The Neuroscience of the movie Inception
I'm the type that likes all kinds of movies and doesn't go to the theater to rip a movie apart but rather to turn off my brain, sit back, and watch the show. That's not to say that after the movie I don't have an opinion of the film but rather that I don't concern myself with that going into the film or even if my 8 dollar popcorn was worth the wait.
With that being said I do have a favorite film type which is what I call the thriller that makes you think. This is also the kind of film that begs you to pay attention for subtle details that may reveal a crafty plot twist or somehow expose the mystery. The best of these films send you on a convincing ride that may later offer up some alternative logic that leaves you wondering.
One such film is Inception, a movie based on the concept of lucid dreaming and how you may exploit dream space in order to steal ideas from someone, or in this case infect them with a new one.
I'd argue that Inception tries to collapse the already thin distinction between dreaming and movie-watching. It gives us a movie in which most of the major plot points are simultaneously nonsensical - Why are we suddenly watching a thriller set in the arctic? Why are all the subconscious mercenaries such bad shots? Why don't Cobb's kids ever age? - and strangely compelling, just like a dream. And so we bite our fingernails even though we "know" it's just a silly movie. Thanks to the subdued activity of the frontal lobes and the excited visual cortex, we sit in our plush chairs munching on popcorn and confuse the fake with the real. We don't question the non-sequiturs or complain about the imperfect special effects or the shallow characters. Instead, we just sit back and watch and lose track of the time together
The wired.com article explores the science of Inception and makes parallels what happens in the dream world to what happens when you simply lose yourself in a movie. Good stuff.
Related Web URL: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/the-neur...
