Science at the movies

A wonderful modern example of film noir is the movie Memento, in which the lead character - apparently following a head trauma - is unable to form new memories. The film follows the character Lenny (played by Guy Pearce) as he tries to track down the person responsible for killing his wife and injuring him.

As a psychologist, it is interesting to note that "Lenny" describes himself as suffering from a short-term memory problem. The DVD box also describes Lenny as having short-term memory loss, as does the Internet Movie Database, though Wikipedia does not (at the time of writing). In fact, as defined by psychologists Lenny does not have any problem with short term memory. His short-term memory is working just fine. Short term memory (or working memory as it is now called) is a memory store of limited capacity and duration. It can hold approximately seven items of information for about 30 seconds, without rehearsal. For example, when you first hear a telephone number you may just about be able to remember it for half-a-minute, if you're lucky. Lenny's problem is that he is unable to create new long-term memories, memories that last for more than about half-a-minute.

Real-life examples of such individuals are HM and Clive Wearing (various clips on YouTube, for example: here). In fiction, this anterograde amnesia makes for a great story, but in real life the condition is clearly far more debilitating to the individual.

Anyway, I've been sent off along this train of thought, about science in the movies, by watching the sci-fi/horror film The Fly once again (the David Cronenberg version that is, not the original). In The Fly a scientist studying bodily transportation through space accidentally merges his DNA with that of a fly. On this repeat viewing it suddenly dawned on me that the physical changes in the lead character (played by Jeff Goldblum) are preceded by psychological changes. Increasingly, the instincts of a fly begin to dominate those of the human. Eventually, the fly's instincts completely take over, although in physical terms there is more of a mixture of characteristics - a fly-like creature of human size.

In the middle part of the 20th century, a school of thought known as radical behaviourism argued against the concept of instincts and, indeed, any reference to "the mind". These behaviourists argued that scientists should only study things that could be directly observed, i.e. stimuli and responses to stimuli. In due course, though, this approach proved untenable. For example, Breland and Breland, students of the famous behaviourist B.F. Skinner, reported that many animals could not be trained using behaviourist principles because these organisms had instinctive behaviour patterns that were hard to overcome. For example, a racoon could not be trained to put two coins into a box; instead, it would only rub the two coins together. Breland and Breland argued that the behaviour of organisms could not be understood without reference to such instinctive behaviours, the evolutionary history of the organism, and its ecological niche.

Evolution also gets a mention in The Planet of the Apes. In this movie, astronaut Charlton Heston crash-lands his spacecraft about 2000 years into the future, though he does not realise - until the end of the film - that he is still on planet Earth. In this future time, the planet is dominated by highly evolved apes, whereas humans have become the slaves of the apes and have lost their capacity for language. In an interesting parallel with the modern arguments about evolution, it is a heresy to even suggest that apes may have evolved from humans. Although there is evidence to show that this is in fact the case, no-one is allowed to mention it. The sites containing the evidence are out-of-bounds and, at the end of the movie, are destroyed.

It is fun to consider the philosophical underpinnings and the level of realism of such movies. For instance, if human DNA and fly DNA were merged as in the movie, would it even be possible for a dramatically transformed living creature to be produced? What kind of behaviour might result? To what extent are we even now ruled by our instincts? Do we have the free will to completely overcome our instincts? In The Planet of The Apes, it is never explained why apes have become dominant or why humans have lost their capacity for language. What environmental circumstances might have caused this? Could such a change have come about in the time period since the fall of human civilisation (about a couple of thousand years)?