Our Brains on Film: Neurocinematics with Heather Berlin

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk.

I’m Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.

Got Chuck Nice with me.

Chuck, baby.

Hey, Neil, what’s happening?

All right, all right.

Today’s going to be Cosmic Queries.

And you know what the subject is going to be?

Oh, my, this is a good subject, this is a good subject.

Your brain on movies.

Your brain on movies.

OK, now I remember the commercials where my brain was in a skillet.

Oh, I remember that one.

Yeah, your brain on drugs.

And this is your brain on breakfast.

Chuck, how old are you?

That commercial was 1971 or something.

No way.

I think that was the 90s.

Yeah, they took a fried egg and dropped it into a very hot skillet.

This is your brain on drugs.

And every time I saw it, I was like, and now I’m hungry.

Now I’m just hungry.

I just want breakfast now.

Well, this is a brain episode and we don’t do brain things without our Brain Brainiac at Large.

Heather Berlin, Heather, welcome back to StarTalk.

Hey, how are you guys doing?

Thanks for having me.

Brainiac at Large.

That’s going to be my new cell heading, Dr.

Heather Berlin.

Brain Brainiac at Large.

Yeah, and so you’re a neuroscientist at the Icahn School of Medicine in Mount Sinai and right here in New York City.

So it’s great to have you back for the gazillionth time.

We love the brain as a subject and especially since I don’t have any expertise, I get to learn something for every one of these episodes.

That’s part of why we love you as a guest because I get to learn.

But first, let me start off with some questions.

There are a subset of movies that specialize in unusual things going on in people’s brains.

Some of them are just really smart people and they become the subject of it.

But there’s also what’s going on in the brain of the person watching the movie.

It seems to be more than just entertainment.

Sometimes extra changes are going on in people’s heads.

And one of the biggest ones that people always ask about is, do violent movies make you violent?

Do they desensitize you?

Can you distinguish between fiction violence and actual violence?

And if you do, then what’s everybody complaining about?

And if you can’t, why hasn’t all that been outlawed 100 years ago?

There have been some neuroimaging studies which look at what happens in people’s brains when they’re watching violent videos, let’s say a riot or somebody getting beaten up, and they compare it to when they’re viewing a natural scene.

And what they find is actually when they’re viewing violence images, they get decreased activation of parts of their prefrontal cortex.

If it was the scene of an actual riot or one that was created with actors, most of the time it won’t make a difference in terms of that decreased activation in the prefrontal cortex because the more engrossed you are in a film, and there are other measures that can look at level of engrossment, the more you perceive that as your reality.

And so it can decrease your prefrontal cortex activation, and in turn, you might be more prone toward either impulsive or violent behavior for a short period of time after you’ve watched that film.

So now, what happens if you’re looking at the nature scene and you just feel like killing flowers?

Then what’s that mean?

Or trouncing on the grasses.

Right.

You just want to stomp dandelions.

I think we have a different sense of killing plants than we do of killing animals.

But here’s what’s really interesting.

There are measures.

There’s a whole field now called neurocinematics, which is basically the study of what your brain looks like when you’re watching film.

And one of the big measures they look at is something called intersubject correlation.

So it’s not what areas of the brain are active in your particular brain, per se, when you’re watching a film.

But they’ll look across many subjects, all watching the same film.

And the level at which their brain activation syncs up is a measure of how engrossing that film is, how much it’s able to capture your attention.

And films vary in their ability to do this.

So, for example, the highest intersubject correlation in this study was Alfred Hitchcock film.

So he was a master at using cinematography and all this little sound and light to grab people’s attention and draw them in and play them like a violin, whereas other films, less so, like compared to a Larry David episode, for example, which is more sort of naturalistic.

It was less intersubject correlation.

There was an analysis just right into playing it exactly what you said, Heather.

I’ve watched an analysis of a Hitchcock film.

Forgive me, I don’t remember which.

But somebody is walking down the stairs of this home with a glass of milk, which has poison in it.

And they’re going to feed the glass of milk to the person and kill them.

And your eye goes straight to the milk.

And I don’t learn until this is analyzed by the reviewers that Alfred Hitchcock put a light bulb inside the glass of milk, which gave it a kind of a glow.

But you just see it as white.

Milk is white.

So it’s just white.

But it caught your attention.

And you’re not even thinking that it’s glowing.

You’re just thinking it’s milk.

But so he was really right in there to do this.

Interesting.

And also he was very good at creating the tension necessary to grab your gaze.

So in Psycho, you never saw her get stabbed.

It just didn’t happen.

You know, for all you knew, she had a bloody nose because you never saw a knife go into her.

You know, and then I forget the other one where there’s a bomb under the table.

And the whole idea is, you know, there’s a bomb under the table, but the people don’t know there’s a bomb under the table.

So you’re now feeling the anxiety as if you were sitting at the table, but you can’t tell these people there’s a bomb there.

Like, get up, get out, you know.

But here’s the thing, it’s that suspense is what draws people.

Because once these sort of surprise happens or, you know, the guy jumps out from behind the closet, it’s kind of it’s over.

Then you just have this full like fear response.

But the build up is what draws you in.

That’s your feargasm.

That was your feargasm.

For those who love it.

But it’s the build up that’s the real, you know, that’s what draws you in.

What’s going to happen?

When is it going to happen?

Where should I look?

They also have done eye tracking studies.

So on certain films, you know, you look across many subjects and they’re all concentrated at looking at the same places on the screen.

But when you have them, they compared it to, for example, looking at a natural scene in like Washington Square Park, just natural footage.

And people are looking in all other directions.

But just because eye gaze is at a certain place doesn’t mean that the brains are synced up.

So you have to look at both behavior, which is eye gaze, and brain activation, because there’s parts of the brain that have to do with self-referential.

So they do it for commercials, too.

They’re using now brain scans to make good commercials.

And they find that they want to create, they’ll test different videos.

The ones that activate the amygdala, which is the kind of emotional center of the brain, and these parts of the prefrontal cortex that have to do with your personal story, that are self-referential.

So the more that the images or the story can you reflect and refers to something in your own history, the more emotionally and more attached you’ll be to it.

So these are the kinds of ways they’re trying to structure, for example, commercials and also film.

You know, film is more engrossing when you can relate to it.

Okay, but wait one second here.

Doesn’t there have to be a diminishing return on that?

Like, the more you manipulate me, the less I’m able to be manipulated.

Because, like, you’re toying with my emotions, kind of.

And so I’m not going to keep giving you that same emotional response.

Well, why not?

Why not?

Because, okay, think of it this way.

When you go to the puppy store, you’re like, oh my God, these puppies!

But if you work at the puppy store, you say, get these smelly puppies out of here.

Now you’re like, F these puppies!

So here’s the thing.

These poop crapping all over the place.

Poop machine puppies, right?

Yeah, exactly.

They stank, stank, stank ass puppies all over the place.

I can’t stand puppies.

You know what I like?

I like dogs because they get the hell out my store.

Here’s the thing.

Here’s the thing.

It’s not like a steady stream of emotional manipulation.

So if you think of, for example, even a Hitchcock movie or any suspense movie, it’s not suspense the whole time.

Then your brain would habituate and it would get boring.

It’s build up, build up, surprise, and then like mundane, mundane, and then another suspenseful moment.

So with commercials, they can vary.

You know, it’s not that the whole time you’re being emotionally manipulated.

It might just be at the end or, you know, interspersed with other things.

So as long as you can vary it, right, and change it up a bit, you’ll keep being activated by the, by the emotions.

Like, but if you were to see, you know, those animal rescue commercials, which kill me with the animals in the cages.

But if you were to see one commercial like that after the other, after the other, after the other.

I’m Sarah McLaughlin.

These animals need you so much.

Yes, so we can, anyway, the point is as we’re using neuroimaging to help filmmakers, we’re also, you know, it’s also being used in the advertising industry as well to create more engrossing commercials.

So it’s where science meets, you know, the arts in another way.

Now, you throw this term around very glibly, and I just want to make sure we’re on the same page.

When you say prefrontal cortex, is this larger in humans than in other mammals?

Well, OK, so it’s relative.

So the relative size of the prefrontal cortex compared to the rest of the brain, humans have the largest prefrontal cortex compared to the rest of the brain than other animals.

But if you think of it like a whale, objectively, it has a larger prefrontal cortex than a human.

But the ratio, so compared to the rest of the brain, we have the largest prefrontal cortex compared to the rest of the brain.

And the prefrontal cortex does what for us specifically?

It means my favorite part of the brain.

By the way, by the way, the hippocampus just called and said, screw you too.

We broke up a long time ago.

So your prefrontal cortex, what precisely does that do for us as humans?

So it’s my favorite part of the brain because it’s involved in so many things, one of which is impulse control, how to both regulate our emotions, control our impulses, decision making, organization.

We call it, it’s the executive function.

It’s the executor of the brain.

And so it enables civilization to exist.

I’ve often said that without the prefrontal cortex, there would be no civilization.

We would just be busy having our immediate rewards and not thinking about building or creating a future or anything like that.

Well, there are other animals that have societies as well.

Do they have developed prefrontal cortexes?

I mean, other great apes actually have hierarchies.

They have social constructs.

They have means of communication.

They have tasks that they all kind of allocate to one another and positions.

But Chuck, they don’t have trains, planes, and automobiles and skyscrapers.

And wouldn’t it be funny if they actually thought of that and said, you know what, one day that’s going to lead us to a place where we destroy ourselves and the planet.

There’s something called the Dunbar number.

It’s created by a researcher named Dunbar.

But basically, if you look at…

Oh, I thought it was created by somebody named Number.

Dunbar.

That’s good, Chuck, right?

I’m sorry, Heather.

You walked into that one.

That was good.

That was good.

Dunbar Number, created by somebody named Number.

So, there’s a direct correlation between relative size of the prefrontal cortex to the rest of the brain and the scale of the society.

So, you can tell how many…

Yeah, so the larger the societies that work, the larger the prefrontal cortex.

Humans have the largest, and as you go down with the great apes and other species, the sizes of their society directly correlate to the size of their prefrontal cortex.

So, there’s something about social interactions, but there’s also thinking about the future, being able to plan for the future.

So, yeah, without our prefrontal cortex, there would be no society.

So, there are no shrimp sitting around going, I wonder if there is indeed a night sky.

No contact.

But why am I so lonely?

Why am I so lonely?

Where are the other shrimp?

How come no one ever talks to me?

And why am I here?

What is my mission?

What is my purpose as a shrimp?

What is the meaning of shrimpdom?

Wait, so that means almost everything you’ve described in the prefrontal cortex is an interaction point in a movie that you sit down and watch.

Well, that’s interesting.

No, no, I say that because you can’t really show a movie to a dog.

They’re not interested.

Even though they’re recognizable people.

Not even Lady and the Tramp?

They’re recognizable people.

They’re recognizable scenes, but they’re not going to interact mentally the way you are because it’s a mental thing.

They’re not going to get meaning out of it.

They’re not going to extract meaning.

You can show an animal, a dog, a video of other dogs, and it will be, you know, it’ll grab its attention and it’ll be attracted to it and it will watch it even.

But to then extrapolate meaning or how is this referenced to me, to tell for a referential, other species aren’t going to have that.

I met a dog once that jumped up and barked any time I saw a dog on the TV and that was hilarious.

The dog I grew up with didn’t care about the TV.

It’s also a dumb dog.

The dog I had was pretty smart growing up.

She did not bark.

Didn’t stare at herself in the mirror.

It was like…

Okay, so Heather, we know, Chuck and I know that you are a mind reader.

You attach electrodes to whoever walks within ten feet of you.

And then you study this.

So it’s one thing to just say there’s activation in one part of the brain or the other.

We get that.

But what’s this I hear that recently you can actually reconstruct the thoughts rather than just say where the thought is happening?

That’s a whole other level of getting inside somebody’s head.

Yeah.

So we’re at the early stages now.

So basically you would feed, you would have someone in a scanner.

You would show them a picture, say of a shoe or a cat.

And you would get this pattern of activation based on these voxels, like little pixels that you can read as an image.

And then you fed this into this algorithm, this computer algorithm.

And then…

To be clear, a voxel is a three-dimensional pixel.

Isn’t that correct?

I’m pretty sure.

Yes, yes, yes.

So based on this sort of, let’s just say, you know, this data of what the brain is doing when it’s seeing a particular image.

you can show a person a different image and give that information to the computer and based on feeding it many, many other images that, you know, a person might see, it can predict what image you’re looking at.

So it can predict based on the brain activation.

Or interpret.

I would say identify.

It would identify the image you’re looking at based on the feedback that it’s receiving from you.

After you would give all the information to it, it then looks at you and determines what you’re looking at.

With shapes and everything?

It makes its best guess at what you’re looking at.

How accurate, though?

You say early stages, but how well is it performing?

High degree of accuracy.

I wanted to give you a number, but I don’t have a number off hand.

But very high degree of accuracy.

You guys always, you’re never satisfied, are you?

Right.

No.

You’re never satisfied.

I mean, first you come up with artificial intelligence.

Now, now, you’re going to let machines be able to read our minds.

Okay.

I mean, and then on top of that, okay, let me just say this.

I feel sorry for your husband.

I know him very well.

Okay.

He’s married to a woman who says, what are you thinking?

And he goes, nothing.

And she’s like, no, I’m going to find out.

I’m going to find out.

Right.

That’s right.

Yeah.

Don’t worry.

When you go to sleep, we’re going to find out what you’re thinking.

Speaking of which, speaking of which, actually, so there’s been studies that have done that.

This was a paper that was published in Science where they woke up people at different stages of sleep.

And they would say, what were you, they were in the scanner.

So they were imaging their brain at the time.

And they would ask them to report what they were seeing, what they were dreaming about.

And again, the computer algorithm could predict with very high accuracy, for example, that the computer would spit out, let’s say, an image of a person or a key or a chair.

And the person would say, you know, I was having this dream about this person and there was like a key on the chair or whatever.

It would correlate with what the algorithm, right?

So now you can start to read dreams.

And they do.

And they’ve done it now with images.

So they’ve had people watching films.

And the computer basically constructs a video based on what it thinks you’re seeing based on your brain activation, which really it’s amazing.

You can go online and see this, these images that really look like the actual film they’re seeing.

It’s fuzzy and it’s not, you know, it’s not a clear image, but it’s a fuzzy like moving object that’s moving in a similar pattern as to what the person is seeing.

So again, I say early stages because it’s not this exact.

It’s very fuzzy.

But as time goes on, it’s going to get clearer and clearer.

Could you identify that monster that was always chasing me as a kid in my dreams?

I have to send it to the algorithm.

They’ll print out a picture.

The algorithm is now Freddy Krueger.

The Freddy Krueger algorithm.

I mean, what’s going to be really cool, honestly, that you mentioned that, Neil, is that ultimately we can combine that with other techniques that we’re using to like kind of zap out fearful memories.

And they’re if with implants, with or soften them at least.

Yeah, you can then see, oh, this person’s having a type of brain activation, which suggests it’s a scary monster coming into the dream and then do a little, you know, zap and just, you know, change the scene.

Yeah, that ultimately.

Yeah, all of my images would basically come back not as visuals, but as a wah-wah guitar going, wow, wow, wow.

The auditory cortex.

No, plus you have to be careful because if you zap the part where it’s a monster chasing you, it could turn it into like a bunny rabbit chasing you, you know?

Suddenly you wake up and you’re totally afraid of…

Yeah, I mean, once you start messing around with the hardware, you never know what’s going to happen.

It’s true, you need to be careful.

At some level, we’re getting to the point where it’s going to be something like, you know, a minority report perhaps, you know?

Not that you can predict the future, but that you can kind of read people’s brain activity and see what they were thinking at a particular time.

And if you can record that information, you can see whether a person might have committed a crime or so forth.

So, I mean, it can be used in all sorts of ways.

So, it’s something you have to think about.

So, that was one of the great, yep, the Minor Report, one of the great brain movies when you think about it that way.

And, of course, half the episodes of the Netflix series Black Mirror involved the brain behaving just like a disk of data that you can upload and download and alter.

Great series.

It was.

And if Heather continues as.

She is, she will be the Black Mirror.

We’ll take a quick break.

This isn’t Cosmic Queries.

When we come back, we’re going to pick up questions from our loyal Patreon members.

And Chuck has them all lined up when StarTalk continues.

I’m Joel Cherico, and I make pottery.

You can see my pottery on my website, cosmicmugs.com.

Cosmic Mugs, art that lets you taste the universe every day.

And I support StarTalk on Patreon.

This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

We’re back, StarTalk, Your Brains on Movies with Heather Berlin.

And of course, I got Chuck Nice here.

Heather, how do we find you on social media?

Heather, underscore Berlin on Twitter and Instagram.

Don’t forget the underscore, which I know you love, Neil.

No, no, no.

Underscore is like the lamest thing that could ever be in a handle, but we’ll accept it.

Before we go to questions, let me ask a quick…

While I find them entertaining, there’s an absence of plausibility that concerns me.

Anytime it’s one of these movies where someone gets really, really, really smart, and those people in every one of these movies do things like move objects with their brain power.

And it’s like, no!

If you’re smarter, you’ll just solve problems faster or better.

You’re not going to all of a sudden start moving stuff.

So where did this come from?

Why do people think your brain could ever possibly have that power?

Other than just, I’m really smart so I can solve something you can’t.

I think it’s predicated on this myth that we only use 10% of our brain and like imagine we can use all of our brain and the powers we would have, but that’s a myth.

The entire premise of the movie, Lucy, the entire premise of that film.

Or Limitless is another one, you know, just take this pill and then you can use all your brain.

Yeah, you use all of it.

Idiocracy, idiocracy.

You use all your brain and none of it is redundant.

It uses so many resources, energy, blood flow.

We don’t waste those resources in our body just thinking about evolution.

But most of it is just happening outside of awareness.

We’re unconscious about what’s happening.

And sometimes we can, when we think about meditation and other techniques of mindfulness, we can bring more of what’s happening unconsciously to our conscious attention.

But it’s not that we’re using more of our brain.

And I think with the like being able to move things or telepathy, I mean, this is just wishful thinking on the part of people.

I mean, I remember laying in the bed with my daughter and I did not want to get up.

She said, please, let me get the book on the shelf.

And I said, let me just, let’s both try really hard and just will it over here so we don’t have to get up.

And it didn’t work.

It didn’t work.

And if it had worked, you’d have been like, all right, sweetie, and now you have to move out.

The rename or Tabitha.

Yeah, Tabitha, you can’t move here anymore.

Matilda, yeah.

Yeah, either.

So Chuck, give me some questions from our fan base.

All right.

Here we go.

Let’s pop it off with Bridge.

Bridge Karan or Charan says, have we gained any insight into the long-term effects of the brain, long-term effects the brain gets from misinformation pop culture, specifically during the pandemic?

I think more pointedly, what are the effects of exposure to misinformation, whether you live in a misinformation bubble or if you’re just encountering misinformation that is counter to what you already believe?

Because that’s what’s happening now.

And let me dovetail that.

Can you ever emerge out of it?

Yes.

Very big question.

How do we save these poor saps who are being duped all the time?

Well, there’s a way of seeing the world and interacting with the world that I think, you know, as scientists learn early on, and it’s sort of like question everything, you know, be skeptical, look for evidence.

But when you’re in these echo chambers and these bubbles, and especially when they’re on issues where they are emotionally significant, people tend to disconfirm what doesn’t go along with their beliefs in terms of the evidence and only pay attention to things that support what they already believe in.

So it’s very difficult to break this bias.

It’s a cognitive bias.

But the best way is that you have to meet a person where they’re at.

So say, oh, I hear you that you believe, I don’t know, for example, that there’s no such thing as, you know, climate change, gravity, whatever.

The earth is flat.

Flat earth.

Right, right.

I hear you that you believe that and I understand.

And then sort of maybe even cite something that their evidence for that that they and then say, that’s really interesting.

But have you ever thought about this other thing?

There’s also this other evidence that suggests this.

You have to, as soon as you come in in an aggressive, controversial way, they’re going to shut it out immediately.

But if you meet people where they’re at, empathize with their emotions and, okay, I hear you, you don’t want to take vaccines.

I know you’re scared, you know, but let’s talk about it and find a way in, then maybe they’ll be more open to hearing an alternative view.

The way that people are doing it now isn’t working.

It’s just like my side or you’re crazy.

And that’s never going to work.

You know why?

Because it’s my side or you’re crazy.

That’s why it’s…

That’s why it’s that way, right?

Wait, so Heather, this is a serious flaw in the human mind.

Yes.

Is there any understanding of its origins, evolutionarily or otherwise?

Our…

Well, there’s something called…

So, with group affiliation, right?

You were safer when you were in groups, right?

And so, there’s also the higher the sort of entrance fee to get into the group, the greater the group affiliation.

So, if you think about like sororities and fraternities, how they have all these crazy things you have to do to get in.

So, once you’re in, yeah, you have protection of the group, whatever.

But the psychology is that you’ve gone through so much to get into this group, you’re more likely to be persuaded by their belief system and to want to keep that group affiliation because there are some evolutionary gains from that.

There’s protection.

There’s, you know, better survival in a group.

So, some of those group dynamics are also at play here.

You want to keep…

Okay.

So, basically, it’s missed.

We still have these tendencies at a time in a place where we no longer need them.

And so, we are suffering from our own evolutionary past.

Yeah.

And also, we’re living in this technology world now that our brains have not evolved quickly enough to accommodate.

Right.

So, we have these old caveman brains, you know, in this modern technology, with information being bombarded by this information.

And we’re not able to process it and really analyze it in a way that’s going to be to our advantage.

So, I think this is part of the problem.

Also, what you just said is, you know, what exacerbates the problem is, we can find those groups and that safety because of the technology, where otherwise, we would have been ostracized and marginalized.

And isolated, yeah.

Because we felt that, you know, I don’t know, eating children was a good thing.

Right.

But then we go online and we find like other people who say, you know, children are delicious.

Why shouldn’t we eat them?

And then all of a sudden, I feel like, oh, I’m okay.

I’m all right.

Chuck, is that the best example you could have given in this?

He’s curious that that is where your brains went to.

Listen.

Of all the examples you could have given.

I’m just saying, you know, I read Hansel and Gretel to my daughter the other day and it got me wondering.

Every one of those stories, somebody, a chilled child gets eaten every one of those stories.

I’m sorry.

At one point, eating kids was a thing because guess what?

A whole lot of those stories end up with somebody got to eat a kid.

Peter and the Wolf, right?

Exactly.

Hansel and Gretel.

Goldilocks.

Goldilocks.

Goldilocks.

Chuck is on to something, I’m pretty sure.

I’m telling you, man, eating a kid had to be a thing at some point.

At some point in society, we said, you know what, man, we got to stop eating these kids.

This is out of control, guys.

We can no longer mask it in our allegory and our children’s horror stories.

We just have to stop eating the kids.

Alright.

I’m sorry.

Alright.

Back to back to back to base.

Chuck, give me another question.

Here we go.

This is Catherine Chalorini Moore says this.

Hello, doctors.

And Chuck.

She missed your Lord episode, so that’s alright.

Exactly.

As augmented reality and virtual reality, movies, and gaming experiences become more mainstream, are we learning through scientific studies as to whether or not the brain processes AR, VR stories differently or the same as if we’re watching a flat screen?

Or if you’re watching just reality.

I mean, just put that on the list, too.

Really, the differences are the level of engrossment.

The brain, it’s dark in there.

It’s black.

It doesn’t actually see anything.

All it is, is getting stimuli coming in as ones and zeros from the retina, let’s say visual stimuli, and it’s interpreting that information.

Whether it’s real life, whether it’s on a flat screen, whether it’s virtual reality, it’s if you’re fully attending to that information and not having, there’s always another little part of the brain saying, oh, you’re watching a movie or this isn’t real.

But once you kind of, you know, that’s when they say, you know, you go to a film and you suspend your disbelief, right?

So once you’re in the mode of suspending your disbelief, it all is the same.

And virtual reality is just much more engrossing.

But you can be as engrossed in a virtual reality as you are when you’re watching a film on a big screen.

It doesn’t make a huge difference other than what is your ability to suspend your disbelief.

And so that’s the thing you’re playing with.

The more engrossed you are, the easier it is to forget that this is a simulation.

So just to put this on the table, I’m old enough to remember Shari Lewis and her hand puppet, Lamb Chop.

At no time did I think Lamb Chop was real.

I could not suspend my disbelief looking at a talking sock.

It never worked for me at any age.

No, I wasn’t even going to try.

It’s like, no, I’m not doing this.

Did you watch Sesame Street?

Or maybe, I don’t know how you made it.

No, I’m too old for Sesame Street.

My sister watched it.

Okay, so Chuck, Sesame Street.

But what about Sesame Street?

When you’re watching Sesame Street, were you not feeling that maybe Oscar was a real character or Big Bird was a real, Kermit the Frog?

Or were you thinking, oh, that’s just a puppet.

There’s some guy’s hand controlling it.

Okay, when I got older, I got better at that.

And in fact, was it Kermit?

I was on stage once.

You met Kermit the Frog?

I think I met Kermit the Frog on stage.

And while there, I totally blocked out the fact that there’s a human being there with his hand and a stick.

And I was having, it was just me and Kermit.

And I think we were doing good.

God, I want to meet Kermit the Frog.

You’re so lucky.

Just so I can say, you think it’s hard being green?

It ain’t easy being green.

Yeah, you think that’s not easy?

Try being black.

There you go.

You got it.

You got it.

Chuck, it was allegory.

Chuck, you know it was allegory.

The same thing is happening with these robots, these companions that they’re creating now, right?

So, you know, that you’re interacting with, like they’re your pet or they’re becoming, you know, we’re anthropomorphizing these robots so the closer they can act and look and sound and have facial expressions like a human, you’re going to forget that it’s a robot and interact with it in that way.

So it’s the same thing whether you’re watching a film, interacting with an AI.

The more realistic it is, the easier it is for you to forget that it’s not reality.

Now, how much of that has to do with your from an early age?

Like, I don’t care how realistic you make a robot pet for me.

I’m just, it’s never going to be a pet.

It’s going to be a robot to me.

But I have a feeling that if you gave my eight-year-old daughter a robot pet anything, dog, cat, whatever, as she got older and became more, how can I say, familiar with that as an actual thing, when she, you know, it would just be nothing to have a robot pet.

Well, I think it’s just a matter of what can fool you.

I’m sure when you were a kid, whatever thing, I don’t know, they had like a Teddy Ruxpin or whatever they had then at that point, maybe was able to fool you, you know.

I remember Teddy Ruxpin and I hate it.

No, no, Chuck, I think you’re asking something different, I think.

It’s one thing to say, I have this robot pet and I’m perfectly happy with it.

It’s another thing to have a robot pet and you think it’s no longer a robot.

So I think your daughter is not going to think the robot is ever real, but she’ll be perfectly content with a robot pet.

Just as an evolution of pets, I have a robot pet.

So it really isn’t about your belief that…

I don’t think it has to be.

It’s your belief that it’s a pet.

Not that it’s real.

It’s a real robot.

Just like a real mouse or a real hamster.

The deeper question I think is whether this thing has consciousness or not.

So when we start talking, like the Alexa, my kids talk to the Alexa like it’s a person that has a conscious brain.

There was a movie about that.

And they ask her questions.

Oh, well, she’ll know.

She knows everything.

And it’s very hard to explain to a child, this is just an algorithm.

It’s not an actual conscious person.

But yeah, but they get confused.

And so it has to do with earlier stages of development as well.

But why does it matter?

It matters I think ethically.

That’s a philosophical question really.

If I can’t tell the difference, then who cares?

Tell me why after the break then.

You see what I did there?

Suspense.

I’m trying to do a Hitchcock thing here.

When we come back, we’re going to find out, does it matter if you know in advance something is real or fake?

If it serves your needs and if it makes you happy, then what do you care if it’s a robot or a human being?

When we come back, StarTalk, Your Brain on Movies.

We’re back, StarTalk, third and final segment of Your Brains on Movies.

We’re doing Cosmic Queries here, and we left off with a thought.

I basically, I was challenging Heather with the thought that if your kids have Alexa and they think Alexa’s real, but even if they don’t think Alexa’s real, Alexa knows more than any other human.

So why does it matter to you whether they think Alexa’s real or not?

What difference does it make?

This is a friend on the other side of a box.

Here’s the differentiation.

I think that it matters, well, it matters if it’s real or not because it’s how we treat it.

So for example, if your refrigerator is not conscious, it’s okay to kick it or smash it or unplug it for Alexa, for example.

But if you think it really has feelings, and then you do things to it that smash it, shut it down, that has ethical, there are more ethical considerations to that.

So how you treat the thing, it matters.

So, I mean, this is a case in which, does it matter whether a child believes it’s conscious or not?

Well, yeah, because if it believes it’s conscious and then it says, I hate you, Alexa, and it starts smashing it, it’s a different scenario than if it does.

Look out, mom, you’re next.

You know, then you know you have a psychopath on your hands, right?

So, how we treat these objects, whether they’re conscious or whether they actually have subjective experience or not, matters.

But it also matters in what we believe, because that tells us about that person.

If a person is negative to something they believe is conscious, then we have to say this person might have some psychopathic tendencies.

So there are some reasons.

Yeah, got it.

Good answer.

Good answer there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right, Chuck, keep it going.

This is our last segment.

Alexa, you’re safe for another day.

This is Alejandro Reynoso from Monterrey, Mexico.

He says, hello, or should I say, hola?

Hola.

And I’m going to read this in the way I think Alejandro sounds.

Please, tell me.

Stop.

This is the best representation you have ever seen of mental illness in a movie or a series.

And by that, I mean the closest reality.

So Heather, what do you have there?

There’s so many.

Just one of the caveats is that when it’s not done right, they show mental illness as just being this like stable thing, this trait, once you have it, you’re this person.

But a lot of the time, mental illness, the severity can ebb and flow throughout a lifetime.

So you might have OCD, you might have a really bad episode, then you get better for a while, then it’s bad again.

So some of the films that do it well, certainly A Beautiful Mind, portrayal of John Nash, because the films where they allow you to actually get inside the head of somebody who’s experiencing mental illness to feel what it might feel like.

Birdman, that was with Michael Keaton, which was another one.

Where they take you into his mind and you’re almost there with them and see what this might experience.

What it might feel like to have hallucinations and delusions and how you can easily slip from reality into these delusions.

And was it The Grandfather, the recent film that came out during COVID?

Yeah, with Alzheimer’s.

With Alzheimer’s.

And I think its twist on a typical story was that he sees, is it his wife?

Someone comes in twice, but he doesn’t recognize her as his wife.

But it’s played by a completely different actress.

Oh, I haven’t seen this.

So you experience what he experienced.

You are now in this man’s head.

It is, who are you?

Get out of here.

The other memento was a film from a while back about memory issues.

And you’re trying to experience it the way he’s experiencing it.

You don’t know what’s happening either.

You’re kind of lost.

It’s not a real condition, by the way, that where you just, you have, but you do have long term memory, but you have zero short term memory, right?

It’s called like a dissociative fugue.

It’s when you go into these fugue states where you just forget completely who you are and where you’re from.

And yeah, so that is that.

So some of those films which drag you in, Pi, which was another one that was a Darren Aronofsky film from a while back.

So those films that bring you in, even The Shining, you know, where you’re…

Pi, you mean The Life of Pi?

No, no, no.

There was a film, I think it was in the 1990s called Pi.

Just called Pi.

Yeah, yeah.

And it was a Darren Aronofsky film.

And the sequel, Apple Pie.

And then there was another sequel.

Yeah, I don’t think that, I don’t think those are real sequels.

I never heard of Pi, I’m sorry.

There’s so many, so those films that really bring you in.

But other ones, you know, like Dissociative Identity Disorder or Split Personality Disorder, Black Swan, Natalie Portman, I think she got an Oscar for playing that role.

It was actually her, it was two actresses.

It was her and Mila Kunis.

Mila Kunis.

She played this other character.

The whole time you think it’s two different characters.

Or Fight Club, same thing.

You think it’s two different characters, but you really, it’s this one, you know, Brad Pitt.

And Mila Kunis is the voice of Meg on Family Guy.

Well, then, it’s a perfect circle.

It’s a perfect, it all makes sense.

One that I always cite in my classes, for an example, Borderline Personality Disorder is Glenn Close and Fatal Attraction.

It’s a movie from the 80s.

And it’s such a, it’s an extreme portrayal, but of Borderline Personality Disorder.

Also Girl Interrupted is another good one.

There’s so many, so many.

Oh, I know Girl Interrupted.

That one was good.

That was Angelina Jolie.

Yeah, that had an early Angelina Jolie was in there.

But not as the star.

She was a side, a side character.

Are you sure?

Did you get your two movies right?

I thought Fatal Attraction had the other woman in it.

There were two similar movies.

Glenn Close.

Fatal Attraction.

Are you sure about that?

Okay, then there’s another movie with, what’s her name, which she crosses her legs in front of the…

Oh, Sharon Stone.

That’s Basic Instinct.

Sharon Stone.

That was another one of those…

Basic Instinct.

Basic Instinct.

Wasn’t it like the same movie basically?

Different.

They were different.

They’re the same, but different, right?

Silver Lighting’s Playbook is a more recent one that was portraying…

It was with Bradley Cooper and…

Bradley Cooper and Katniss Everdeen.

It was Bradley Cooper and Katniss Everdeen.

Katniss Everdeen.

Who is amazing.

Jennifer something.

Lawrence.

Jennifer Lawrence, yes.

Jennifer Lawrence.

Thank you.

So these are all…

So which one of these are the best, would you say?

The best what?

Portrayal of mental illness?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Would you say?

You want me to pick one?

That’s too difficult.

I really like…

I’ll pick one.

Okay.

I’ll pick one.

I just read Flowers for Algernon and I went out and saw the movie Charlie with Cliff Robertson and I was very moved by that where he’s mentally disabled and they have a test serum that they give him where he becomes really smart and you slowly watch him get smarter and smarter and smarter and then he gets smarter than all of the friends who used to make fun of him for how non-smart he was and then they no longer want to be his friend and then the serum wears off and then he goes back to the way he was, oh my gosh, and it was very, and he won an Academy Award for that.

I’m pretty sure.

That sounds cool.

Charlie.

It’s basically based on the Flowers for Algernon story.

I’ll tell you one really good one that portrays addiction is Requiem for a Dream.

It’s really disturbing, but it portrays addiction very, very well.

You know, there’s so many good films.

I might have to.

Yeah, it’s too difficult.

One flew over the cuckoo’s nest.

But getting back to your earlier point, the better ones would get you inside their head so that you could completely empathize.

A Beautiful Mind stands out to me because you really, I always, you know, I’ve worked with patients with schizophrenia and I could never understand like how did they, and that sort of allowed me to have insight into what it might feel like to be an intelligent, otherwise, you know, functioning person, but be plagued by these delusions and how easily you can slip into them.

And so that for me was really a moving film.

So slip in a couple fast ones.

Michael, Michael Boyford, this says, Hey guys, it’s Michael Bow from Canada here in Shutter Island.

The main character thinks he’s a hero investigating a case of psychiatric hospital.

At the end, we figure out he was the killer and the psychiatrist made up the story to set up his therapy.

My question, can you really convince and hold someone into a living, happy dream for their entire life?

From that standpoint of a mourning family, would a person that has no self-awareness to be put in jail be a fair thing to do if he’s living peacefully in a dream and will never regret or know his actions?

Dude, you just got super deep.

Wow.

I mean, well, here’s the first thing.

Let’s answer the first question.

Would that be acceptable therapy to put somebody inside of their own living dream?

In other words, to massage their delusion to the point where they are living that delusion?

Well, I mean, I don’t think that would be legal.

I don’t think, you know.

Plus you’re reading them of their accountability for their wrongdoings.

Yeah, I mean, there’s so many levels there.

I mean, this is the thing.

If you don’t know of anything else, then whatever you’re living in is your reality, right?

It’s the matrix.

And it goes for, you know, I’ve seen this with, you know, in unfortunate cases with children who have been in, like, abusive situations at home and they think that that’s normal.

That’s all they know.

So they’re not even that sometimes aren’t as upset about it until they see what else alternative exists.

You don’t know what you’re you know, you can’t you need a comparison, right?

So if you were in your whole life living in a delusional, you know, simulated world, you would never know the difference.

But until it’s just like it’s just like living in the matrix.

Would that be a suitable I’m a little confused because I haven’t seen the movie treatment.

But you know, that’s what they did to I think it was in Minority Report when they jail people, they just like stick you in this thing and put a thing on your head.

And I think then you’re just living in a kind of virtual reality world or something for that’s your imprisonment.

You’re suspended there.

Yeah, basically a dream, basically.

Exactly.

Exactly.

They lock you like in.

But what I love in terms of therapy, one of the films also that I love is Inception, because they’re in their dream.

It’s actually how things work.

They go back deep into the unconscious and they plant a seed and that seed then germinates and changes ultimately the character’s behavior that they’re trying to change.

And so the idea of actually getting into someone’s unconscious and planting a little bit of information, a little seed and letting them.

So they make a life changing decision that’s better for them or different later on.

That’s what a lot of therapy is.

You just sort of say, oh, what about this?

Have you ever thought about it this way?

And then you just let them create their own and then change their behavior on their own.

Look at that.

Alright, Chuck, one more question.

It’s got to be fast.

Got to be fast.

And this is a great one.

This is Lydia, and she says, hello to all.

My friend Naomi, who is doing her master’s in neuroscience, is wondering if movies could be a very good treatment for depressed people.

Also, if movies could give a good amount of dopamine, just like getting rewards.

With my kind regards, Lydia.

And we answer back, dearest Lydia.

My dearest Lydia.

Thank you for your letter.

I think yes.

So humor is really something that does release dopamine in the brain.

Chuck doesn’t know anything about humor.

Give Chuck some schooling.

School Chuck here.

Let me tell you a little bit about humor, Chuck.

It releases dopamine in the brain and it can be a very useful, first of all, it’s a useful defense mechanism.

Sometimes when people are in pain, they use humor to deflect, but it’s one of the positive defense mechanisms.

But losing yourself into another person’s story is a good way.

It’s a form of healthy dissociation in a way.

So if you’re ruminating over your problems and you just can’t get out of your own head, if you can get engrossed in a film that’s maybe with a positive theme and something that’s happy or funny, it can actually help change your brain in a way.

And if you’re in a very deep, deep depression, it’s a neurochemical imbalance, maybe not so much.

But if you’re just feeling a little bit down, and I’m sure we’ve all had that experience of you watch something that moves you and it shifts how you’re feeling for the rest of the day.

Yeah, but okay, but Heather, if I’m depressed, do I benefit from seeing people who are more depressed than I am?

And I say, I guess I don’t have it that bad.

Or do I see people who are happy and then I aspire to that?

I mean, it seems like you can argue it both ways, right?

It’s a very good question.

I mean, studies show, so there’s this thing, it’s called upward comparison and downward comparison.

And so they find that people are happier in general when they compare down.

So they say, you know, look at people who are worse off than them, and then they feel better.

So if you’re having a problem in your life right now, you say, but wait, look at those people in the Ukraine right now, like they’re really suffering.

So put your problems in perspective, you’ll feel a little bit better about your life.

But if you’re comparing yourself to, I don’t know, Richard Branson or somebody who has their own island and yacht, and you know, you might feel a little bit bad about your current position in life.

So in general, Not Jeff Bezos, which makes him the saddest man in the world, even though he’s worth more money than anybody, you look at him and go, I don’t want to be that a-hole.

But his ex-wife, on the other hand, she’s someone I’d like to be.

So black people have a famously low suicide rate relative to white people.

And Red Fox once remarked about that.

He said, it’s hard to kill yourself jumping out of the basement window.

That is hilarious.

Guys, we got to land this plane.

Heather, thanks for giving us some insights here.

It’s all valuable.

And this is an unending subject.

We’re going to have to do this again.

Yes.

Because I’m sure we didn’t get through all the questions, Chuck.

So we will have to do this again.

It’ll have to be Your Brain on Movies, the sequel.

How’s that about that?

Done, sir.

You see how I played that?

I could do it there.

All right.

Chuck Nice, co-host, Heather Berlin, our favorite neuroscientist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, you’re a personal astrophysicist, keep looking out.