Lights, Camera, Action (Potential)!

Image: arianta

So, it turns out that writing up your lab report dissertation and revising for final year exams takes up a lot of time, energy and sanity. Who knew? However, if you can excuse that, some good has come out of the recent months of radio silence in which this blog has been gathering a fair bit of Internet dust and resident tumbleweeds. Because, as any student knows, with great obligation comes procrastination, and if you live in a house of neuroscientists this apparently means watching as many films as you can find which are at least sort-of neuroscience-related (because ‘it’s not really procrastinating if it’s got brains in it, is it?’)  What with the human brain being so baffling and in many aspects not completely understood, there’s a lot of room to get creative. Unsurprisingly, this means there are a lot of films out there with various takes on what’s going on up there: from more personal and historical stories of neurological disease to playing around with the endless sci-fi ‘what-if’ scenarios the brain provides.  So, without further ado, here are a selection of the weird and wonderful movies we unearthed over the last couple of months in Revision Cave, which I thought I’d share. And of course it goes without saying, feel free to leave any recommendations and suggestions of your own…my next blog post isn’t going to procrastinate itself!

Awakenings
Starring: Robert De Niro & Robin Williams (1990) 

If, like many people (including me) you thought Eddie Redmayne did an incredible job of portraying Stephen Hawking in 2014’s The Theory of Everything, then Robert De Niro is comparatively outstanding here. Awakenings is an adaptation of late and great neurologist Oliver Sacks’ written account of his time working with ‘catatonic’ encephalitis epidemic victims at the Beth Abraham Hospital, New York in the 1960s. De Niro is initially unrecognisable as Leonard: wheelchair-bound, mute and – like the rest of the patients consigned to the bluntly-named ‘garden ward’ –  unable to move, frozen in a Parkinson’s disease-like state. The transformation from living statue to being fully mobile and dancing, thanks to receiving Parkinson’s disease drug L-DOPA, is remarkable (this might just be me and my own general ignorance, but I genuinely didn’t realise it was De Niro until this point!) Awakenings’ account of individuals being brought back to life after being given up on is an honest and unexpectedly funny film definitely worth checking out, but be warned: the laughs and light-hearted recovering-patient-montages only last as long as it takes for the L-DOPA to wear off…

The Science of Sleep 
Starring: Gael Garcia Bernal & Charlotte Gainsbourg (2006) 

The phrase ‘there are no words’ springs to mind, however, I’ve decided to think of some to describe what is possibly one of the most bizarre films I’ve seen. Ever. The Science of Sleep ostensibly is the story of Stéphane Miroux (Gael Garcia Bernal), who moves to his mother’s apartment block in Paris after his father’s death, and takes a shine to the quirky, arty girl next door (Charlotte Gainsbourg). So far so cliché, I’m sure you’re thinking. However, the major draw-back here is that, like Stéphane, we’re never quite sure if what’s happening is a dream or reality. The opening scene: a TV studio constructed entirely from cardboard (even the cameras) from which Stéphane presents ‘StéphaneTV’, pretty much sets the tone for the rest of the film from the off. Although it later transpires that this cardboard studio cleverly represents the inner workings of Stéphane’s brain reacting to unfolding  events (imagine Inside Out but with cardboard and a strange middle-aged French guy and you’re not far off). The rest of the film unfolds in a mix of French, English and occasional Spanish (because why not?!) accompanied by creative, but disorientating, stop-motion and visual effects intruding just when you thought you’d found a scene that was ‘definitely really happening.’ Overall, this is definitely a Marmite kind of film, which has a lot of fun playing around with dreams vs. reality: think Inception on a tight budget. However in its defence, The Science of Sleep did successfully lure me into watching the entire thing, in the bewildered hope that at some point – the next bit, surely – I would figure out what exactly I was watching. Of course, this never happened. So the best way to describe this film, I feel is: ‘just watch it and see?!’

The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Starring: Kate Winslet, Jim Carey, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood, Kirsten Dunst (2004) 

Possibly a bit late to the party with this movie, as it’s probably one of the more well-known ones on this list. Nonetheless, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a fun foray down the rabbit-hole of human memory. In a nutshell: boy meets girl, boy likes girl, girl likes boy, they inevitably break up and decide to erase the memory of each other from their brains. However, as opposed to listening to copious amounts of Adele and drinking yourself into oblivion, they decide to achieve this via a conveniently-available medical procedure. Whilst reliving his memories as they’re being demolished, Joel (Jim Carey) changes his mind and decides that actually he doesn’t want to forget Clementine (Kate Winslet), and so a frenzied dash through fragmented memories ensues, as he attempts to wake himself up. Whilst it’s got a lot of odd quirks, what’s interesting about Eternal Sunshine is the way it plays around with memory and how, quite often, what we remember is not necessarily always exactly an accurate representation of events. At the beginning things are somewhat hectic, jumping back and forth between past and present, eventually the story pieces together and allows you to figure out just what on earth is going on. Overall, it’s a cleverly back-to-front kind of film, which you’ll either find satisfying or frustrating, depending on who you are – but either way, it’s worth a watch.

The Music Never Stopped
Starring: J.K. Simmonds, Lou Taylor Pucci, Cara Seymour (2011) 

This is yet another, more recent, adaptation of the writing of Oliver Sacks – this time of the case study: The Last Hippie. The story follows a young man who, due to a brain tumour, suffers anterograde amnesia and is unable to remember anything after the late 1960s or form new long-term memories. However, by focusing on music, and the memories certain songs are strongly tied to and able to evoke, Gabriel (Lou Taylor Pucci) is gradually able to connect with his estranged family. The Music Never Stopped is a sincere, heartfelt film which highlights just how far we still have to go to understand how human memory works (the music therapist in the film has some debatable ideas, but then most of what we understand about memory is debatable and the film is set in the 80s…). Nonetheless, it’s an enjoyable watch – if only for the great soundtrack – with plenty of laughs along the way.

States of Mind: The Somnambulist in the Room

Image: The Wellcome Collection

At the start of this year The Wellcome Collection, London’s art-gallery-meets-science-museum, held the first part of its new exhibition States of Mind: a series of installations spanning until October, which aims to examine consciousness from a variety of perspectives. In January the series got off to an interesting start: filling rooms with coloured mist in the name of exploring visual perception (yellowpinkblue by Ann Veronica Janssens). Yesterday, part 2 – multimedia installation The Whisper Heard by Imogen Stidworthy – opened to the public so, intrigued, I decided to go and take a look.

From stepping through the entrance, it was clear that perspective – and provoking thought about different perspectives – is certainly central to this exhibition. As I wandered around, taking nerdy delight in the intricate ink drawings of neurons by the legendary Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramon y Cajal, I couldn’t help wondering what this would all look like to someone whose normal day-to-day life didn’t involve thinking about neurons all the time. Where I clearly saw an astrocyte – how could it be anything else – in one of Ramon y Cajal’s drawings framed on the opposite wall, would someone else see an inscrutable, tangled mess? Would anyone notice the texture of the off-pink walls subtly looked like the convoluted folds of the cerebral cortex if it wasn’t something they were frequently exposed to? (On a side note, I’m not sure if the décor was intentional or not – I got the impression it probably was. Speaking of impressions, I imagine that having an appreciation of the colour of art gallery walls that’s on par with your appreciation of the actual art work itself is a bit odd. You got me.)

Following spidery images of neurons, things then began to depart from the safety of what we reasonably understand. If there’s one thing anyone in neuroscience knows, it’s that when brains go wrong, things can get pretty weird. States of Mind looks at this in particular through the focus of one of the brain’s biggest mysteries: sleep. Eyes closed in a somewhat creepy repose, sculpture ‘The Somnambulist’ lies innocuously on the floor in a corner, but just prominently enough in the Uncanny Valley that you have to stop and check that ‘that-isn’t-actually-a-real-person-is-it?’ (It wasn’t just me on this one: I definitely saw multiple people eyeing it like it might suddenly get up to stretch its legs and go for a coffee.) In the background, black and white observation footage of real patients in a sleep clinic flickers.

Memory is also branched into. A notable feature for me was a piece of artwork inspired by the experiments of psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, whereby study participants were influenced to adopt a suggested false memory of being lost in a shopping centre as a child, as a recollected event in their own lives, demonstrating the fallibility of memory. Large security-camera photos of an empty Westfield shopping centre dominate the wall: normal at first glance until you notice that all the people have been eerily photoshopped out, leaving behind only the odd lone child here and there.

The current centre-piece installation of the exhibition: The Whisper Heard takes an interesting look at language from two contrasting perspectives. The room fills with the sound of a child stumbling aloud over words, whilst the deeper voice of an old man with aphasia – a condition impairing the speech and language-processing areas of the brain – rumbles haltingly underneath. The televised source of this sound is, at first, confusingly unclear until you successfully navigate a slightly disorientating maze arrangement of surgical-like curtains.

Through its careful blend of art of and science, States of Mind as an experience, treads a fascinating line somewhere between peaceful and eerie in its examination of how, despite its relative infancy, neuroscience has made enormous progress. The artwork and literature displaying confident paranormal interpretations of sleep paralysis are, in retrospect, strikingly archaic – but not quite as old as you might think – in contrast with 3D models of damaged brain areas of amnesia patients and fMRI scans of coma patients. Though it starts off on solid ground with what we know – neurons – in the way the exhibition sort of drifts to a loose end, it says a lot about how we still have a long way to go until we really even begin to scratch the surface on consciousness. If you find yourself in London, I’d definitely recommend States of Mind as a carefully curated, thought-provoking collection of work, whether you’re into science, art, both or just after something a bit different. It’s the sort of exhibition where you find yourself (quite literally) peeping behind curtains thinking ‘is this part of it?’ with the brief thrill of trepidation that you might just be about to wander somewhere you shouldn’t. Consciousness is quite the rabbit-hole.

States of Mind is open at the Wellcome Collection, London until 16th October, with frequent installation changes throughout this period. Entrance to the exhibition is free.

The sleep-deprived: sleeping with the fishes?

Imagine what being asleep, oblivious to the whole world passing you by, for one whole year would be like. Think of that, and the thirty-or-so years you’ll have spent sleeping by the time you reach the end of your life start to seem like an unfathomably long time. Sleep is a strange and fascinating thing. We physically cannot go without it. It takes up so much of our time, yet we still don’t actually know why we do it. After looking into this, including watching sleep scientist Russell Foster’s talk about sleep in the video above (worth a watch if you’ve got time!), I was surprised to discover just how little your average person ‘really’ knows, or thinks they know about this enigmatic bodily function.

It’s worrying just how blasé we are about sleep, when it’s so vital to our quality of life. Now, I’ve got nothing against living your life to the full: I’m not petitioning that we all be tucked up in bed as soon as night descends. But it seems to me that we could all benefit from a little more shut-eye now-and-again rather than letting the fear of missing out (‘FOMO’ to those of you who are down with the acronym-loving, hash-tagging kids) keep you awake.

While research has yet to show us conclusively what exactly sleep does for us, we all intrinsically ‘know’ that we feel good after a good night’s sleep, and that we’re unlikely to be feeling our best after an all-nighter. We also ‘know’ that not getting enough sleep is bad for us – and while research hasn’t yet shown us what sleep does, there is a lot which tells us what happens to us when we don’t get enough sleep and the truth is a lot more startling than getting caught sleeping at your desk.

Unsurprisingly, long-term effects of regular sleep deprivation are linked to all the usual deadly suspects: type 2 diabetes, obesity, cardio-vascular disease, stroke, high blood pressure and heart attacks. Prolonged lack of sleep often triggers stress and weight gain which are associated with all these health problems. In order to continue to stay awake, the brain will crave things which enable it to do so: stimulants (caffeine, nicotine), alcohol (to counteract the stimulants when you’re finally trying to get to sleep later on), and food high in sugar and fat. Other immediate effects of sleep-deprivation include: increased risk-taking and impulsive behaviour, memory impairment, poor judgement and poor creativity (there’s a reason why there are so many historical accounts of great innovative thoughts, inventions and creations which occurred while the brain responsible was asleep, dreaming or just waking up!). With all this, staying up past bed-time might seem like a dangerous idea, but the consequences don’t just stop at your own health.

To rather state the obvious, lack of sleep makes us tired and drowsy. When tired you might find yourself plagued by uncontrollable micro-sleeps. This is the act of falling asleep without realising for a short period of time – from seconds to a few minutes – only to be woken when your muscles start to relax: the classic ‘nodding off’ action. Now, apart from the perils of unsympathetic friends drawing on your face, the odd micro-sleep whilst sat at the back of a stuffy lecture theatre may not sound too hazardous; but place your micro-sleeping self behind the wheel of a car, perhaps on a motorway, and things start to look a bit more serious when there’s more at stake than marker-pen moustaches. Every year in the UK, there is a notable increase in road traffic accidents – around 20% – the day after the clocks change for daylight-saving. Interestingly, this increase occurs both when the clocks go ‘forward’ and ‘back’, and not just after the switch to summertime when we lose an hour’s sleep. It is telling that disrupting sleep by just one hour for one night is enough to cause such damage. We are beginning to become more aware of the harm sleep-deprivation can cause, with ‘Tiredness Kills, Take A Break’ signs springing up more and more on our roads, but society is yet to universally frown upon driving tired in the same way as we do with regard to driving drunk.

If you’ve read this far, you may well be wondering who I am to be admonishing you that ‘it’s way past your bedtime’ like every nagging parent since the dawn of time. Having read my cautionary words of gloom and doom you may decide to carry on exactly as you are and do absolutely nothing different. This is an opinion you are perfectly entitled to, but the important point is that at least the decision to do so is now an informed one. I’m sure you’ll agree that, far scarier than any of the consequences I’ve sagely listed in this post, is the fact that so many people just don’t know what the consequences of being regularly sleep deprived are, beyond feeling a bit ‘rough’. In this case, ignorance is not bliss, and what you don’t know may well hurt you.

In our modern, 24-hour society we have a strange, almost brutal attitude towards sleep that contributes to this ignorance. There’s an almost heroic respect attached to those who frequently forgo sleep in the name of work, leisure or both. What is really unsettling is that many of these champions of wakefulness, the most sleep-deprived people, are found in important roles, often requiring life-or-death decisions: politicians, pilots, medical professionals and nuclear power plant engineers are just a few named examples. Industrial disasters, such as Chernobyl, notoriously occur in the small hours of the morning, and have often been linked to sleep-deprived workers. Given the choice, would you really want the pilot of your holiday flight micro-sleeping over the controls? Your surgeon nodding off over your burst appendix?

The negative attitude towards sleep doesn’t just apply to those in the corridors of power and positions of responsibility. If you’re not one of them, just think back to the last time you declined a night out with friends because you were ‘too tired’, and the reaction which that ‘excuse’ might have elicited. People who get enough sleep are boring, they’re not risk-takers (even the research says so!), they need to live a little, right?

I may be wrong, but perhaps life ought not to be experienced as one long bleary-eyed stumble from one early morning meeting to the next late night party like the victim of a zombie apocalypse. Or at least not all of the time. I can’t help wondering about all that we might stand to gain – not least from a health perspective – and appreciate, in occasionally approaching life with eyes not propped open by caffeine or wide with that terrible fear of missing out. It’s time we all took a good long look at the way we perceive sleep.

So think on that – you might even want to reach for your duvet and sleep on it.

(And so it begins! I can only apologise in advance for the shameless puns that will inevitably follow in the titles of many future posts about sleep. But who doesn’t love a good pun? At least I had the creativity and good grace not to immediately resort to Shakespeare – that man sure had a lot to say about sleep.)