Mind in Motion

The documentary starts off with an animated, colorised woodcut, originally published in black and white by the 19th century astronomer Camille Flammarion in his L'atmosphère : météorologie populaire (Paris, 1888). This visionary scientist, along with his scientific research, published several books regarded as occult literature in his time, among which Lumen, a kind of clairvoyant view of an extraterrestrial (or free spirit) onto occurrences on earth and the cosmos over time. This captivating image of a man peeking through the Earth’s atmosphere as thought to examine the ‘inner’ workings of the universe, serves as visual transformational shift from the macro to the micro cosmic view, when the camera zooms into the human figure with a voice-over commenting on the introspective move of the sciences from the complexities of the universe into the explorations of the ‘inner cosmos’. The zoom enters the man’s brain and neuro-network and ends up on a superimposed image of the painting Narcissus, attributed to Caravaggio, with Narcissus captivated by his own mirror image. From a Humanities and Arts perspective there would be much to say to this intro to the film, however, dramaturgically these images foremost seem to serve the purpose of evoking the idea of the mirror-image (and -neuron) as one of the Leitmotivs of the unfolding narrative. The largest interview sections are divided between V. Ramachandran and Walter J. Freeman as well as intersected sequences with interviews and glimpses into the research labs of van Swinderen, Naccache and Ptito. The initial discussion addresses neuroscientific research into brain functionality, highlighting Freeman’s important intervention of an understanding of a dynamic brain (in contrast to the previously traditional view of a static brain), the way the brain constantly processes and creates understanding. This is followed by presenting studies of how the visual cortex of blind born individuals is being stimulated by learning processes of other sensory stimuli. Perception is revealed as attention alternation processes tuned into the environment we live in with individual differences, from perspectives informed by a predominant approach through an input-reaction model of how we interact with the world. The documentary further addresses the issue of simultaneous conscious and unconscious processes during perception. Although Freeman locates knowledge in the synaptic connections that recent instrumentation makes visible, he modestly admits that we still do not understand enough about the complexity of neuron activity to understand consciousness. Ramachandran demonstrates the results of the last decade’s applied treatment for pain in phantom limbs through a visual mirroring of the healthy arm/hand that allows the brain in some cases to reverse the unlearning processes that occur once the brain learns that a limb is not responding to its stimuli. Although the success-rate of this re-learning to activate certain brain areas, he admits, is probably only around 10%, this still has a positive impact for many suffering from this phenomenon.

The last voice-over comment in the film evokes collective consciousness as fiction in a provocative statement in line with some of the presented research, ending with some practical advise by van Swinderen how to effectively catch a fly to demonstrate the loopholes of distributed attention. In search for the take-away message, this may not be the most powerful issues to be remembered in particular if the viewer is encouraged to truly shift the attention from the organ “brain” to the film’s actual title: Mind in Motion. What seems to linger instead is the actuality and timeliness of Freeman’s last interview sequence. Freeman applies the understanding of the constant learning and unlearning processes of the brain to the social interaction and organisation: the brain functions as organ to facilitate cooperation rather than control — what in consciousness studies has become to be known as the ‘social brain’ (also for example The Origin of Consciousness in the Social World by C. Whitehead, ed., 2008, also reviewed here this month). In this regard Freeman evokes the importance of adaptation to each other in social networks (sports, fusion in groups, dance, etc.), similarly induced by drugs like XTC, which dissolves pre-existing structures selectively to form new structures. He addresses the pressing issue in many Western societies of potentials for conflict of street gangs and particularly teenagers as targets for the formation of bonding and alerts to “… the failure of neuroscience to come to terms with that aspect of brain dynamics in the failure of learning as a model for the development of a stable society”. What Freeman’s concern here seems to call for is a timely broadening of neuroscience and scientific studies of the brain to the inclusion of socially and culturally informed considerations of interactions between individuals and their environment. Finally, to play upon the commonly assumed ‘mystery of the brain’, which, it cannot be denied, haunts the film’s (and probably some of the scientists’) unconscious, it might be appropriate to end with a credit to the opening titles by a quotation from Lumen (C. Flammarion, originally published in 1897 by Dodd, Mead, and Company). While astronomers today speak of the ‘dark matter’ of the Universe as that part of the unknown we will never know, the extraterrestrial messenger Lumen observed in his conversation with the earthling Quaerens:

“But I see by the disturbance of your brain, and the rapid movements of the fluid which crosses your closely-concentrated lobes, that you no longer understand my revelations. I will not then pursue this subject which I have thus merely lightly touched upon, with the end in view of thereby demonstrating how greatly you would err, did you attach any importance to difficulties born of your terrestrial sensations, and to assure you that neither you nor any man upon the Earth could form even an approximate idea of the universe” (http://books.eserver.org/fiction/lumen/contents.html).