Mapping the mind scape final frontier

The Hollywood hit film Inception has rekindled interest in the subconscious mind. But is science keeping pace with science fiction?

Filmmakers consider cinema a process of collective daydreaming. Historically, our understanding of dreams and film making grew over the past century on parallel tracks.

Freud was busy interpreting dreams and peeping into the subconscious mind, while the Lumiere brothers were making the first clips of motion picture. The mind has now become the final frontier for film- makers, with our half- baked understanding of the subconscious mind becoming fodder for many a film script.

The mega- success of Avatar and the recently- released Inception , which made Rs 7.5 crore in India during its first week alone underscores how much the audience is lapping up a cinematic take on the mysteries of the human mind. In Avatar , James Cameron’s Oscar- winning film in 3D, a former marine ( Sam Worthington) becomes a humanoid on a distant planet to aid an exploitative mining firm. He doesn’t go there in person — it is his subconscious mind that powers the marine’s humanoid ‘ avatar ’ which is deployed on the ground.

Inception is a more complex film. It shows how protagonist Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his team use drugs and gadgets to peep into the minds of their unsuspecting targets. They then set out to try and plant an idea into the target’s subconscious mind and watch it grow and work.

The question is: are such films a mirror to the future of science? Well, while the obvious answer is no, it is not a no with a capital ‘N’. Brain research over the past decade has blurred boundaries of the classical body- mind dichotomy.

“ There are many new ways of looking at the brain. These are costly investigations,” says Vivek Benegal, additional professor of psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro- Science. Benegal explains that scientists now know more about how the mind works and increasingly, it is possible to explain how a certain brain works in a certain way. “ The brain is an organ like any other, though it is highly complicated,” says Benegal.