Author: mchupick

Marjorie Prime is a hauntingly beautiful depiction of the grief that comes along with losing a loved one. This movie felt super real; between the characters stumbling over their words and their subtle facial expressions, it felt as if I were watching real people. The story follows a Marjorie, and older woman with Alzheimer’s disease who talks to a hologram of her late husband to learn about her life. Later on, after Marjorie dies, her daughter, Tess, gets a hologram of Marjorie in order to relieve memories with her. Tess ends up committing suicide after being unable to deal with the death of her mother, and her husband, Jon, purchases a hologram of her. The movie ends with Marjorie Prime, Walter Prime, and Tess Prime reminiscing about memories together.

In every instance of a Prime being created, memories become a little mixed up. This is because memories change with time and vary from person to person because of their emotions and experiences associated with the memory. An example of this can be seen with the opening scene compared to the ending scene. In the opening scene, Marjorie asks Walter Prime to invent a beautiful rendition of their proposal so she could remember it that way. Since Marjorie has Alzheimer’s, she truly believes in this story. Walter Prime is a program taking orders from the people who own him, so because of Marjorie’s intervening, he also remembers the proposal that way. In the last scene, Walter Prime recounts this made-up proposal to Marjorie Prime – as that is how they both remember the memory now. The final scene also includes Damien, who was erased from earlier stories, as they have finally accepted the terrible truth of his suicide. The storytelling with these memories shifting and growing makes the viewing experience chilling. Though the thought of memories changing in my head overtime makes me uneasy – to say the least – it’s a natural process that doesn’t undermine the existence of those memories, but, in a way, enhances them by making them new again.

“The Measure of a Man”, an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and, once again, I am absolutely enamored by this show. Every character has so much detail and the plot is always so interesting. This time, Data, a highly advanced and sentient android, is debated being taken apart by a scientist to learn about his inner workings. When Bruce Maddox, the scientist, confronts Data about why he doesn’t want to be taken apart, Data responds that he believes that the emotion connected to his memories might not survive the transplant. He admits that these memories could be transplanted successfully, but that the experience of these memories would not survive. This reminded me of the memories in Inside Out. Riley’s memories are all stored with emotions that accompany them, signifying that the experiences aren’t complete without these emotions. Even if Data’s experiences can be stored, there is no way to know if they will be as whole as they were when they were formed.

This week, we delved into the processing of emotion, watching Disney’s Inside Out and “Man of the People” from Star Trek: The Next Generation. I laughed, cried, and experienced almost every emotion possible along with these characters.

I watched Inside Out first; a movie I’ve seen a few times before, though this is the first time I’m truly appreciating it. It’s so sweet and such a relatable story. We follow the personified emotions of young Riley as she moves across the country, both her and her emotions struggling with the process. While Joy and Sadness have to trek across Riley’s inner mind, wreaking havoc as they do, Riley suffers the consequences and acts out against the people in her life.

Though I believe the writer’s intentions were to depict the changes we experience when growing up, I think this could also be a really brilliant way to depict mental illness. Riley’s emotions act for her, flipping switches to make decisions, which becomes a huge issue when only Anger, Disgust, and Fear are in control. This is akin to mental illness; I imagine depression would be as if Sadness was in control of your actions most of the time, while anger issues would be like if Anger was always in control. As someone with ADHD, I think my emotions are constantly pushing each other out of the way to take the wheel – they’re probably bouncing off the walls in there! I also think that the scene towards the end when Riley makes her first core memory out of two emotions – both Joy and Sadness – is a great depiction of growing up. As a child, your worldview is much more black-and-white, so it makes sense that Riley’s memories would be centered in one emotion. As she discovers the difficulties and nuances of life, she gains more memories that are a just as nuanced.

While nearly all the topics of this week’s lecture could be tied into Inside Out, I found myself connecting the Theory of Emotional Construction to it the most. This states that emotions are not something that happen to you, but are something that you construct from your experience. All of Riley’s memories are experiences tied directly to emotions and they are created simultaneously. One cannot exist without the other; emotion shapes Riley’s experience, while experience also shapes her emotions. I think the way Inside Out depicts Riley’s memories is a really simple and efficient way to communicate this theory.

I then watched “Man of the People” from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and man, have I been absolutely loving the Star Trek episodes we’ve had to watch! I’d never seen the Star Trek T.V. shows before this class, but now I’m going to add it to the weekly rotation of shows I play in the background while I’m doing work or cleaning (along with She-ra and the Princesses of Power, Ghibli movies, and basically every other cartoon available).

This time on the Enterprise, they are carrying Alkar, an ambassador, to mediate peace talks in order to end a civil war. The ship’s counselor, Deanna Troi, began to act strange after spending some time with him; flirting with various men on the ship, wearing scandalous clothing, and becoming angry for no apparent reason. It is only revealed towards the end of the episode that Alkar had found a way to offload his negative emotions onto other people, which helped him become an extremely effective ambassador, and Deanna is going to die because of it.

The logistics of this are a bit more complicated than “Deanna feels Alkar’s negative emotions”, though. Deanna, and the other woman who Alkar did this to, seem to feel their own negative feelings in an extreme way because of Alkar’s. For example, it is shown that the receptacles Alkar takes are all women and have had a lot of romantic tension with him. When Deanna and the woman Alkar first appears with both accuse other women of wanting him and say to stay far away from him, they are expressing an extremely heightened version of their thoughts. This agrees with the Theory of Emotional Construction, as well; while Alkar and Deanna both understand the concept of anger, they will express it in different ways according to their life experiences.

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.

For this week’s module, we watched a few TV episodes that explore the relationship between the body and the mind. These episodes were all really trippy and made me wonder about what the mind really is and how it connects to the body.

The first show I watched for this week was the episode of Futurama titled “The Day the Earth Stood Stupid”. In this episode, Earth is attacked by giant brains who want to wipe out all thought in the universe. Everybody on the planet has been rendered stupid because of this attack – besides Fry, who is immune to this. In their final battle against the leader of the brains, it traps Fry and Leela in a series of classic books – including Moby Dick and Pride and Prejudice – in which they appear to be in scenes from each story. This is an example of the brain in a vat thought experiment, which states that if a human brain can be kept alive in a vat and fed stimuli, it would register this stimuli exactly the same as a normal human would. Though Leela, Fry, and the brain’s bodies are sitting lifeless while they are inside the books, they perceive that they are whaling with Captain Ahab and Queequeg or at a ball with Mr. Darcy – and these experiences are as real as any other they’ve had in their bodies. This scene depicts the mind as having these experiences, while the body can be left out entirely. As always, Futurama was super fun and hilarious to watch, but the concepts they tackle leave me wondering about the nature of the mind, life, and the world itself.

Next I watched the first episode of Altered Carbon – a complete 180 in tone from Futurama. Altered Carbon details the past of a super soldier/rebel leader, Takeshi Kovacs, who gets “resleeved” – placed into a new body – 250 years after his death. There is a dissonance that happens between him and his body, along with everyone else who has been recently resleeved. In a scene where Kovacs is being given a presentation about his new body along with the other recently resleeved, everybody looks wildly uncomfortable with themselves – their eyes wide with terror and confusion, gripping at their skin like it isn’t theirs, pulling and clenching their clothes like they’ve never worn them before. It displays the idea of embodied cognition – that cognition is integrated with our bodies and emotions, not entirely separate from each other. When these people were separated from their previous bodies, they lost a piece of themselves, as well. The most haunting part of the episode was when they show a family reuniting with their daughter who has been resleeved into an older woman. I cannot imagine how horrifying it would be as a little girl to look in the mirror and see someone who looks older than your parents. Though terrifying, it was a great way to show the audience how strange it would truly be to be resleeved.

The last piece of media I watched was the episode of Star Trek: The Original Series titled “Return to Tomorrow”. The starship Enterprise is travelling far into uncharted space when they receive a transmission from a planet that has seemingly had no life for half a million years. They are contacted by a being who has no body and is made of “pure energy”, powerful enough to speak to the crew from their spaceship and turn off their power. When Captain Kirk goes down to the planet to meet this entity – named Sargon – they find a glass ball that contains his mind. This is another example of the brain in the vat, as Sargon is able to perceive the world around him the same as when he had a body. Sargon then takes control of Kirk’s body in a scene that can only be described as beautiful. Sargon moves as if uncomfortable in a body again yet looks enamored with the world as a bombastic and almost romantic song plays, saying that it felt amazing to simply breathe again. This is similar to the reaction of people resleeving in Altered Carbon; they feel strange being in a different body because of the idea of embodied cognition. In Star Trek, however, Sargon has been conscious for half a million years without his body, making his reunion with a body glorious and emotional experience instead of strange and uncomfortable. This scene was executed really well and William Shatner did an incredible job of showing the nuances of Sargon’s emotions while unadjusted to his body.

This week, we watched Arrival and “Darmok” from Star Trek: The Next Generation: media that focuses heavily on cognitive linguistics, which views language as not separate from our way of thinking, but deeply embedded in our overall cognitive capabilities. I was really intrigued and entertained by watching these concepts play out; it made me think about how English approaches language compared to other languages.

I first watched Arrival, directed by Dennis Villeneuve and based off of the short story “The Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang. This story follows Louise, a linguist, who is sourced by the government to help translate the language of aliens who had landed on Earth. I read this novella earlier this month and am a big fan of Dennis Villeneuve’s work on Dune, so I was super excited going into this movie.

After watching, my thoughts are…that I really liked it! Though it differed considerably from the novella, the story is just as chilling and compelling. Both the soundtrack and visuals were beautiful and haunting – as I would expect from Villeneuve.

This story is a great way to explain cognitive linguistics, as I knew little about them before reading the novella, but came out understanding the concept fairly well. As Louise learns the language of the heptopods – her name for the aliens – she begins to experience time non-linearly as they do. This means that she begins to see flashes of the future, seeing her daughter who hasn’t been born yet, her husband, and her teaching a room of people the heptopod writing system. This illustrates the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which states that the language you speaks influences the way you think. This hypothesis is even mentioned by name in the movie to help explain to the viewer Louise’s ability to see the future. In one scene, Louise explains that the heptopods can write complex sentences in one logogram – the symbols they use for writing – which would require them to know everything they have to communicate all at once. Comparing this to human speech, where one word comes after another and sentences can be changed in the middle of speaking them, heptopod writing requires a knowledge of the future. This begs the question – were the heptopods able to tell the future before they invented their method of writing, or did the writing give them this sense over time?

The next media I watched was the episode “Darmok” from the show Star Trek: The Next Generation. Though I have never seen any of the Star Trek shows before, I was excited to finally take a look at one of them, as I know they handle some really interesting sci-fi concepts.

This episode follows the Enterprise as they attempt to communicate with the Tamarians, a race of people whom nobody has been able to understand. After unsuccessfully trying to speak to the Tamarians, Captain Picard is teleported to the surface of the nearest planet – El-Adrel – along with the Tamarian Captain of their ship. At first, they are still unable to understand each other. The Tamarians speak in cryptic and repetitive clips of sentences, such as “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” and “Shaka, when the walls fell”. After spending time with the Tamarian Captain, Picard learns that these phrases refer to stories from Tamarian mythohistory that reflect their current situation – in other words, they use metaphors to explain what is happening. Because Picard does not have the cognitive frame of knowing what these stories are, he doesn’t understand what the Captain is trying to say. I really like the scene where Picard and the mortally wounded Tamarian Captain are sitting by the fire explaining their stories to each other. Though they cannot fully understand each other still, Picard has begun speaking in the same metaphors and even attempts to tell the story of Gilgamesh in this way. It was really heartwarming to see them finally begin to understand each other and made it even more devastating when the Tamarian Captain dies, Picard knowing that he sacrificed himself so that his race could finally be understood by others.

Hello everybody!

My name is Madeline, but you can call me Maddy. I use she/her pronouns and am an English major with a Creative Writing minor at Stony Brook University. I’m going into my senior year, which feels so unreal! I took off a year during COVID, so it felt like I’d never reach graduation, but now it’s just around the corner!

I’m very excited for this upcoming year. I play drums in the marching band here at Stony Brook, which is definitely my favorite non-school activity I do. This year I’ve been chosen for drum captain – a position I’ve wanted since I first started marching – and I couldn’t be more excited! If you go to any football games, keep an eye out for me – I’ll be the blonde girl yelling directions at the drumline. I’ll also be living in a house with other people in band, which is going to be TONS of fun!

Besides drumline, I love to read and write. I enjoy mostly fantasy and sci-fi. I’ve had writers block recently, so I’ve been rereading the Percy Jackson series – my go-to – to get me passionate again.

Of course I have to brag about my pet doves. Their names are Mordecai (the one farthest away in the photo) and Rigby (the one closest to the camera), and they’re my best friends. They like to sleep, eat peas and edamame beans, and look out the window. They also make a laughing noise which cracks me up daily (look up “ringneck dove, burt” on YouTube if you want a sample, that video is amazing). Here’s a cute candid picture of them with my boyfriend Riley.

I’m taking this class for a credit, but the topic of this class caused me to take this instead of a different one. I love sci-fi and the topic of cognition in relation to sci-fi sounds super interesting.

I’m excited to start learning with you guys!