OBEs

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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3 November

Pass by, if you wish to read about royal honours, not Out-of-Body Experiences...


It is a curious term, if you think about it. As usual, the experimental psychologists think that they have got it licked - in the lecture where I learnt about The Rubber-Hand Illusion (sounds more like something in one of Woody Allen's characters' magic acts), I was also told about a woman who was having some pre-operative measurements made of her brain.

She had epilepsy, and, by stimulating parts of her brain, the surgical team wanted to establish that they were not going to deprive her of any important function when they came to remove material to prevent her fitting further. It so happened that they found that stimulating one part caused her to say that she was above her body, looking down on it. For whatever reason this part of the brain had not been identified before, the psychologists seem delighted that they have the brain to hold responsible for this 'experience'.


Not much of an experience, when people report far more than just being above themselves, looking down, but the lecture did not dwell on that possible criticism of this enthusiastic discovery. Of course, experimenters can see that stimulating this part of the subject's brain, when they know where the subject is (i.e. not above their body), causes him or her to report looking down from above, but do they non-scientifically assume it is not a real effect, by invoking a silent circularity ?

In other words, we can see that the subject is where he or she was, so it is just a function of the brain that reports that he or she is several feet in the air above the bed. If the subject were alone when a non-induced experience occurred, he or she would say that, if someone else came into the room when he or she was above his or her body, that person would see his or her body. So, true scientific investigation would have to carry out this experiment (it is my guess that it has not been carried out) :

1. By a shield at mid-body level, prevent the subject from being able to see the lower part of his or her body.

2. Place an easily identifiable object, e.g. a coloured square, on the bed, unknown to the subject.

3. Then stimulate the relevant part of the brain. If the subject can, when asked, report the presence of the object, one can only conclude, not that the brain generates the impression of that point of view, but that the self is actually put into that point of view.


Has anyone tested that ? Or did science confuse cause and effect, as so often ?


Maybe it has been done, or you want to say that it is a waste of time to do an experiment of that kind (though ones on ESP have been carried out enough), and maybe the person would never be able to see the object, because it is just a function of the brain to cause the illusion (can science say why, what use it would be ?). OK.

Do you recall the pivoting beds on board the USS Enterprise in Star Trek ? What if the person whose brain were to be stimulated got put in one of those first, so that he or she is near vertical before the brain is touched ? Where would that person report his or her self being then - upright facing 'the bed', or still above, looking down ?


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

The Agent Apsley on depression

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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12 May

To open* :

British psychiatric practice is a bit like this : It's as if someone were talking Scots, but saying Gae hame were perceived as psychosis.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 11, 2013

Since I Tweeted this, I shall say more (to @stephenfry, or - as he may not - anyone who cares to listen) :

Sorry, @stephenfry, but this notion that depression is as the weather and - one supposes - we just live with it 'till it changeth' is tosh !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 11, 2013

What did this refer to ? :

Depression isn't a straightforward response to a bad situation, depression just is, like the weather.


Where I saw it, it wasn't properly punctuated (unlike here), and no source was given (true elsewhere) :

Beautifully put by @stephenfry about #depression - please RT if you agree that this is amazing: twitter.com/otrbristol/sta… #mentalhealth
— Off The Record (@otrbristol) May 8, 2013

Excuse the poor quality of another's reproduction of his letter, but it seems that he wrote something similar, just at more length, to someone called Crystal seven years ago (10 April 2006**), shown at http://missbeautifullydepressed.wordpress.com/2012/01/13/depression-is-like-the-weather/


But is Fry right, or do such analogies hamper us 'getting to grips with' the negative thinking, patterns of self-depreciation, and modes of cataclysmic reaction, which might make life better, in time ?


If I'm wrong - and Fry's right - then people like Wilhelm Reich with his cloud-busting*** just has no place in a world where a crap day is a crap day, but it will pass... Forget Reich, but, as some will also know, clouds can be seeded - and so, in this respect, we can manipulate when (and so where) rain will fall.

That doesn't destroy Fry's analogy : it's the message, though, of sheer helplessness that he seems to convey in :

In the same way that one has to accept the weather, so one has to accept how one feels about life sometimes.


You'd think that no one (who can afford to) spends the winter in (what they hope will be) warmer climes - or even just (with a car) drives out of the rain (or into it, for that matter).

Staying with this powerlessness of just waiting for things to get better, or just feeling myself going low and allowing it to happen, is not what I spent a dozen or so sessions with a psychologist for, or why I read parts of Paul Gilbert's book Overcoming Depression, about compassion, self-hatred, and the like. 

No, I believe that @stephenfry's message is a negative and unhelpful one for anyone and everyone to hear - I have experienced being able to seed (or bust) those clouds, and I want to escape from this meteorological notion of the inevitably of depressions and cold fronts, which is, as far as I am concerned, not 'reality', as Fry claims, but barometric.


End-notes

* Quoting the spirit of Words and Music, one of Beckettt's plays for radio.

** He seems to favour the ever-encroaching US format for dates... He also writes (about the weather) It isn't under one's control as to when the some [sic] comes out, but come out it will. One day.

*** An experience that Kate Bush alludes to in 'Running up that hill' (from the album Hounds of Love), probably drawing on Peter Reich's (Reich's son') book.


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Meditating about Lars

This is a review of Lars and the Real Girl (2007)

More views of - or at (or before) - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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13 September

* Contains spoilers *

This is a review of Lars and the Real Girl (2007)

I am still musing about this film, not just because I delayed until to-night to watch the special features, and not even because of most of what was in them. So what causes me to continue to muse?

The answer may partly be in the title (as I don't think that 'the Real Girl' refers to Bianca), and where it locates this film. Undeniably, whatever the cast and crew say about her in the so-called featurette, it would not have worked if Ryan Gosling, too, hadn't been good - and he is very good.

In order not to meet the film head on, although I do not really believe that it has any hidden depths, I find myself thinking about the therapy sessions in Good Will Hunting: when I saw the film, nothing could detract from or diminish the fact that Matt Damon's character was there with that of Robin Williams on account of the improbability that - despite the obvious problems posed by the notation alone - he had just been able, in a casual way, not only to pick up advanced mathematical learning from blackboards, but also to become a highly competent practitioner. (The impudent memory that lingers is of the joke that is told about the old couple, when all is said and done.)

Or I reflect on A Beautiful Mind, and what that film wants to suggest about the nature of experiencing schizophrenia, and how it seeks to set academic life, honour and achievements against discordant behaviour. (One could go on to mention Shine, though some disputed that it dealt with mental illness as such.)

I continue musing, knowing that the film gets the viewer to credit certain things, but at the same time - largely - presenting such a utopian picture of acceptance and understanding of another's needs that, if there were any truth in it and it is not to make us feel better about what could be, we would not face so many struggles that seem bound up with life, but, rather, people would bend when they saw how we were hurting.

In a world where people sometimes label one another as 'needy', a word that laughably seems to suggest that the labeller has no needs, I rather doubt it...


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