Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This movie is a flawed masterpiece – it’s way too long, it’s a lot more depressing than the subject matter necessarily requires, but it’s fascinating. It makes for a lot of interesting thinking about theatre and art and representation, but when I was watching it, I kept thinking, ‘This is exactly the sort of thing that we in the lab do every day!’ We try to build models of the human mind, we try to understand how it is that our brain can represent the outside world, and if there’s something in the brain that represents the outside world, what represents that bit of the brain to itself?
On to your last choice, the 2008 movie, Synecdoche, New York, directed by Charlie Kaufman.
This movie is a flawed masterpiece – it’s way too long, it’s a lot more depressing than the subject matter requires, but it’s fascinating. It’s the story of a theatre playwright/director’s mind and his attempt to portray the mind in a play. So there’s a lot of introspective, self-aware art-making going on. He is trying to make a play that is true: that is truly true, meaning he is trying to portray his life in a play, he is trying to portray the entire outside world as it’s perceived in his mind, he’s trying to portray every event in his life. But then, of course, in the end you get the problem that he tries to portray himself making the play about his life, which leads to an infinite regress loop. And it makes for a lot of interesting thinking about theatre and art and representation. But when I was watching it, I kept thinking, ‘This is exactly the sort of thing that we in the lab do every day! We try to build models of the human mind, we try to understand how it is that our brain can represent the outside world, and if there’s something in the brain that represents the outside world, what represents that bit of the brain to itself? It reminded me of this naïve image I had as a child of what goes on in the brain – I also saw it later in the Woody Allen movie, Everything You Wanted to Know about Sex, but Were Afraid to Ask. There’s a brilliant scene in there that takes place in someone’s brain while he’s on a date. As a child I always imagined the brain as being something like that, populated by little people, who walked around carrying out various roles. I used to imagine someone sitting behind each eye, looking out and relaying the information on. But then, of course, the problem becomes, who is in their heads? And who is in the heads of those people who are in their heads? And that leads to what is known as an infinite regress. The term is philosophical, but I used to wonder about these things aged four or five. It’s not hard to grasp this problem on a philosophical level, and understand why it’s a problem – and I think this particular movie does a really good job of portraying it in a work of art.
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David Carmel is a research scientist at the Carrasco Lab, part of New York University’s Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science. His area of research is Consciousness, with an emphasis on visual awareness.
