The secret of why horror films make some people scream in terror while others may simply laugh has been revealed.

Scientists say different versions of a single gene linked to feelings of anxiety can explain the way in which some people simply cannot abide such movies, while others enjoy the suspense and the gore.

The findings may explain why it is that over the past 35 years people have had wildly different reactions to the classic horror film, The Exorcist.

While many screamed and some even fainted in cinemas at scenes of spinning heads and shaking beds, others simply laughed.

A particular variant of the ‘COMT’ gene affects a chemical in the brain that is linked to anxiety, they have found.

{ Telegraph | Continue reading }

At a major conference last year in Las Vegas, in a scientific paper published last week and another due out this week, psychologists have argued that magicians, in their age-old quest for better ways to fool people, have been engaging in cutting-edge, if informal, research into how we see and comprehend the world around us. Just as studying the mechanisms of disease reveals the workings of our body’s defenses, these psychologists believe that studying the ways a talented magician can short-circuit our perceptual system will allow us to better grasp how the system is put together.

“I think magicians and cognitive neuroscientists are getting at similar questions, but while neuroscientists have been looking at this for a few decades, magicians have been looking at this for centuries, millennia probably,” says Susana Martinez-Conde, a neuroscientist at the Barrow Neurological Institute and coauthor of one of the studies, published online last week in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. “What magicians do is light-years ahead in terms of sophistication and the power of these techniques.” (…)

A great deal of the success of a piece of magic is simply getting the audience’s attention and sending it to the wrong place - to a right hand flourishing a wand while the left secrets a ball away in a pocket or plucks a card from a sleeve. Magic shows are masterpieces of misdirection: they assault us with bright colors and shiny things, with puffs of smoke and with the constant obfuscatory patter that many magicians keep up as they perform.

For years, cognitive scientists thought of perception as like a movie camera, something that reproduced the world in its panoply of detail. Over the past decade, though, that model has been increasingly questioned. For one thing, people have a pronounced tendency to miss things that are happening right in front of them. Daniel Simons, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, did a series of now-famous studies in the late 1990s that showed the extent of this cognitive blindness. In one, people were approached by someone asking them for directions, only to have, in the middle of the conversation, that person replaced by another. Only half noticed the change.

In another study, people were shown a movie clip of two teams, one in black shirts and one in white, each passing a basketball around. The subjects were asked to count the number of passes one of the teams made. Half said afterward that they hadn’t noticed the woman in a gorilla suit who, midway through the clip, strolled through, paused, and beat her chest.

Because of work like this, a new model has arisen over the past decade, in which visual cognition is understood not as a camera but something more like a flashlight beam sweeping a twilit landscape. At any particular instant, we can only see detail and color in the small patch we are concentrating on. The rest we fill in through a combination of memory, prediction and a crude peripheral sight. We don’t take in our surroundings so much as actively and constantly construct them.

“Our picture of the world is kind of a virtual reality,” says Ronald A. Rensink, a professor of computer science and psychology at the University of British Columbia and coauthor of a paper on magic and psychology that will be published online this week in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. “It’s a form of intelligent hallucination.” (…)

The vanishing ball illusion is one of the most basic tricks a magician can learn: a ball is thrown repeatedly into the air and caught. Then, on the final throw, it disappears in midair. In fact, the magician has merely mimed the last throw, following the ball’s imagined upward trajectory with his eyes while keeping it hidden in his hand.

But if the technique is easily explained, the phenomenon itself is not. If done right, the trick actually makes observers see the ball rising into the air on the last toss and vanishing at its apex. As Rensink points out, this is something more powerful than merely getting someone to look in the wrong direction - it’s a demonstration of how easy it is to nudge the brain into the realm of actual hallucination. And cognitive scientists still don’t know exactly what’s causing it to happen.

{ Boston Globe | Continue reading }

photo { Bradini Magic Productions | more }

Police investigating a teenager accused of bomb-making and weapons violations found a map of Camp David with a presidential motorcade route in his home, a Montgomery County prosecutor said.

Collin McKenzie-Gude, 18, of Bethesda, also had a document that appears to describe how to kill someone 200 meters away, Montgomery Assistant State’s Attorney Peter A. Feeney said.

The teen had two forms of fake identification - one portraying him as a Central Intelligence Agency employee and another as a federal contractor, Feeney said. (…) They found 50 pounds of chemicals, assault-style weapons and armor-piercing bullets in his home.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

A man who authorities said was keeping weapons and military-style gear in his hotel room and car appeared in court Thursday on charges he threatened to assassinate Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. Raymond Hunter Geisel, 22, was arrested by the Secret Service on Saturday in Miami.

{ Yahoo/AP | Continue reading }

John Warnock Hinckley, Jr. (born May 29, 1955) is a United States citizen who attempted to assassinate U.S. President Ronald Reagan in Washington, D.C. on March 30, 1981, as the culmination of an effort to impress actress Jodie Foster. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity and has remained under institutional psychiatric care since then.

After repeated viewings of the 1976 movie Taxi Driver, in which a disturbed protagonist, Travis Bickle, played by Robert DeNiro, plots to assassinate a presidential candidate, Hinckley developed an obsession with actress Jodie Foster, who had played a child prostitute in the film. The Bickle character was in turn based on the diaries of Arthur Bremer, the attempted assassin of George Wallace. When Foster entered Yale University, Hinckley moved to New Haven, Connecticut for a short time to be nearer to her, slipping poems and messages under her door and repeatedly contacting her by telephone.

Failing to develop any meaningful contact with Foster, Hinckley developed such plots as hijacking an airplane and committing suicide in front of her to gain her attention. Eventually he settled on a scheme to win her over by assassinating the president, with the theory that as a historical figure, he would be her equal. To this end, he trailed President Jimmy Carter from state to state, but was arrested in Nashville, Tennessee on a firearms charge. Penniless, he returned home once again, and despite psychiatric treatment for depression, his mental health did not improve. In 1981, he began to target the newly elected president, Ronald Reagan. It was also at this time that he started collecting information on Lee Harvey Oswald, John F. Kennedy’s alleged assassin, whom he saw as a role model.

Just prior to Hinckley’s failed attempt on Reagan’s life, he wrote to Foster:

Over the past seven months I’ve left you dozens of poems, letters and love messages in the faint hope that you could develop an interest in me. Although we talked on the phone a couple of times I never had the nerve to simply approach you and introduce myself. […] the reason I’m going ahead with this attempt now is because I cannot wait any longer to impress you.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Shortly before 2:30 p.m. EST, as Reagan walked out of the hotel’s T Street NW exit toward his waiting car, Hinckley emerged from the crowd of admirers and fired a Röhm RG-14 .22 cal. blue steel revolver six times in three seconds.

The first bullet hit White House Press Secretary James Brady in the head. The second hit District of Columbia police officer Thomas Delahanty in the back. The third overshot the president and hit the window of a building across the street. The fourth hit Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy in the abdomen. The fifth hit the bullet-proof glass of the window on the open side door of the president’s limousine. The sixth and final bullet ricocheted off the side of the limousine and hit the president under his left arm, grazing a rib and lodging in his lung, near his heart.

Sixteen minutes after the assassination attempt, the ATF found that the gun was purchased at Rocky’s Pawn Shop in Dallas, Texas. It was loaded with six “Devastator”-brand .22LR cartridges, which contained small lead azide explosive charges. The rounds were not manufactured in the U.S.; any bullet which contained actual explosives would have been classified as an illegal explosive device under U.S. federal law at the time Hinckley purchased them. All six bullets failed to explode.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

The blonde is Margaret Nolan, a forgotten 1960s starlet. The man in silhouette is Robert Brownjohn, one of the most innovative, expensive and downright difficult art directors of the 60s. Nolan is being filmed for the title sequence of Goldfinger (1964), the third James Bond film. She was painted gold from head to toe and images from the film were projected on to her body, creating a hallucinogenic effect that was ahead of its time.

{ Guardian | Continue reading }

{ Fake AA ad on Kenmare St, NYC }

related { Spencer Taylor, 20, went to the Three Rivers Cinema multiplex, costumed as the Joker, to steal Batman posters and other collectibles. | Smoking gun | Continue reading }

Sienna Miller found herself on the horns of a prickly dilemma during post-production of her latest movie Hippie Hippie Shake. (…)

“Sienna was an absolute star throughout filming and her performance was flawless. The only slight problem being that she’s very much a girl of the Noughties - and this extends to her personal upkeep. Unfortunately, Brazilians weren’t common in the 60s and Sienna’s part involved one or two nude scenes - meaning that her grooming habits were on full display. A merkin or pubic wig simply wouldn’t have done the trick, but luckily computer wizardry came to the rescue. Sienna’s private parts were digitally enhanced, giving her a rather unruly, loud and proud bush.”

{ Mirror | Continue reading }

image { 1975-2006: 31 years of Playboy in Brasil }

related { Keira Knightley refuses breast enhancement for ‘The Duchess’ }

Rapper 50 Cent has sued Taco Bell, claiming the fast-food restaurant chain is using his name without permission in an ad asking him to change his name to 79 Cent, 89 Cent or 99 Cent.

{ AM NY | Continue reading }

related { Woody Allen sues American Apparel over billboard }

Police in Paris have discovered a fully equipped cinema-cum-restaurant in a large and previously uncharted cavern underneath the capital’s chic 16th arrondissement.

Officers admit they are at a loss to know who built or used one of Paris’s most intriguing recent discoveries.

“There were two swastikas painted on the ceiling, but also celtic crosses and several stars of David, so we don’t think it’s extremists. Some sect or secret society, maybe. There are any number of possibilities.”

Members of the force’s sports squad, responsible - among other tasks - for policing the 170 miles of tunnels, caves, galleries and catacombs that underlie large parts of Paris, stumbled on the complex while on a training exercise beneath the Palais de Chaillot, across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower.

After entering the network through a drain next to the Trocadero, the officers came across a tarpaulin marked: Building site, No access.

Behind that, a tunnel held a desk and a closed-circuit TV camera set to automatically record images of anyone passing. The mechanism also triggered a tape of dogs barking, “clearly designed to frighten people off,” the spokesman said.

Further along, the tunnel opened into a vast 400 sq metre cave some 18m underground, “like an underground amphitheatre, with terraces cut into the rock and chairs”.

There the police found a full-sized cinema screen, projection equipment, and tapes of a wide variety of films, including 1950s film noir classics and more recent thrillers. None of the films were banned or even offensive, the spokesman said.

A smaller cave next door had been turned into an informal restaurant and bar. “There were bottles of whisky and other spirits behind a bar, tables and chairs, a pressure-cooker for making couscous,” the spokesman said.

“The whole thing ran off a professionally installed electricity system and there were at least three phone lines down there.”

Three days later, when the police returned accompanied by experts from the French electricity board to see where the power was coming from, the phone and electricity lines had been cut and a note was lying in the middle of the floor: “Do not,” it said, “try to find us.”

{ The Guardian | Continue reading | Thanks Daniel }

Modern movies begin here, with Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” in 1960. No debut film since “Citizen Kane” in 1942 has been as influential. It is dutifully repeated that Godard’s technique of “jump cuts” is the great breakthrough, but startling as they were, they were actually an afterthought, and what is most revolutionary about the movie is its headlong pacing, its cool detachment, its dismissal of authority, and the way its narcissistic young heroes are obsessed with themselves and oblivious to the larger society. (…)

The credits for “Breathless” are a New Wave roll call, including not only Godard’s direction but an original story by Francois Truffaut (Godard famously wrote each day’s shooting script in the morning). Claude Chabrol is production designer and technical adviser. (…)

Godard’s key collaborator on the film was the cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who worked with him many times, notably on “Weekend” (1967). It was only Coutard’s fourth film, and his methods became legend: How when they could not afford tracks for a tracking shot, he held the camera and had himself pushed in a wheelchair. How he achieved a grainy look that influenced many other fiction films that wanted to seem realistic. How he scorned fancy lighting. How he used hand-held techniques even before lightweight cameras were available. How he timed one shot of Belmondo so that the streetlights on the Champs Elysses came on behind him. There is a lovely backlit shot of Belmondo in bed and Seberg sitting beside the bed, both smoking, the light from the window enveloping them in a cloud. (…)

In this scene and throughout the film, Godard uses jump cuts–cuts within continuous movement or dialogue, with no attempt made to make them match. The technique “was a little more accidental than political,” writes the Australian critic Jonathan Dawson. The finished film was 30 minutes too long, and “rather than cut out whole scenes or sequences, Godard elected to trim within the scene, creating the jagged cutting style still so beloved of action filmmakers. Godard just went at the film with the scissors, cutting out anything he thought boring.”

{ Roger Ebert | Continue reading }

Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) pioneered many of the techniques of the thriller genre, and remains highly influential to this day. He was, for example, one of the first directors to portray psychological processes in film narrative.

However, his films were initially more popular with audiences than with critics, and it was not until the latter part of his career, largely due to directors of the French New Wave, such as Francois Truffaut, that his genius was recognized. (…)

Hitchcock once remarked that “television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it.” During much of Hitchcock’s career, Freud’s ideas were dominant, and although Hitchcock was skeptical of psychoanalysis (as he was of other explanations for human behaviour), Freudian concepts and motifs recur in many of his films.

Repression is one of the Freudian concepts which recurs in Hitchcock’s films. According to Freud, “the essence of repression lies simply in the turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious”. Freud believed that traumatic memories, usually of childhood events, are repressed by the conscious mind; this is a defence mechanism which keeps the ego free of conflict and tension. These memories remain hidden in the subconscious, and manifest themselves in the neuroses and psychoses of the individual, when something induces the momentary retrieval of a repressed memory, triggering a neurotic or psychotic episode. One aim of Freudian psychoanalysis is the retrieval of these repressed memories from the subconscious, in the hope that confronting them will cure the patient’s neuroses. (…)

There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.

From this quote, it is clear that Hitchcock had a profound understanding of the human psyche. He knew that the imagination was far more powerful than any image he could render on the screen, and this knowledge was key to his remarkable ability to manipulate his audience. Graphic violence was rarely featured in Hitchcock’s films; the audience instead used their imagination to ‘fill the gaps’.
Take, for example, the shower scene in Psycho (1960), which remains the most famous murder scene in cinema history. The scene, which lasts 45 seconds, involved 78 camera set ups and took one week to film. Not once do we see the knife penetrate the flesh of Janet Leigh’s character, yet the scene is one of the most shocking ever filmed.

{ Neurophilosophy/ScienceBlogs | Continue reading }

photo { Bates Motel Set at Universal Studio Hollywood CA }

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Pixar began to take shape in the late 1970s, when George Lucas, after the success of “Star Wars,” hired many of these men (virtually without exception, they are men) into Lucasfilm’s computer division. But he didn’t have a clue what to do with them. Even with the best computer animators on his payroll at Skywalker Ranch, he used no computer animation in “The Empire Strikes Back” (1980), resorting to scale models for special effects. (…)

Frustrated with Lucas, the Computer Division renamed itself Pixar in 1986 and sought an outside investor. (…) Pixar’s central figures were introduced to Steve Jobs, already worth $185 million and beginning his Apple exile. After Jobs’s $5 million offer was rejected, the team attempted to do a deal with Disney [ for $15 million] (…) Jeffrey Katzenberg, then head of Walt Disney Studios: “I can’t waste my time on this stuff.”

Jobs then swooped in and bought Pixar for the same $5 million he had originally offered. (…) In 2006, Disney bought Pixar for $7.4 billion.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }