Now on ScienceBlogs: Surgical masks versus respirators for flu protection
Category: Memory
Despite occuring only rarely, amnesia (or memory loss) has featured often in Hollywood films for almost a century. By 1926, at least 10 silent films which used amnesia as a plot device had been made; more recent productions, such as...
Posted by Mo at 7:20 PM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Cinema
A hilarious scene from The Man With Two Brains....
Posted by Mo at 5:23 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Cinema
Researchers from the Computational Neuroimaging Laboratory at New York University recently carried out a study of the effects of films on viewers' brains. Hasson et al scanned the brains of 45 participants whilst they watched scenes from a number...
Posted by Mo at 11:50 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Cinema
Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the headquarters of the Stasi (the East German secret police) were found to contain a large room in which many thousands of "smell jars" were stored. Each jar contained an odour...
Posted by Mo at 4:30 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Psychology
The great filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock had a profound insight into the workings of the human mind. "There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it," he once said, and the shower scene from Psycho, demonstrates...
Posted by Mo at 3:37 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Cinema
The vilification of Arabs in American popular culture serves an ideological purpose: the dehumanization of America's "enemy" in the "clash of civilisations". (Via Woman of Color Blog)...
Posted by Mo at 3:38 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
At Wired, filmmaker Ridley Scott discusses the forthcoming remastered final cut of Blade Runner. This classic 1982 film depicts a dystopian futuristic society based on artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, and was recently voted as the best science fiction film...
Posted by Mo at 4:46 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolutionary Biology
The New York Times has an article about how Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers and Eugenie Scott (director of the National Center for Science Education) were duped into appearing in Expelled, a film that puts forward the case for intelligent design...
Posted by Mo at 5:30 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Philosophy
In The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999) Keanu Reeves plays a computer programmer who leads a double life as a hacker called "Neo". After receiving cryptic messages on his computer monitor, Neo begins to search for the elusive Morpheus...
Posted by Mo at 7:12 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Links
"What is matter? Never mind. What is mind? Never matter." So says Homer, in one episode of The Simpsons. And although I'm not an adherent of Homerian dualism, the show is still my favourite thing on television. I think...
Posted by Mo at 4:56 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
