10 Surprising Links Between Hollywood and Neuroscience

Image: photographerglen / Flickr

Christmas is over and the start of the movie awards season is only weeks away! This is my excuse for a post about cinema and the brain. Over the years I’ve been keeping note of actors who studied neuroscience and other similar factoids and now I have the chance to share them with you. So here, in no particular order, are 10 surprising links between the worlds of Hollywood and brain research:

Bialik. Image: Wikipedia Commons

1. Actress Mayim Bialik is a neuroscientist. Bialik currently plays the character of neuroscientist Amy Fowler in the Big Bang Theory, which is neat because Bialik herself has a PhD in neuroscience. Her PhD thesis, completed at UCLA in 2007, has the title: “Hypothalamic regulation in relation to maladaptive, obsessive-compulsive, affiliative, and satiety behaviors in Prader-Willi syndrome.” “I don’t try and rub my neuroscience brain in people’s face[s],” Bialik says, “but when we have lab scenes … I have had to say that’s not where the tectum would be, we need it down here … or I’ve actually carved the fourth ventricle into slices … ’cause you know, why not have me do it.” Among her other acting roles, Bialik also featured in the short film for Michael Jackson’s Liberian Girl and she played the child version of Bette Midler’s character in Beaches (1988).
2. Natalie Portman is a neuroscientist. Perform a Google Scholar search on her name and you won’t get very far. But under her original name of Natalie Hershlag, the Oscar-winning actress co-authored a paper in 2002 on the role of the frontal lobes in infants’ understanding of “object permanence” – recognizing that things still exist even when you can’t see them. According to the Mind Hacks blog, Ms. Portman contributed to this research while working as a research assistant at Harvard University. Her paper has now been cited in the literature over 100 times.
3. Michael Fassbender is the brother of cognitive neuroscientist Catherine Fassbender, who works at the University of California Davis Mind Institute studying ADHD. Another family Hollywood link comes via Sacha Baron Cohen who is the first cousin of autism expert Simon Baron-Cohen. “I’ve got a deal with Sacha,” said Professor Baron-Cohen last year, “which is that I don’t talk to journalists about him, just to respect his privacy. It’s just about respecting feelings, actually, although I can say that I like his work.”

Aniston. Image: Wikipedia Commons

4.Your brain has a Jennifer Aniston cell. Well, kind of. This is a reference to the concept of “grandmother cells” or “concept cells” in the brain that are said to respond only to a specific concept. In a 2005 paper (pdf) that investigated such cells, researchers in California identified a single brain cell in the hippocampus of one volunteer that responded strongly to “all pictures of the actress Jennifer Aniston alone, but not (or only very weakly) to other famous and non-famous faces, landmarks, animals or objects.” Curiously, this cell was not a Brad Pitt fan and did not respond to pictures of Jennifer Aniston when she was with Pitt. This research area is a delight for headline writers covering neuroscience: “Neuroscientists Battle Furiously Over Jennifer Aniston,” was an NPR story last year.
5. Hollywood movies are used frequently in brain research. A fertile area of research right now is testing how reliably computer algorithms can be used to decode patterns of brain activity, for example to determine what a person or animal was watching at the time the activity was recorded. These and other studies often use clips from Hollywood movies. There’s even a subfield of research known as “neurocinematics” (pdf) in which the effects of films on the brain is compared. Last year, researchers used the movie The Good, The Bad and The Ugly to compare brain processes in humans and monkeys.
6. Colin Firth has co-authored a brain imaging paper. It was about the links between political orientation and brain structure and was published in the journal Current Biology in 2011. It’s been cited 68 times to date. Unlike Portman, who studied psychology at Harvard, and Bialik, Firth is by no means a neuroscientist. He ended up as co-author via rather convoluted route that involved his guest editorship of the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, during which he commissioned a brain scan of two politicians. The Neurocritic blog has the full story.

Barrymore. Image: Wikipedia Commons

7. There was a real-life case like Drew Barrymore’s character in 50 First Dates. In 50 First Dates (2004), Barrymore’s character hits her head in a car crash and then is unable to store memories from one day to the next. Her memory is fine during any given day, but sleep wipes it blank again, which is completely unrealistic in medical terms. And yet a case was reported in the literature in 2010, in which a woman – a Drew Barrymore fan – reported these exact symptoms after a car crash. Contrary to her claims, tests suggested the woman could in fact remember material from the day before. However, the researchers don’t think she was a faker. Rather they think she had a form of psychogenic amnesia. The movie [50 First Dates] “may have influenced FL’s concept of how memory could fail after a car accident,” the researchers said. “The brain uses preexisting concepts of memory and through altered brain function creates a particular constellation of symptoms.”
8. Hollywood has influenced our perception of brain treatments. Electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), in which electricity is used to induce a seizure, can be a beneficial treatment for people with severe, chronic depression. Nonetheless, the technique has a terrible reputation among large sections of the public. The reasons are manifold, including fears of memory loss, and the crude and dangerous application of the method in its early years. However, another major influence on the reputation of ECT is the way the treatment is depicted in the movies, most famously in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). “While initially portrayed as a dramatic but effective psychiatric intervention,” a recent review concluded, “ECT on film has come to stand for something quite different, representing the brutal and generally futile attempts of society to control and suppress the individual …” (Side-note: Mind Hacks reports that the mental hospital depicted in Cuckoo’s Nest is to become a museum of mental health).

Edwards. Image: Wikipedia Commons

9. One of the most famous TV characters in America in the 60s was a neurosurgeon. “Ben Casey,” broadcast on ABC from 1961 to 1966, and filmed at the Desilu Studios in Hollywood, was one of the most popular TV shows of its time, and the starring eponymous character was a neurosurgeon played by Vince Edwards. An article by Allen Maniker in the Neurosurgeon estimates that on Monday nights in 1962 almost one third of the viewing population tuned in to watch Casey’s latest neurosurgical challenges. Maniker adds that even today Ben Casey remains more famous than any real neurosurgeon. The consultant to the show and inspiration for the lead character was real-life neurosurgeon Joseph Ransohoff, who died in 2001. Apparently one of the plot lines involved Casey falling for a patient, Jane Hancock, after she emerged from 13 years in a coma. This glamorisation of coma and unrealistic portrayal of recovery is a recurring theme in Hollywood depictions.
10. Neuroscience has provided plenty of inspiration for Hollywood. Coma, epilepsy, autism and amnesia and other brain conditions make useful plot devices or characterisations for many films, often in unrealistic ways that distort the public’s understanding of these conditions (a topic I explore in my forthcoming book about brain myths). A notable hit in recent years with another neuroscience theme was Limitless (2011) starring Bradley Cooper, which uses the mistaken premise that we only use a fraction of our brain power. Other (loosely) neuroscience-inspired movies include The Man With Two Brains (1983), Brainscan (1994), and The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962). Neuroscience has even inspired the naming of certain film companies. For example, there’s the Brain Damage Films production company, and It’s Not Brain Surgery productions.
Are there any Neuroscience-Hollywood links that I’ve missed? If you know any, please let me know via comments and I’ll add them into this post. Thanks!
-Grabbed from the comments (thanks Mary Guiden): The 2013 movie Enders Game used a real surgical robot, borrowed from the University of Washington BioRobotics Lab, in a scene that involved brain surgery on one of the lead characters. Full story.
-Grabbed from the comments (thanks Alexis Kirke): BBC Report on research using viewers’ brainwaves to choose optimal movie endings.
-Grabbed from the comments: Ben Motz has compiled a Cognitive Science Movie Index – a list of movies where a cognitive science theme is central to the plot.