"Now... where was I?"

The last film being shown as part of the Movies and the Mind Season is this weekend. The Arnolfini are showing The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. I haven’t seen it but the book is astonishing.

Can you get to Bristol? Like films? Like brains? Go!

The concept behind Movies and the Mind (kudos to Bristol Festival of Ideas and to the lovely lovely people at Bristol Neuroscience) is to show films relevant to current topics in neuroscience, then have a discussion about the film and wider issues with members of an expert panel (experts on brains, minds or films).

Initially lured by A Matter of Life and Death paired with the promise of some geeky discussion I ended up seeing Memento at the Arnolfini. As much as I think A Matter of Life and Death is one of the most amazing films about a neurological condition (or is it?) ever made, I couldn’t make that one.

The experts at Memento were Dr Clea Warburton who researches neural and cellular substrates of learning and memory processes, and Dr John Holloway who specialises in the treatment of people who have suffered head injury that affects brain function. The discussion was chaired by Dr Ash Ranpura, a neuroscientist from University College London who promotes talk and public debate around issues in neuroscience.

I saw Memento when it first came out but couldn’t remember it very well (ha!). So here is a quick reminder of the plot: Leonard Shelby is a former insurance fraud investigator searching for the man he believes raped and killed his wife during a burglary. During the attack Leonard suffered a severe head trauma which left him with anterogarde amnesia – the inability to make and store new memories. Leonard maintains a system of notes, photographs, and tattoos to record information about himself and others, including his wife's killer.

A particular strength of going to see a film in this format is there’s no need to be embarrassed about being a massive geek. We all knew why we were there, for unashamedly nerdy film- and neuro-talk.

We watched, we thought for a bit, then we poured out our opinions and questions. The experts were indeed expert, but the atmosphere was informal enough to encourage plenty of discussion from the audience.

Clea and John agreed that it was a pretty good portrait of anterograde amnesia, if a little peppered with some artistic licence. There was also some particularly good chat about the way in which the film’s structure reflected the way in which we actually remember our lives, like little episodic fragments rather than the seamless narrative that we’re used to on screen.

Another particularly fruitful discussion concerned the fact that there most certainly isn’t a clear black and white distinction between remembering and forgetting. The film addresses this by suggesting a fairly wobbly continuum between drawing a total blank and vivid memories, which features remembering inaccurately, deliberately remembering differently, and deliberately forgetting and everything else in between. Which we are all prone to, brain injury or not.

There was also some really interesting stuff about recognition versus memory as such, and whether these are different systems and how they can be specifically affected as in the case of face blindness. But that really deserves a post all of its own.

A lot of the stuff the audience wanted to know, just isn’t known yet. But then that in itself is something worth knowing.

It is such a great platform for really good discussion - especially as you've all just spent the last 90 minutes sharing the same air, so everyone is quite relaxed with each other. Frankly, all films should be shown like this.

Crimes of Passion at the RWA

Took some time out at the weekend from preparing the house for the arrival of the small monster I am growing to visit the Crimes of Passion street art exhibition at the Royal West of England Academy of Art (RWA).

The curators have done an incredible job of making it appear as though the RWA's very grand marbled building has been invaded and covered in all kinds of crazy.


b movie in the sun by *FilthyLuker on deviantART

"blown up and octopied all at once" - the inflatables currnetly squatting at the RWA.

I loved it. Perhaps because I’m such a rule-abiding freak (see below) I found the sight of graffiti on precious marble slabs/bursting out from the wall all over the period features insanely pleasurable.

The video below is off of YouTube and I believe is from opening night. It takes until about 1.02 to really see the stuff that makes the most of using the gallery walls as a canvas. Although it’s street art, so actually it’s just using the gallery walls as walls. It's subversive stuff so it is.



At 2.31 there’s a brief glimpse of my favourite, The Bristol Montage by Acerone which can better be seen on his blog here. Somewhere in there are three canvases that seem to have been completely obscured by the paint. Just ace.

We'll send him a red cap and a Speedo.

Whenever people ask me, and they often do, which Wes Anderson film best evokes what it’s like to be a scientist, I say “Why, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou of course”.

If I thought I could fund my research by making exciting and colourful popular films about my findings, I absolutely would. The crucial difference here is that Steve Zissou et al.’s data look like this (Fig. 1).



Fig. 1 Crayon Pony Fish

Any samples I deal with are either pus or blood. Apparently the film-going public just aren’t that interested. I had assumed that this was the case for most other scientists. Then I see THIS…



Fig. 2 “Oh hai!”

Meet “Psychedelica”, a new species of fish reported by Ted Pietsch and colleagues in the journal of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists.

Isn’t it wonderful? Clearly the creature’s name was inspired by its migraine-inducing good looks but, as the press release points out, “Psychedelica is perhaps even more apt given the cockamamie way the fish swim”.

Members of Histiophryne psychedelica, or H. psychedelica, propel their crazy selves along by pushing off from the sea floor with their fins and expelling water from tiny grill openings on their side to jet themselves forward. They don’t seem to concern themselves with steering too much. Fortunately, they have “gelatinous bodies covered with thick folds of skin” to protect them as they bumble along looking for food.

The video is well worth a look. Little beast made my day.

Psychedelica image ©David Hall/seaphotos.com

"You'll never be better than a spider"

Public lecture time. Very cool format – a ‘conversation’ between Richard Wentworth (artist, curator and teacher based at the Ruskin School of Fine Art in Oxford) and Mark Lythgoe (Director of the Centre for Advanced Biomedical Imaging at University College London and prolific science communicator). 

The audience were distinguished looking folk and I immediately felt like a scruffy pleb. I was sat next to a very smart looking woman who I promptly elbowed while taking off my coat. 

We were in an enormous hall usually reserved for graduation ceremonies. Right at the front, dead casual like (this was a conversation after all), were some brown leather arm chairs and a tiny projector screen.

Richard Wentworth kicked off by showing some photos. 

I would have said “this projector screen is too small for this room”. 

Richard Wentworth said, “we are defeated by the combination of pre-war confidence and modern technology”. 

This is why I am not an Oxford Professor of Fine Art. That and a few other reasons like being shit at art.

The conversation was about images like this one:

Since the mid 70s Richard Wentworth has been making a photographic documentary of aspects of everyday life that interest him in an ongoing project called ‘Making Do and Getting By’. 

It’s about the fact that we are not really very suited to our surroundings, but we ‘make do’. We innovate with whatever materials we have to hand, and we're really quite good at knowing exactly which chocolate bar will best silence an alarm, for example. 

If you grinned a bit at the alarm bell image, then that’s the bit that Mark Lythgoe is interested in. He wants to know what happens in the brain when people experience that warm satisfaction from seeing a piece of improvisation or ingenuity, an elegant bit of engineering. Just generally the recognition of brilliance in others.

He believes that it’s a form of reward, and there is growing evidence to suggest that in the same way memory consolidation is improved during stress (so we get better at avoiding those situations in future) it is also improved during reward and may be enhanced by positive emotion (so we are better at learning nice solutions to tricky problems). 

What Richard Wentworth does is record the things that make us feel like that; capturing a problem and a solution simultaneously. 

The way they were talking about coming at the same concept from completely different angles was ace. Especially as it developed into an in-depth discussion on the nature of creativity in which they both agreed that "maintaining awareness of the periphery is essential". Which I took to mean “it’s ok to fart about on the internet instead of doing actual work as it will somehow lead to increased flowing of creative juices”. I’m pretty sure that’s what they meant.