Day: July 28, 2022

In this week’s module, the film Inside Out and The Star Trek episode “Man of the People”, touched upon the intersection of our cognitive system with our emotions and how they function. I think the film did a nice job showing how our emotions can fluctuate due to our surroundings and how we are interacting with it. When Riley moves to a new home, we can tell that she seems to be in a nostalgic state or mood, but she experiences a variety of emotions on top of that. This relates back to our lecture where it discussed that moods are “modulated and sustained background feeling”, while emotions are “self organizing patterns of the organism, the collection of responses, many of which are publicly observable”. When they first enter the new home you can tell that Riley is not impressed by their condition and misses her old home already, but after Joy plants an idea in Riley’s mind to play mini sticks (10:50), we see that she is happy. Riley is seen laughing with her parents, a physical display of the emotion she is feeling. Her nostalgic mood for her home did not disappear, it’s still there, just hidden below the current emotion she is feeling.

We see this again when Riley is at the dinner table with her parents and she gives them attitude after they bring up hockey (27:30), which causes Riley’s Dad to scold her. Riley eventually yells at her father to “shut up”, her anger clearly on display. This emotion is a reaction to the conversation between herself and her father, but her underlying longing for home is at the bottom of it.

For me, I felt like the film represented emotions as something that we first construct at birth, but then afterwards it is something that happens to us (post us creating them) which I think is interesting that it can be both in a way. When Riley is born and she first sees her parents (1:34), Joy is sprung into existence in Riley’s mind. This shows how Riley herself constructed Joy based on what she was feeling and seeing in that moment even though she was just a baby. We see that as things begin to happen Riley constructed all the emotions into existence, Sadness arriving second.

We see how emotions are represented to be the “masterminds” of the brain as they are located in Headquarters, which is far away from the other areas such as long term memory, imagination land, and the dreamland. The emotions in headquarters have access to a large console where there are buttons and levers that trigger something in Riley’s mind to then act a certain way physically with her body. When Riley stands up to introduce herself in front of the class, Sadness touches one of the “joy” memory balls and turns it blue. Now that that memory has a new emotion attached to it, Riley begins crying and having a physical reaction. We see this again when Riley is playing hockey and Anger fully sends one of the levers and Riley throws her hockey stick before stomping off the ice. But this made me think back to the lecture where it discusses that one of the tenets of the Theory of Emotional Construction states  that “Emotions are not something that happens to us, they are something we do”. So, this made me think about how the act of throwing her hockey stick is anger itself, and that’s how she was expressing it, not that anger “told” her to throw the stick as represented in the film with the console that was controlling Riley. 

In the episode of Star Trek, I thought they had a really cool way of representing negative emotions, and how it can take a physical toll on your body, showing how our emotions, mind, and body are so closely intertwined. Also, it touched base with how our own emotions can sometimes have an affect on how we perceive and interact with others. When Ambassador Alkar reveals what he did to Captain Picard (33:14), he justifies his actions by saying “If I came to these peace talks hindered by unwanted emotions, then Rekags and Seronians would be condemned to go on fighting.”.

He is worried about his own emotions becoming obstacles in trying to create peace between two sides who have their own negative feelings towards each other. In other words, the emotions have the capability to control your mind to an extent, because they can be so strong, and the power may be unconscious. This goes back to how in the film, the emotions Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear were located in the Headquarters with the brain with access to a console. Earlier in this scene though, Alkar says “I discovered long ago I had the ability to channel my darker thoughts”, which then leads to the idea that Alkar is so hyper aware of his emotions that he can separate them from his mind, even though they are actually heavily connected as the mind functions in unison with emotions. 

In a later scene when we see Deanna on the table, Captain Picard and his crew are trying to figure out what is wrong with her (36:20). They note that “If Alkwar is flooding her with all this psychic waste, that would explain the high level of neurotransmitters, all these negative emotions pouring into her, they have caused a chemical response in her brain”. We see throughout the episode that Deanna’s body is aging at an exponential rate, and her demeanor is becoming more aggressive. There seems to be a correlation between negative emotions and physical health, and how what we are feeling can ultimately take a toll on your body. Also, Alkar dies at the end of the episode because all of the negative emotions he had pushed onto Deanna went back to him and he looks like an old man. This made me think about how some people die of a broken heart. Their sadness and grief surrounding a loss actually cause their body to not function as it is supposed to. First the emotions affect the brain, the person becomes numb to their surroundings and eventually the body seems to follow. 

I’m late to the discussion on this one, but this module included media that deals with empathy in extreme sci-fi scenarios. While Futurama is always a fun watch, I wasn’t sure what to expect from The Possessor, as ’empathy’ wasn’t as intriguing of a topic compared to the previous week. Though it wasn’t an easy watch, I was pleasantly surprised with the sci-fi concepts and story.

I watched The Possessor first, and oh boy, was it hard to stomach at parts. The camera work was amazing (which only made the gory parts even gorier) and the concepts it tackled were really interesting. We follow Tasya Vos, an assassin who takes over other people’s bodies to kill her target. As she moves in and out of bodies, she becomes more and more disoriented with her identity and life itself. Even before the assassination on John Parse goes wrong, Tas has become prone to violence, killing her victims brutally with knives and blunt force. She also appears constantly confused, practicing her mannerisms before seeing her family and misremembering facts about her life.

I interpreted this descent into madness as the effect of an overload of emotions and experiences; when Tas goes into other’s bodies, she seems to gain a better understanding of her target while simultaneously losing a piece of herself in the process. In the final scene where Tas/Collin kill Michael, the process is described as parasitic – almost as if the process of switching bodies intrinsically causes insanity. This idea is supported by Girder’s apparent lack of emotion and statement that she feels overtaken by the act of entering another body. After the years of experience she had being an assassin, the process took it’s toll on her – just as it did to Tas in the end.

A scene that I connected to the lecture was when Tas is watching Collin as he talks to his girlfriend at home, mimicking everything he says. She’s likely directed by her employer to learn about her target this way because the mimicking activates her mirror neurons, which fire both when an organism witnesses an action and performs that action themselves. This would help her learn Colin’s mannerisms quicker.

I then watched the episode “I Second That Emotion” from Futurama, which was a welcomed change of pace from the nail biter that was The Possessor. Bender gets jealous of Nibbler – Leela’s pet – and flushes him down the toilet in retaliation. Leela is heartbroken because of this, but Bender doesn’t seem to understand or care about her feelings. She says that she would feel better if Bender understood how she was feeling, leading to the doctor implanting an empathy chip into Bender against his will. He’s then stuck feeling the same emotions as Leela. This is an example of simulation theory – the idea that understanding others involves simulating their mental states based on your own experiences. In this case, Bender is literally experiencing emotions as Leela does.

During his time with empathy, Bender is shown to experience emotions in a robotic way. When Leela feels an emotion, a light on the chip blinks red and Bender completely switches what he was previously thinking. He sometimes comments on these emotions with his true thoughts, though, stating that he hates Nibbler just after the empathy chip made Bender miss him. While he is experiencing Leela’s emotions, they are not accurate to how Bender wants to feel. Because of this, Bender doesn’t learn his lesson in the end and is just as big of a jerk as he was when flushing Nibbler down the toilet.

Well, I’m late to the party, clearly. Please excuse me for that; I’m currently in Greece, burning my everything inside a house that might as well be an oven. However, I will be going to a beach soon, so that’s a plus, I suppose.

Not my best metaphors, but they will do.

Hello, everybody. Hope you’re well and cooler than me. I really liked this module’s movie and episode, so let’s just jump right into it.

I want to set a small baseline, if you will. The quoted title is pulled from a TOOL song, “Culling Voices”, one of their more obscure, underrated gems. It is, as per usual by TOOL standards, very vague and ambiguous, which allows the listener to attach their own meaning onto the song. In short, I like to think it’s about being unreasonably paranoid that someone is out to get you, and you think you’re being accused of something when, instead, you’ve created a reality that’s much worse than what’s actually happening.

Sound familiar? Well, if not, don’t worry, I’m terrible at explaining things. That’s why I’ll let Arrival do all the explaining.

In typical alien-scenario fashion, the governments of the world refuse to cooperate with each other because of national security, distrust, paranoia, and big cultural differences. Understandably, they are extremely terrified of the alien spacecrafts (if you can call those egg looking things that) and are certain that the aliens have hostile intentions from the get-go.

But…why is it “understandably”? If you think about it, why are we so scared of aliens in the first place? They are, sort of, making things feel worse than they actually are. Before I delve into this, a specific scene must be brought up first.

When Colonel Weber meets Dr. Louise Banks, he plays her an audio clip of two Heptapods growling. Now, my first thought when I heard them growling so menacingly and lowly (aside from, ZOMG ALIENS SO COOL) was “damn, they must be terrifying and evil,” because I associated that sound with negativity, despite not once seeing the aliens, or hearing some other sounds they could have produced, or how they behaved bodily, etc. What’s funny is that Dr. Louise did point out that it’s impossible to know what they want unless she was there to see the stuff I just mentioned (body language, appearance, etc.)

In other words, that scene puts us in the Colonel’s shoes, not Louise’s.

Like the military, my first instinct was to point fingers and quietly think, “the aliens could be evil because of their sound”. I believe this is because of “Cognitive Framing”. Due to the environment I grew up, which portrays aliens as these “end of the world scenario” capable beings, the moment I heard that growling and attributed it to the word “aliens”, I created a typical picture that helps me understand the situation, even if that picture was completely wrong (which it was).

Emphasis on the “could be evil”. We see in the movie that some countries are immediately against the possibility that these aliens could be harmless. China, Russia, Sudan, and some others I’m forgetting, were paranoid from the beginning.

So language and culture affect how we perceive certain concepts, and how we react to them. Countries like Russia and China, who are notoriously big control-freaks over what goes on in their country, clearly did not take it kindly that massive eggs started floating in the sky. Understandably…

The Star Trek episode also showcases how our language can affect our interactions with people from other backgrounds. The crew meet the Tamarians, and they (try to) talk to them. They noticeably have trouble doing so, as the Tamarians seem to speak only using historical events in their culture as metaphors to portray what is happening in that moment, or how they feel about that specific situation.

I really liked the scene where Captain Picard feels threatened by Captain Dathon when the latter offers knives to the former. Though Dathon offers them in order for them to work together, Picard thinks he wants to fight. Same thing for the crew. That’s because of the two races’ different backgrounds affect their interactions. Without prior knowledge of the Tamarian culture and history, Picard cannot properly communicate with Dathon. However, because a lot of the historical events Dathon mentions are legendary stories similar to those of Earth (two heroes fight the Beast™), Picard is able to slowly make educated guesses as to what Dathon is saying.

This episode encouraged me to think how often I use metaphors to describe situations. And…yeah, I do use a lot of metaphors, ranging from basic to profusely vulgar. In any case, metaphors do get the point across a lot better, I’ve noticed. Maybe because they’re more memorable than typical sentences.

“Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” definitely sticks better than “Two strangers, Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra when they were fighting a beast that threatened to snuff their lives”. Of course, the problem with metaphors is that not every country shares them. “Best thing since sliced bread” would never mean the same thing say in Japanese. It’d just lead to a lot of confusion.

I’d like to finish this post with a chunk of lyrics from “Culling Voices”, because I think it fits with both movies’ themes: