Enslaving Central Executives: Toward A Brain Theory of Cinema

Yadin Dudai
2008 Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind  
This article proposes that a major drive in the fast evolution of cinema is that film uniquely fits, exploits and expands the potential of a specialized cognitive machinery in the human brain. This is working memory (WM), a limited capacity processing system that temporarily holds and processes on-line and off-line information under attentional control during the planning and execution of a task. A dominant model of WM depicts multiple components, including a central executive, subordinate
more » ... paces for spatiovisual information and for sound and language, and an episodic buffer that binds episodes on the go and is capable of sorting them into long-term memory. The distinct generic attributes of film and their relevance to the subcomponents and operation of WM in the spectator are described. It is proposed that in watching a movie, WM operates in a special mode, dubbed the representation-of-representation (ROR) mode, in which normal motor response to reality is suppressed. It is further proposed that under proper contextual settings and mind set, the central executive of the spectator relinquishes control to the film information, culminating in a transient rewarding dissociative state. The usefulness of the model is discussed in the framework of the newly emerging discipline of neurocinematics. In evolutionary context, the interaction of film and brain is bidirectional. Film in its broadest sense is an extracorporeal audiovisual space that allows the human brain to perform detailed past and future mental time travel which, unlike WM and human memory in general, has unlimited capacity, variability and endurance. This augments the original phylogenetic advantage that had probably led to the emergence of episodic memory in the first place. Brains and cultures change and interact over time, though how exactly they do that is still unclear (Jablonka and Lamb 2005). One thing is, nevertheless, clear: The time scale of change of brains and cultures is very different. Cultural revolutions, involving social and technological innovations, can occur in no 2 2 / P R O J E C T I O N S The human mind has adapted cinema so rapidly and successfully because the human brain has a neural system, originally evolved for other purposes, which almost called for cinema to be invented once the technological elements became available.
doi:10.3167/proj.2008.020203 fatcat:ll27s37dpnav7k7fyjcpvl4bhu