The Elinor Munroe Film Center at Lincoln Center opened this weekend. Event tickets were free. I got two to a lecture on cognitive film theory by Antonio Damasio. The title was “Brain, Self and Cinema” and was sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, which gave out free sodas and bags of stale popcorn (but thanks just the same).
Damasio is a professor of neuroscience, psychology and neurology, and director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. Here are some of the insights he shared.
The pastime of viewing moving images could have become popular in its infancy as a solitary viewing of small images through Edison’s kinetoscope. Instead, what started in Paris in the 1890s, viewing in a dark room on a large screen, continues to this day, even with the popularization of movie viewing on handheld tablet and other mobile devices. Damasio doesn’t think of that as real movie watching, any more than I think of those mobile devices as telephones.
Movies on a big screen mirror in many ways the images projected on the screen of our minds, Damasio said.
Our brains store narratives, not just what we see but what we feel and hear. All are images in our brain, brain “maps” so to speak.
As evolving humans, our first “movies” — ways of remembering and reliving — were the internal records of our memory. Then, as human capabilities advanced, we captured memories with music and dance. Then paintings and sculpture. Then words, then images through photography. Moving images brought together the virtual world inside the brain and the virtual world on screen.
The large size of movie screens relative to the brain and the field of vision is a necessary proportion, Damasio said. You need to be overwhelmed to have the movie enter your brain and “the two become one.”
It’s been said that our minds are like a camera but there’s more to it than that, Damasio said. We are more like a studio, with a group including screenwriter, cinematographer and director. “Our brain has compartments.”
He showed gorgeous 3D photos of the brain, not drawings but images from actual brains, highlighting its sections and fibers. Some fibers go up and down, some left and right, some front to back. These intricate connections integrate the maps in our brain. There are many, one for movement, and one for color, for instance. These different parts of the brain process sights, sounds, tactile sensations; all perfectly synced.
Other thoughts from the brilliant lecture:
Many complex emotions stem not just from the cerebral cortex but from the brain stem. This is a critical component of the conscious mind. The brain stem produces feelings; the cortex produces images, not feelings.
“Language is a patina that has been acquired over tens of thousands of years. … Emotions go back farther.”
Vision is least primal and newest sense, in evolutionary terms.
Damasio answered questions after the lecture. Here are pics of the wild carpet at the theater and of Damasio signing copies of his book, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. They were selling like Sunday bagels on Upper West Side.
