly, suggestible, placebo responders, we'd stay as sick as ever until we got a proper cure.

I wouldn't be so sure. We're always interpreting the world around us, and interpreting our own thoughts and feelings, on the basis of our expectations and beliefs about what's going on. We don't suddenly stop doing this when it comes to health.

Suppose you have the flu. You feel terrible, and you're out of aspirin. You don't think you'll be able to make that meeting this afternoon, so you phone in sick.

Now, clearly, flu is a real disease, and it really does make you feel ill. But how do you know that you wouldn't be able to handle the meeting? Unless you have an extensive history of getting the flu in all its various forms, this is an interpretation, a best guess as to what you'll feel in the future, and it might be too pessimistic.

Maybe, if you tried, you'd get on OK. Maybe if you had some aspirin that would reassure you enough to give it a go. And just maybe it would still have worked even if those "aspirins" were just sugar pills...

Link: See my previous posts I Feel X, Therefore Y and How Blind is Double Blind?

The Horror, The Horror

You're watching a horror movie.

The characters are going about their lives, blissfully unaware that something horrifying is about to happen. You the viewer know that things are going to end badly, though, because you know it's a horror movie.

Someone opens a closet - a bloody corpse could fall out! Or they're drinking a glass of water - which could be infected with a virus! Or they're talking to some guy - who's probably a serial killer! And so on.

The effect of this - and a good director can get a lot of mileage from it - is that scenes which would otherwise be entirely mundane, are experienced as scary, purely because you know that something scary is going to happen, so you see potential horror in every innocent little thing. An expectation as to what's going to happen, leads to you interpreting events in a certain way, and this creates certain emotions.

In a medical context, that would be called a placebo effect. Or a nocebo effect when expectations make people feel worse rather than better.

The horror movie analogy is useful, because it shows that placebo effects don't just happen to other people. We all like to think that if we were given a placebo treatment, we wouldn't be fooled. Unlike all those silly, suggestible, placebo responders, we'd stay as sick as ever until we got a proper cure.

I wouldn't be so sure. We're always interpreting the world around us, and interpreting our own thoughts and feelings, on the basis of our expectations and beliefs about what's going on. We don't suddenly stop doing this when it comes to health.

Suppose you have the flu. You feel terrible, and you're out of aspirin. You don't think you'll be able to make that meeting this afternoon, so you phone in sick.

Now, clearly, flu is a real disease, and it really does make you feel ill. But how do you know that you wouldn't be able to handle the meeting? Unless you have an extensive history of getting the flu in all its various forms, this is an interpretation, a best guess as to what you'll feel in the future, and it might be too pessimistic.

Maybe, if you tried, you'd get on OK. Maybe if you had some aspirin that would reassure you enough to give it a go. And just maybe it would still have worked even if those "aspirins" were just sugar pills...

Link: See my previous posts I Feel X, Therefore Y and How Blind is Double Blind?

Inception for Dummies

If you haven't watched Inception yet, don't read this post. It's great and I don't want to spoil it for you. So stop. You didn't though, did you, you're still reading this right now. Well, I warned you.

Inception as everyone knows is about people who can hack into other people's dreams to access their subconcious. The plot concerns their attempts to achieve, well, inception - putting an idea into someone's mind, which makes what they usually do, stealing secret ideas, seem easy by comparison.

The problem is that it's easy to plant an idea, but the victim always knows that it's an external imposition - they don't really believe it. Leonardo DiCaprio comes up with the plan of going into the victim's subconcious's subconcious, and planting an emotional idea about his father, in order to lead him to conclude, on his own, that he should break up his father's business empire. I'm not sure what Freud would have thought of this plan.

Could you actually do this? Well. Hacking into people's dreams is high fantasy: we have absolutely no idea how you'd do that, and in the movie the only explanation we get is that it involves fancy machines and unspecified drugs. It's safe to say no-one will be gatecrashing your dream party any time soon.

But here's one way to achieve the same kind of effect, inspired by two recent papers: this one that I wrote about in my last post, finding that electrical stimulation of the hippocampus produces temporary amnesia, and this one covered at Neurophilosophy, finding that stimulating a mouse's lateral amygdala at the same time as playing it a noise makes it fear that noise.

Simple fear conditioning happens in the amygdala, not the hippocampus (although conditioned fear to some partiuclarly complex stimuli, like places, does.) So assuming you were a neurosurgeon with a desire to do some inception and no ethical scruples whatsoever, here's what you might decide to do.

Knock your victim out with a sedative. Keep them unconscious while you implant electrodes in their hippocampus and their amygdala. Wake them up, but make sure that you constantly stimulate their hippocampus to disrupt it, from the moment they awake. This will leave them fully aware, but will mean they'll have no subsequent concious memory of what you do, because such concious declarative memories depend upon the hippocampus.

Now, you condition them to fear something, by showing it to them whilst stimulating their lateral amygdala. (To be honest, you could just give them a slap in the face and it would probably be just as effective - but that would be a bit unrefined. This is a high-tech evil medical procedure, not a common punch-up.) Maybe you could make them scared of the face of a business rival who you don't want them to cut a deal with. Or you could make a terrorist leader abhor the symbols of his own ideology. The possibilities are endless.

Once you're done, sedate them again and return them to their house. Yeah, you'd have to do this all in the course of one night, but no-one said Inception was going to be easy. With any luck, they'll wake up with no concious recollection of anything, but with the emotional conditioning still intact.

The lack of memory is of course crucial: if they remembered what had happened, they'd realize that the conditioning was an external imposition, and wouldn't be swayed by it. And they'd bust you to the cops, obviously. But without that concious knowledge as to the true source of the feelings, they'd have no alternative interpretation of the fear they now feel - they'd take it as their own, and really start to dislike whatever it was you'd made them afraid of, constructing elaborate rationalizations along the way. The dream is real...

Inception for Dummies

If you haven't watched Inception yet, don't read this post. It's great and I don't want to spoil it for you. So stop. You didn't though, did you, you're still reading this right now. Well, I warned you.

Inception as everyone knows is about people who can hack into other people's dreams to access their subconcious. The plot concerns their attempts to achieve, well, inception - putting an idea into someone's mind, which makes what they usually do, stealing secret ideas, seem easy by comparison.

The problem is that it's easy to plant an idea, but the victim always knows that it's an external imposition - they don't really believe it. Leonardo DiCaprio comes up with the plan of going into the victim's subconcious's subconcious, and planting an emotional idea about his father, in order to lead him to conclude, on his own, that he should break up his father's business empire. I'm not sure what Freud would have thought of this plan.

Could you actually do this? Well. Hacking into people's dreams is high fantasy: we have absolutely no idea how you'd do that, and in the movie the only explanation we get is that it involves fancy machines and unspecified drugs. It's safe to say no-one will be gatecrashing your dream party any time soon.

But here's one way to achieve the same kind of effect, inspired by two recent papers: this one that I wrote about in my last post, finding that electrical stimulation of the hippocampus produces temporary amnesia, and this one covered at Neurophilosophy, finding that stimulating a mouse's lateral amygdala at the same time as playing it a noise makes it fear that noise.

Simple fear conditioning happens in the amygdala, not the hippocampus (although conditioned fear to some partiuclarly complex stimuli, like places, does.) So assuming you were a neurosurgeon with a desire to do some inception and no ethical scruples whatsoever, here's what you might decide to do.

Knock your victim out with a sedative. Keep them unconscious while you implant electrodes in their hippocampus and their amygdala. Wake them up, but make sure that you constantly stimulate their hippocampus to disrupt it, from the moment they awake. This will leave them fully aware, but will mean they'll have no subsequent concious memory of what you do, because such concious declarative memories depend upon the hippocampus.

Now, you condition them to fear something, by showing it to them whilst stimulating their lateral amygdala. (To be honest, you could just give them a slap in the face and it would probably be just as effective - but that would be a bit unrefined. This is a high-tech evil medical procedure, not a common punch-up.) Maybe you could make them scared of the face of a business rival who you don't want them to cut a deal with. Or you could make a terrorist leader abhor the symbols of his own ideology. The possibilities are endless.

Once you're done, sedate them again and return them to their house. Yeah, you'd have to do this all in the course of one night, but no-one said Inception was going to be easy. With any luck, they'll wake up with no concious recollection of anything, but with the emotional conditioning still intact.

The lack of memory is of course crucial: if they remembered what had happened, they'd realize that the conditioning was an external imposition, and wouldn't be swayed by it. And they'd bust you to the cops, obviously. But without that concious knowledge as to the true source of the feelings, they'd have no alternative interpretation of the fear they now feel - they'd take it as their own, and really start to dislike whatever it was you'd made them afraid of, constructing elaborate rationalizations along the way. The dream is real...

The Crazies

I just watched The Crazies, a remake of Romero's 1973 original of the same name, about a small town struck by an outbreak of insanity following a biological weapon accident. It's not for the faint of heart: I was unsettled by a number of the scenes and I watch a lot of horror movies.

Which is to say, it's excellent. It maintains a high pitch of tension through the whole 100 minutes, something that a lot of horror doesn't manage. All too often, I find, a movie will start out scary enough, but then by some point about half way through it's effectively turned into an action movie.

This happens when the nature of the monster/killer/zombies have been revealed and all the protagonists have to do is fight it out - with the uncertainty gone, the horror goes, too. Without giving too much away, The Crazies avoids this trap. (The last great horror movie I saw, Paranormal Activity, does too, although in a very different way).

Of course the real reason I liked this movie is that it's got some neuroscience. The Crazies is (spoilers) about an engineered virus that infects the brain. Early symptoms include fever, blank stares, flattened emotions and stereotypies. This then progresses, over the course of about 48 hours, to psychopathic aggression, at least in some cases, although other victims just become confused. The "crazies" are somewhat like zombies - they have a Zombie Spectrum Disorder, one might say - but they retain enough of their personality and intelligence to be capable of much more elaborate and calculating violence than the average braaaaaaains-muncher, which is what makes them so disturbing.

Could a virus do that? Rabies, notoriously, causes aggression in animals and humans, although the incubation period is weeks rather than days, and aggression is only one of many neurological symptoms of the disease. But maybe an engineered virus could achieve a more specific effect if it was able to selectively infect the area of the brain reported on in this rather scary paper:

The authors report a patient with advanced PD, successfully treated by bilateral stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus, who developed acute transient aggressive behavior during intraoperative electrical test stimulation. The electrode responsible for this abnormal behavior was located within the lateral part of the posteromedial hypothalamic region (triangle of Sano). The authors suggest that affect can be dramatically modulated by the selective manipulation of deep brain structures.

The Crazies

I just watched The Crazies, a remake of Romero's 1973 original of the same name, about a small town struck by an outbreak of insanity following a biological weapon accident. It's not for the faint of heart: I was unsettled by a number of the scenes and I watch a lot of horror movies.

Which is to say, it's excellent. It maintains a high pitch of tension through the whole 100 minutes, something that a lot of horror doesn't manage. All too often, I find, a movie will start out scary enough, but then by some point about half way through it's effectively turned into an action movie.

This happens when the nature of the monster/killer/zombies have been revealed and all the protagonists have to do is fight it out - with the uncertainty gone, the horror goes, too. Without giving too much away, The Crazies avoids this trap. (The last great horror movie I saw, Paranormal Activity, does too, although in a very different way).

Of course the real reason I liked this movie is that it's got some neuroscience. The Crazies is (spoilers) about an engineered virus that infects the brain. Early symptoms include fever, blank stares, flattened emotions and stereotypies. This then progresses, over the course of about 48 hours, to psychopathic aggression, at least in some cases, although other victims just become confused. The "crazies" are somewhat like zombies - they have a Zombie Spectrum Disorder, one might say - but they retain enough of their personality and intelligence to be capable of much more elaborate and calculating violence than the average braaaaaaains-muncher, which is what makes them so disturbing.

Could a virus do that? Rabies, notoriously, causes aggression in animals and humans, although the incubation period is weeks rather than days, and aggression is only one of many neurological symptoms of the disease. But maybe an engineered virus could achieve a more specific effect if it was able to selectively infect the area of the brain reported on in this rather scary paper:

The authors report a patient with advanced PD, successfully treated by bilateral stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus, who developed acute transient aggressive behavior during intraoperative electrical test stimulation. The electrode responsible for this abnormal behavior was located within the lateral part of the posteromedial hypothalamic region (triangle of Sano). The authors suggest that affect can be dramatically modulated by the selective manipulation of deep brain structures.

Snow White

Yesterday we watched a few Disney movies. My Dad said that he had never seen Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs. I'm not sure about that. But that's what he said. He liked it a lot. He told me that the next time we go to Disney World, he wants to buy something with the Dwarfs on it. I think he should get a coffee mug. :)

Sarita told him that he looked like Doc. I think he is more like Happy. My Dad didn't really know who we were talking about. He just knew who Sleepy, Doopey, and Grumpy were. Doopey reminds him of Sancho. He's pretty silly like that! And Grumpy, he knows Grumpy. Because my Nana has some pjs and a sweatshirt with Grumpy on them. My Nana says that she is like Grumpy in the morning. My Dad agrees. :) She just doesn't like the mornings. My Dad is like that. But coffee always makes him feel better. I hope we get to see Snow White again with my Nana! :) C

Zombies!

Splinter and Quarantine are both very good horror movies that you might not have heard of. You should watch them, if you like scares - they're both "zombie movies", of a kind, but with enough originality and twists to keep them interesting.

Helpfully, they're both on the iStore. And on torrents, obviously, but neither was big-budget, and the filmmakers deserve your money, so you should really pay for them.

Maybe it's just because I share their interest in brains, but I've always preferred zombie movies to vampire ones. Vampires just aren't scary - at least in most modern portrayals, they're little more than psychopaths with a light allergy. They're too, well, human, to really horrify.

That's not to say there aren't some good vampire movies: Let The Right One In was great, and 30 Days of Night was pretty fun if nothing else - but as horror, which is the genre they always end up in, they just don't work for me.

Zombies!

Splinter and Quarantine are both very good horror movies that you might not have heard of. You should watch them, if you like scares - they're both "zombie movies", of a kind, but with enough originality and twists to keep them interesting.

Helpfully, they're both on the iStore. And on torrents, obviously, but neither was big-budget, and the filmmakers deserve your money, so you should really pay for them.

Maybe it's just because I share their interest in brains, but I've always preferred zombie movies to vampire ones. Vampires just aren't scary - at least in most modern portrayals, they're little more than psychopaths with a light allergy. They're too, well, human, to really horrify.

That's not to say there aren't some good vampire movies: Let The Right One In was great, and 30 Days of Night was pretty fun if nothing else - but as horror, which is the genre they always end up in, they just don't work for me.