The Neuroscience of Inception [Inception]

This entire post is a spoiler. Stop reading in case you have not seen Inception, because 1) i’ll reveal major plot points and a couple of) It’ll make no sense.

The literary critic Frank Kermode famously argued that every one successful artistic endeavors be capable to inspire multiple interpretations. We read the classics, he said, because we believe they say more than the author meant. In other words, it’s far the paradox of art – this ability to inspire arguments and blog posts-that makes it so interesting.

Inception, needless to say, is all concerning the ambiguity. (Folks that parse the wobbles of the spinning top within the final scene have missed the total point of the scene.) This doesn\’t mean the movie is a masterpiece – I myself thought it was a sensible summer blockbuster but no Dark Knight. That said, I found this interpretation, by Devin Farci, to be mostly convincing:

Every single moment of Inception is a dream. I feel that in a few years this may occasionally become the accepted reading of the film, and differing interpretations should be skillfully argued to be even remotely considered. The film makes this clear, and it never holds back the reality from audiences. Some find this concept to be narratively repugnant, since they believe that a movie where everything is a dream is a movie without stakes, a movie where the audience is wasting their time.

Except that it truly is exactly what Nolan is arguing against. The film is a metaphor for how that Nolan as a director works, and what he\’s ultimately saying is that the catharsis found in a dream is as real as the catharsis found in a movie is as real as the catharsis found in life. Inception is set making movies, and cinema is the shared dream that really interests the director.

I believe that Inception is a dream to the point where even the dream-sharing stuff is a dream. Dom Cobb isn\’t an extractor. He can\’t go into folks\’s dreams. He isn\’t on the run from the Cobol Corporation. At one point he tells himself this, throughout the voice of Mal, who is a projection of his own subconscious. She asks him how real he thinks his world is, where he\’s being chased across the globe by faceless corporate goons.

What I really like about this interpretation of Inception is that it also makes neurological sense. From the point of view of your brain, dreaming and film-watching are strangely parallel experiences. In reality, you could argue that sitting in a darkened theater and gazing a thriller is the closest you’ll be able to get to REM sleep with open eyes. Consider this study, led by Uri Hasson and Rafael Malach at Hebrew University. The experiment was simple: they showed subjects a vintage Clint Eastwood movie (\” The great, The Bad and the Ugly\” ) and watched what happened to the cortex in a scanner. The scientists found that after adults were watching the film their brains showed a weird pattern of activity, which was virtually universal. (The title of the study is \” Intersubject Synchronization of Cortical Activity During Natural Vision\” .) Particularly, people showed a remarkable level of similarity when it came to the activation of areas including the visual cortex (no surprise there), fusiform gyrus (it was turned on when the camera zoomed in on a face), areas involving the processing of touch (they were activated during scenes involving physical contact) and so forth. Here\’s the nut graf from the paper:

This strong intersubject correlation shows that, despite the completely free viewing of dynamical, complex scenes, individual brains \” tick together\” in synchronized spatiotemporal patterns when exposed to a similar visual environment.

But it\’s also worth declaring which brain areas didn\’t \” tick together\” within the movie theater. Probably the most notable of these \” non-synchronous\” regions is the prefrontal cortex, a local associated with logic, deliberative analysis, and self-awareness. Subsequent work by Malach and co-workers has found that, once we\’re engaged in intense \” sensorimotor processing\” – and nothing is more intense for the senses than an important moving image and Dolby surround sound – we actually inhibit these prefrontal areas. The scientists argue that such \” inactivation\” allows us to lose ourself inside the movie:

Our results show a clear segregation between regions engaged during self-related introspective processes and cortical regions concerned about sensorimotor processing. Furthermore, self-related regions were inhibited during sensorimotor processing. Thus, the typical idiom \” losing yourself within the act\” receives here a clear neurophysiological underpinnings.

What these experiments reveal is the fundamental mental technique of movie-watching. It\’s a process during which your senses are hyperactive and yet your self-awareness is strangely diminished. Now here\’s where things get interesting, as a minimum for this interpretation of Inception. After we doze off, the brain undergoes an analogous pattern of worldwide activity, as the prefrontal cortex goes quiet and the visual cortex becomes even more active than usual. But this isn\’t the standard excitement of reality: this activity is semirandom and unpredictable, unbound by the restrictions of sensation. (It really is usually blamed on those squirts of acetylcholine, an excitatory neurotransmitter, percolating upwards from the brain stem.) It\’s as if our cortex is entertaining us with surreal cinema, filling our strange nighttime narratives with whatever spare details happen to be lying around. Furthermore, the dreaming state is accompanied by an increase in activation in quite a lot of \” limbic\” areas, those chunks of the cortex associated with the production of emotion. For the reason that even essentially the most absurd nightmares cause us to wake up in a cold sweat. We care about what happens in our dreams, even when what happens is not sensible.

I\’d argue that Inception tries to collapse the already thin distinction between dreaming and film-watching. It gives us a movie through which many of the major plot points are simultaneously nonsensical – Why are we suddenly watching a thriller set inside the arctic? Why are your entire subconscious mercenaries such bad shots? Why don\’t Cobb\’s kids ever age? – and strangely compelling, similar to a dream. And so we bite our fingernails although we \” know\” it\’s just a silly movie. Due to the subdued activity of the frontal lobes and the excited visual cortex, we sit in our plush chairs munching on popcorn and confuse the fake with the genuine. We don\’t question the non-sequiturs or complain in regards to the imperfect special effects or the shallow characters. Instead, we just kick back and watch and lose track of the time together. It\’s almost as if we\’re being manipulated by Dom Cobb himself, as he effortlessly travels deep into our brain to plant an concept. But this Dom Cobb – we\’ll call him Christopher Nolan – doesn\’t desire a specially formulated sedative. He just needs a huge screen. [Image: Screengrab from the movie trailer]

Wired.com has been expanding the hive mind with technology, science and geek culture news since 1995.

Source

This post is tagged: inception, neuroscience