Author: bridiaz

What is a memory? A memory in simple words is the process of taking in information from the world around us. Our minds process it, store it and later on recall that information. Everyone has memories; good ones, bad ones, sad ones, etc. I hate when I remember the bad ones and sometimes I even wish that I can erase good ones in the past that make me sad now but having these memories is what connects us to our emotions. It’s a part of us and it’s something we will always have.

In the movie, Majorie Prime, Majorie is starting to experience the first few symptoms of Alzheimer’s. Her daughter, Tess and her son-in-law, Jon, hire this service called Prime. This service is designed to assist Alzheimer patients that create a holographic projection of deceased family members. These projections are filled with memories of the patient’s so they can repeat these memories back to the patients when they are being forgetful. Majorie receives a hologram of her late husband Walter. She starts talking to him and enjoys her time with her “husband” but her daughter is still skeptical. I think this matches the Remembering emotions from this weeks’ slides because we experience emotions as we remember. Both the memory itself and how we feel about the memory; in the movie when Majorie was reminiscing with her “husband” about good times and little things they did, she expressed a lot of happiness. However, in one scene when she starts to say she wants Walter but not the Hologram Walter, she seems angry because that is not the memory she has of him in that moment. Memories have such an impact on our emotions because it’s like we are trying to remember how we felt in that moment and remembering a certain thing can trigger any type of emotion within us.

In the Star Trek episode, “The Measure of a Man”, Commander Maddox wants to better understand Commander Data’s brain and wants to transfer the contents of Data’s memory to the star base mainframe computer. Maddox promises he will restore Data’s memories and they will stay intact but Data is concerned that Maddox isn’t telling the full truth. A trial begins and Data begins to explain how the experiment that Maddox wants to conduct, can cost him his life. I think this episode pertains to the Affective Dimension of Memory slides that we discussed because the Affective Dimension of Memory influences what we perceive and attend to and Maddox argues that Data is not a sentient being, however, if Data is already feeling nervousness about the experiment, that already makes him sentient. He is able to feel something based on that alone.

Emotions function as a guide for us to survive and thrive. They focus on our attention and motivate us to take a specific course of action. Emotions are also contagious because our feelings can spread between people, like a virus. We tend to pick up on each other’s emotional states whether we realize it or not.

In the movie Inside Out, Riley has different emotions inside of her and we get to see how they all work and think. We have Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger. We get to see how each emotion functions and how they effect Riley. When Joy and Sadness are gone we see Riley struggling as she can only experience anger, fear and disgust. She struggles with her identity and expressing her emotions. In the scene where her mom talks about hockey, her favorite sport, Riley can only react with disgust when she should’ve reacted with Joy. When Anger takes over the control panel, the father also begins to get upset over her attitude, showing how emotions can be contagious. In the end when sadness and joy work together, Riley seems happier and more comfortable again because she is able to express the proper feelings. We need every single emotion in order to survive. If I was only controlled by anger, I’m pretty sure my road rage would be a lot worse haha

In Man of the People, Troi go through an emotion “curse”. We see Troi get very sexual by making advances to people on the ship, and even signs of rapid aging. Troi even expresses a bunch of anger when she discovers Alkar working with Liva and even tries to attack him with a knife. In the slides from this week, we learned that an instance of emotion arises by categorizing our culturally  contextualized body stimuli. I think this applies to Troi because her anger for example caused her to attack Alkar with a knife, an out of the ordinary action for her character. She was unable to control her body and emotions. I feel like this episode was a little similar to the Futurama episode we watched when Bender was experiencing Leela’s emotions. Bender couldn’t really control his emotions in a way that Troi couldn’t truly express hers.

SIDE NOTE: did anyone else cry when Bing Bong died? I was crying so hard; I haven’t watched this movie in a while and I forgot how sad his death was. I tend to cry in every movie lol

Communicating through different languages is a very interesting concept. There’s always a word or two that can connect us to understanding each other. For example, bien in French also means the same thing as bien in Spanish. If two people communicating in two different languages, there’s always a word or two to connect them to the possibility of understanding each other. Sometimes actions even help with miscommunication.

In the Star Trek episode, Darmok, is about how the captain and is trapped on another planet with an alien captain. They have trouble communicating due to the fact the alien captain speaks a different language. In one scene of the episode, the alien captain throws a knife at Captain Picard and keeps repeating, “Darmok and Jalad”. Picard keeps assuming that the alien wants to fight and the miscommunication gets them both frustrated. Later in the episode when a creature approaches, Picard realizes that the alien captain did not want to fight but wanted Picard to have protection. He also realizes that the aliens communicate by metaphor. The alien captain even utters a phrase making it sound like he is relieved to finally be understood. The Conceptual Metaphors connects with this episode because we learned that these types of metaphors influence how we talk about the world and how we perceive and experience it. The alien captain used these type of metaphors to explain his feelings to Picard and his knowledge of the beast on that planet. It took a while to understand, but once Picard figured out his phrases, they were able to work together.

In the movie, Arrival, Linguist Louise Banks is needed to help communicate with these aliens that have appeared on earth in 12 ships. She makes contact with them and starts to study their complex language. Their language seems to consist of palindromic phrases and circular symbols. She establishes enough of their “vocabulary” to ask why they have come to earth. They respond in their language which ends up being translated as “offer weapon”. This movie would go with the Frame Shifting concept we learned this week because frame shifting occurs when additional information provides a new context which requires a reanalysis. This is what Banks did as she studied the symbols and tried to interpret what the aliens were trying to tell them.

Emotion researchers define empathy as “the ability to sense other people’s emotions, coupled with the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling.” The film and episode we watched demonstrates what researchers define empathy as with a psychological example and a humorous example.

In the film Possessor, an assassin, Tasya Vos takes control of others’ bodies to commit murders. There’s a special machine that inserts her consciousness into their minds. To return back to her own body, she has to force the host(the other body) to commit suicide. The beginning of the film shows Vos in the first host body and is seen looking in a mirror and crying. It then switches to the host killing the intended target. Vos struggles to pull the trigger when it’s time to commit suicide so she waits for the police arrive to kill her instead. She feels empathy for this host body that she is in because she knows that she has ruined this person’s life and now has to kill them while being in their body. It’s as if she can feel that person suffering and their sadness as she takes their life. Vos also seems to show empathy when she is back in her own body and her boss asks her to explain a personal object she has. It’s a framed butterfly and Vos expresses her guilt for killing it.

In the episode “I second that emotion” of Futurama, Bender flushes Nibbler down the toilet in an act of annoyance towards Nibbler. Leela gets so anger that Bender isn’t feeling any emotion and wants him to feel the way she feels: sadness. The professor puts an empathy chip on him so he can feel every single one of her emotions. Throughout the episode we see him feel all different types of emotions such as anger, sadness, and jealousy. I think in this episode we were able to see Cognitive and Emotional empathy because Bender was able to understand Leela’s emotions being controlled by the chip and emotional empathy because every time she would cry, for example, he would cry as well and express why he is crying.

The film/episode really portrays of feeling empathy because it really helps us understand how others are feeling and how those feelings can help us respond to certain situations.

In the show Altered Carbon, Takeshi Kovacs wakes up 250 years later after being resurrected from his death. He wakes up in a whole new body called a “sleeve”. “Sleeves” are the new bodies that one wakes up to after dying and you look different from your last body but your brain in still intact. This goes with what we learned in this week’s lecture because one of the terms we learned was called , Embodied Cognition. Cognition does not occur in a disembodied mind but is an embodied process. To quote the slide, “A body is not something you have; it is something you are.” I think this related to the episode because Takeshi was put into a different body, however, his emotions and personality are still intact. His “body” is who he is because both of his sleeves were nicely built guys that play along with his soldier like traits. When he first wakes up, after fighting the doctors he asks for a mirror and sees his old body in the reflection for a second before seeing his new self. Our bodies and emotions are integrated into our cognitive system, not separate from it.

            In Futurama, the episode was about how brains were taking over the plants and making everyone dumb. Fry then has to stop the brains by using his own brain. He goes against the biggest brain of all and has to actually think of a plan to stop it. He reads a book to it and defeats the big brain. I feel that this episode of Futurama contributed to “The Brain in a Vat” concept and Embodied Cognition. “The Brain in a Vat” concept connects with the episode for the reason that the floating brains in the episode “made up” their own worlds by making other planets dumb which is similar to the experiment where the scientist would create an entire fictitious world that he captive brain would feel normal. Embodied Cognition also goes with this episode because the slide from the lecture explains how we don’t notice the thinking our bodies do. We think with and through our bodies. I’ve only seen a few episodes of Futurama to know that Fry isn’t the smartest character but he unknowingly used his brain to save his planet.

            In the Star Trek episode, this voice appears and as the crew investigate, they find a device that contains a mind; Sargon’s mind. Sargon then takes over Captain Kirks body and starts to reminisce as if he were re-enjoying having a body again. He also got a chance to rekindle his with his wife. I think this goes with 4e Cognition because it shows that being just a brain isn’t enough. You need your body to express emotions physically, you need your 5 senses. To quote the lecture, “Cognition is embedded, always occurs and is often off-loaded onto, a physical and social environment.” The body is such an important factor in every thought and decision one makes.

Hello Everyone! My name is Brianna Diaz, and my pronouns are she/her. I feel my hobbies are very basic but I enjoy swimming, writing, reading and going to clubs with my friends. I am actually in Dominican Republic right now at a resort with my friends so this is one part of my summer plans. I am also going to Miami at the end of July and Colorado to visit my best friend. I chose this class because as much as I love having English as my major, most English classes in my opinion are a bit boring or just the same concept. It gets a bit tiring, so when I read about this class when applying for summer courses, it seemed out of the ordinary and it caught my eye.