It’s not often that the mere title of a piece of art strikes me enough that I jot it down verbatim on the back of the gallery guide for later examination. Perhaps not ever. Until last week. The photograph bearing the striking title struck me as well, viscerally promoting its dark irony. But of course neither struck me as hard as a more tangible object appears to have struck the subject of the portrait in question.
Category: Mind/Brain
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Open up and say “Derrrrr.”
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The Man Who Takes the Science out of Scientology
For years I’ve had a recurring dream in which, outlandish as it sounds, Matt Lauer and Tom Cruise debate the finer points of neuropharmacology on national television. Crazy stuff, fodder for a Spielberg movie, I know. But today my odd dreams retroactively became premonitions.Okay, there are a few differences. Replace "finer points" with "coarser points." Replace Cruise in a flight suit with Cruise in a creepy stupor, sporting bags under his eyes and a cult-addled stare. And replace Lauer dressed as a court jester with Lauer as my new Hero. [Also, remove the weird sex stuff.] There you have what transpired this morning on "Today."
Scientologists notoriously hate psychiatry. Lauer breaches the topic and eggs Cruise on, revealing Cruise to be pedantic, myopic, and apparently illiterate. I’m still not sure how a man who says "you have to evaluate and read the research papers on how they came up with these theories, Matt, okay? That’s what I’ve done" in the same conversation as "there is no such thing as a chemical imbalance" can figure out which tube is for food and which tube is for air.
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Memory is Treachery
This week The New Yorker, the creme of the fact-checking crop, perpetuates the common misdiagnosis of Memento‘s protagonist. According to movie critic David Denby, an otherwise careful judge of character and plot, Leonard "suffers from short-term memory loss." Um, no.As any cognitive neuropsychologist worth his salt–or any attentive adult, or, come to think of it, your average inattentive six-year-old–can tell, Leonard’s short-term memory works just fine. How else would he carry on a conversation? What he suffers from is an inability to transfer things from short-term memory to long-term memory. A few minutes after a conversation is over, he forgets it.
Now, maybe I’m a stickler for details. After all, I did spend two years in a lab that studied learning and memory. And the professor I worked for, Anthony Wagner (now at Stanford), was interviewed on NPR about Memento. And he collaborated with Sue Corkin, known for her studies with the most famous anterograde amnesia sufferer in the annals of science, patient HM. (Leonard in Memento has anterograde amnesia.)
But, really, is it all that complicated? The concept of short-term memory? Remembering things for a short amount of time, as Leonard so capably demonstrates over and over throughout the entirety of the film? The real question is: How did this Memento misdiagnosis meme begin? It’s easy to hear "short-term memory loss" and repeat it without stopping to think about it (as nearly every movie critic has done), but who was the first person to say, yeah, that’s what it is! Leonard has no short-term memory!
Sure, "short-term memory loss" is easier on the ear than "anterograde amnesia," but you know what’s even easier? "Amnesia." And, it’s–get this–accurate. If you’re into that sort of thing.
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Watching TV Makes You Better at Watching TV
Steven Johnson wrote recently in the New York Times Magazine that "Watching TV Makes You Smarter." Oh, how I would love to believe that. Even if it’s true, Johnson makes the claim only about recent television programming, not what I watched during my long school vacations. Zero mention of Punky Brewster, MacGyver, or Yo! MTV Raps.You see, I used to watch up to 12 hours of television a day. I often wonder how much more I could achieve with my mind if I had spent that time reading or, heck, watching paint dry. I sometimes console myself by saying that it didn’t rot my brain–there are many types of literacy, and watching so much TV just made me learn to think in a particular way. Maybe not a way useful to the classroom, but a way that will make me wildly suited to some fabulously constructive endeavor someday. For a while I was very interested in going to grad school for media studies. Finally, a way to turn my years of experience with TV into an asset!
