The neuroscience of Inception

(Image: A screengrab from the movie's trailer.)

This article is all about revealing the plot. So if you haven't seen Inception, please don't read this article for two reasons. First, I'm going to reveal the main plot points of the film in this article; If you have not seen the movie, this article will not make sense at all.

Literary critic Frank Kermode makes a superb case that all successful works of art have the ability to inspire multiple interpretations. We read the classics, he says, because we believe they say more than the author intended. In other words, it's the ambiguous nature of art -- the ability to inspire audiences to argue and blog about it -- that makes art so fascinating.

"Inception," of course, is full of this ambiguity. Those who parse the wobble of the spinning top in the film's final scene have missed all the points of the scene. Because the top as the protagonist Cobb's totem, whether to turn or stop actually does not explain whether he is in someone else's dream or reality. Cobb got the totem from his wife, MEL, and did not make it himself. And MEL killed herself because she thought she was still in a dream. Think of MEL's suicide scene, where they're in one window, two Windows facing each other. It's very weird. Sure, you could say MEL rented another room directly opposite, but if it was all in a dream, wouldn't this strange architectural layout be easier to explain? MEL's death proves that the toppling of the top doesn't mean Cobb is in a dream state. Totems are useless.) But that doesn't mean it's a masterpiece - in my opinion, it's just a slick summer blockbuster that doesn't stand up to director Christopher Nolan's blockbuster The Dark Knight. That said, I found this explanation by Devin Farassi, editor of the movie news site CHUD.com, mostly convincing:

"Every moment of Inception is a dream, not a reality. I think within a few years this interpretation will become an acceptable version of the film, and the different interpretations will all have to be delicately discussed and become more capable of being considered. The film makes that clear, and it never hides that fact from the audience. Some people find this idea contradictory from a storytelling point of view, because they think that a movie where every moment is a dream is a movie where the audience doesn't freak out about the characters, a movie where the audience is just wasting their time."

"Unfortunately, this is exactly what director Nolan is against. The film is a metaphor for how Nolan works as a film director, and his ultimate point is that the catharsis we get in dreams is just as real as the catharsis we get in movies, and just as real as the catharsis we get in reality. Inception is really about filmmaking, and what really fascinates the director is the shared dream."

"Cobb's Inception team can be matched one-to-one with the main characters in the filmmaking process. Cobb was the director, and Arthur, who did the preliminary research and set up the sleeping spots, was the producer. Dream designer Ariadne is the script writer - she builds the world they will enter. Mr. Eames was an actor (this is evident in the detail of his identity change by sitting in front of a makeup mirror, which is still used in stage plays today). Pharmacist Joseph is an engineer: Remember, the full name of the Oscars is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and a film requires a fair amount of technical support. Nolan himself, in a recent Film Review, somewhat revealed the similarities between the behavior of the Inception team and that of making a Hollywood film. For example, when the extractor is walking and investigating the street that he built himself, it is almost exactly the same as the technical investigation that we conducted before turning on the machine. That leaves two main characters. Saito is the investor behind the whole game. Fisher was in the audience. Director Cobb takes Fisher on a fascinating, thrilling and exciting journey that leads him to a deeper understanding of himself. Cobb is an amazing director (or perhaps the best of film directors) who brings action and special effects while conveying meaning, humanity and emotion."

"I think Inception is all a dream, even the shared dream itself is a dream. Dom Cobb is not a dream thief. He can't enter other people's dreams. And he's not on the run from Kobel. At one point he told himself so, though through the words of his wife, MEL, who was a projection of his own subconscious. She asks him: How real is his world, in which he's being hunted around the world by an anonymous gang of Cobb thugs?"

Why I like this explanation is that it also makes neurological sense. From your brain's point of view, dreaming and watching a movie are incredibly parallel experiences. In fact, it has been argued that a spectator sitting in a darkened cinema staring at a movie is most similar to a person who opens his eyes and enters REM sleep. Consider a study by Uri Hasson and Raphael Malach of Hebrew University in Israel, who presented the study at the 7th International Conference on Cognitive Science in Beijing last month. The experiment was simple: They showed the subjects an old Clint Eastwood movie (" Three Dead Men and Three Dead Men ") and looked at what was happening in the subjects' cerebral cortex in an MRI scanner. Scientists have found that when adults watch a movie, their brains show a particular pattern of activation, which is very common. (The study is called "Intersubject Synchronicity of brain Activation during Natural Vision Viewing.") In particular, this includes the visual cortex (which is not surprising, since visual stimuli definitely activate the visual cortex), the fusiform gyrus (which is activated when the camera zoates in on a face), the areas associated with processing touch (which are activated when a movie scene involves physical contact), and other brain regions, There was a clear similarity between the different subjects. Here is the main paragraph of the paper:

But it's also worth pointing out that there are other brain regions that don't "activate together" in the cinema. Chief among these "out-of-sync" brain regions is the prefrontal cortex, an area associated with logic, critical analysis, and self-awareness. Subsequent research by Malach and his colleagues found that when we are engaged in intense "sensorimotor processing" - but the intense sensation is just a fast-moving screen and Dolby surround sound - we actually suppress activation in these prefrontal regions. Scientists claim that this "deactivation" causes us to immerse ourselves in movies:

"Our results present a clear separation between brain regions involved in self-related introspection processes and cortical regions involved in sensorimotor processing. Moreover, self-related brain regions are inhibited during sensorimotor processing. So the phrase 'lost on screen' has a clear neurological basis here."

What these experiments reveal is the basic mental process of watching a movie. In the process, your senses are hyperactive, but your sense of self is incredibly diminished. Now this is where things start to get interesting, at least for the interpretation of Inception. When we fall asleep, the brain experiences a similar pattern of whole-brain activation as when we are normally awake, although the prefrontal cortex remains silent and the visual cortex is even more active than usual. But what excites our visual cortex is not the usual reality: it is a semi-random and unpredictable activity, unconstrained by sensory constraints - namely, dreams. (This is often attributed to a squirt of acetylcholine, an excitatory neurotransmitter that penetrates bottom-up from the brain stem.) It's as if our cerebral cortices entertain us with surrealist movies, filling our strange nocturnal stories with any superfluous details that happen to be around us. Moreover, the sleep state was accompanied by increased activation of a wide range of "limbic" brain regions, which are involved in the production of emotions. This is why even the most absurd nightmares (the more absurd they are, the less likely they are to be believed) cause us to wake up in a cold sweat. All we care about is what happens in our dreams, even if they don't make any sense.

I would argue that Inception is an attempt to destroy the already fine distinction between dreaming and watching a movie. Most of the major plot points in the film happen simultaneously and are absurd - why are we suddenly seeing a thrilling scene set in the North Pole? Why are all the subconscious defenders such bad shots? Why will Cobb's children never grow up? - and, like a dream, strangely arouses our interest. So we still bite our nails, even though we "know" it's just a fool's movie. Thanks to reduced frontal activation in our brains and excitement in our visual cortex, we can sit in a comfortable chair, munch on popcorn and blur the line between virtual and real. We don't question the absurdity of the plot, or complain about imperfect special effects or shallow characters. Instead, we just sat idly, watching the screen, and lost track of real time together. It's almost as if we're being completely manipulated by Cobb as he effortlessly dives deep into our brains and implants an idea. But this Cobb -- we'll call him Christopher Nolan -- doesn't need a specially formulated sedative. All he needs is a big screen.

The translation of Devin Farasi's film review quoted in this article is partly based on Ai Xiaoke's translation and film review article in Douban.

By newkiwi