How movies influence perceptions of brain disorders - The Globe and Mail - 0 views
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Blockbusters, from the 2002 action thriller The Bourne Identity to last year’s Scarlett Johansson vehicle Lucy, reinforce pervading misconceptions about how the brain works.
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“Watching movies about neurological disorders, if they’re done well, I think gives people an appreciation for what the characters may go through,” she says, while films that promote stereotypes “can actually be a little bit more hurtful to people who have those disorders.”
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Dory, voiced by comedian Ellen DeGeneres, suffers classic symptoms of anterograde amnesia, which is typically associated with damage to the hippocampus, the area of the brain involved in encoding memories.
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the portrayal of the condition is spot on. She has difficulty remembering names and retaining new information, but her condition doesn’t affect her sense of identity.
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Jason Bourne, the amnesiac main character of this action flick, exhibits no trouble with short-term memories, but wakes up after suffering an unspecified injury to the brain with no recollection of who he is.
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explaining that the “double conk” myth – the idea that someone can lose their identity after being hit in the head and regain it after a second blow or psychological trigger – is actually a conflation of two ideas.
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Identity loss is more closely associated with psychogenic amnesia, an extremely rare and controversial diagnosis, whose origins, some experts believe, may be influenced by culture.
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Sure, filmmakers may take artistic licence, she says, but the trouble is many people actually believe we only use a portion of our brains.
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she notes that due to its success, the film may have inadvertently contributed to the stereotype of the autistic savant – the notion that people with autism excel in a specific area, which, in the case of Hoffman’s character, involved dealing in numbers. In reality, Spiers says, this is very rare.