Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Neuroscience, Psychology and Inception

If you're a neuroscience nerd and you saw the movie Inception, you probably couldn't help but think of some kind of neuro-theory to explain the plot or themes of the film. It seems that this is the case, anyhow, in the neuroscience blogosphere where there is no shortage of articles on Inception from a neuroscience perspective. Here is a list of good articles:

Malcolm MacIver at the blog Science Not Fiction provides a more in-depth look at current research on the neuroscience of sleep with reference to Inception.

The Stanford Neuroblog gives even more detail on the neuroscience of sleep and Inception (and promises to come out with part 2 of this discussion).

Christof Koch reviews Inception in Nature, explaining that "Inception is a visionary science-fiction film that does for dreaming what The Matrix did for virtual reality in 1999."

Neuroskeptic describes how it is possible to induce inception, or the planting of an idea into one's mind, with a little modern neuroscience.

Jonah Lehrer at the Frontal Cortex explains that Inception is about movie-making and movie-watching by describing similarities in the brain during sleep versus movie-watching.

Over at Mind Hacks, a compelling case is made that Inception borrows more from Jungian psychology than it does from contemporary neuroscience.

And of course, I posted my interpretation of Inception here after I saw the movie a couple of months ago.

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