All good things must come to an end.
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Religion 101: How I Would Design a Kick-ass Course
Exchange Building, University of Nottingham. Source: Wikipedia; author: mattbuck.
Introduction to the Critical and Interdisciplinary Study of Religion 101: A work in progress.
Read moreThe mythological machines of Homo sapiens
We are eminently social primates highly susceptible to power dynamics, individual status, and social hierarchies, to the point that we spend a considerable amount of our time and resources in obtaining prestige goods, following charismatic individuals, and accessing or owning places deemed special, sacred, or relevant by our in-group. If you don’t believe me, just have a look at all the pop items auctioned for jaw-dropping sums of money, from vintage comic books to sport and cinema paraphernalia. In 2003, for instance, comic book artist and creator Todd McFarlane bought baseball player Mark McGwire's 70th home run ball from 1998 for $3 million. Today, Golden Era comic books in good conditions are worth millions of dollars.
Read moreNarrator, mendax, sciens: creating meaning in a world of stories
We are made of stories - and these are some of stories I am made of. An amazing project over one year in the making, by Italian artist Emiliano Troco. Oil on canvas, © 2020 Emiliano Troco
Human cultures are neural environments extended throughout time and space. Cultures reach out to the ancestors. They explain the origins of everything. Thunders, earthquakes, life, death. They connect the most remote past with the future. And in the process, they provide meaning. Cultures make sense of all that happens. In the skies up above, on earth down below. Within us, between us, among us. Our similarities, our differences, our emotions, our thoughts. Everything is culture, and culture is everything.
Read moreA cognitive exploration of horror tropes
“2019 Bela Lugosi Dracula Funko Super7 ReAction 9943.” Author: Brechtbug (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
You know the drill. You went to the movies to watch the latest installment or the much talked about reboot of your favourite horror/thriller series. You read the interviews, you heard the podcasts, you checked some quite promising non-spoiler reviews. This time it really looked like the new movie could be a lot of fun. All you hoped for was a breath of fresh air, and then… meh. Nothing. Been there, done that. Déjà vu. Just more of the same.
Read moreThe (neurochemical) medium is the message
“Movie Theater at Shibuya.” Author: naoyafujii (CC BY-NC 2.0).
Cinema provides a virtual environment specifically engineered to stimulate our cognitive and sensorial inclinations – for our own entertainment. The cinematic experience itself is an embodied simulation based on illusory stimuli able to elicit the mirror neurons of our brains – putting us effortlessly in the characters’ shoes and making us feel what they feel (Gallese and Guerra 2012; Gallese and Guerra 2015). The illusion does not stop at emotionally connecting to the characters’ adventures. We intuitively transform opaque cinematic techniques into flawless narratives (e.g., converting an illogical jump cut into the natural blink of an eye).
Read morePseudoscience at the time of Covid-19
The Battle of Balaclava, 2020 edition: the Russian artillery stands for SARS-CoV-2; the Light Brigade of the Six Hundred is herd immunity. Source: Charge of the Light Brigade by R. C. Woodville Jr. Wikipedia.
The response by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his team to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has been dismal. On 12 March, I had to endure possibly one of the most cringeworthy political speeches of recent history, when Johnson addressed the nation to tell its citizens that despite the fact that “many more families [were] going to lose loved ones before their time” (meaning the elderly), there was basically nothing to do in terms of prevention (Stewart, Proctor and Siddique 2020). Johnson’s statement was mind-boggling for a variety of reason, the most astounding of which was that the core Tory electorate is currently made up of older people (Inman 2019). You get what you vote for, I guess (Walker 2020), but is a selective culling of the elderly really what elderly Conservative voters voted for during the recent national election?
Read morePlus ça change... From scary stories around the campfire to horror hyperreality
Original poster for the Spanish 1966 horror movie El sonido de la muerte (“The Sound of Horror”, dir. José Antonio Nieves Conde). All rights reserved. Source: IMDb
Perhaps no other cinema and literary genre has already experienced the same exploration of genre variations as horror. Giant ants, blobs, werewolves, vampires, ghosts, humanoid monsters, shapeshifting creatures, living dead, living meteors, interdimensional demonic books, mind-controlling aliens, bloodthirsty hounds from hell, televisions as infernal gateways, invisible bloodthirsty dinosaurs… yes, you read that right: El sonido de la muerte (“The Sound of Horror”, Spain, 1966) features an invisible prehistoric reptilian creature hatching from a fossilized egg after being inadvertently awakened by controlled explosions carried out by a group of archaeologists. Given enough time and a competitive environment, every cinema genre is set to exploit a mind-blowing number of variations of its own tropes, but horror truly stands out. Is there anything that has not been thrown at the wall by horror producers to see if it sticks? Is there a limit to what can be literally thought of? And, most interestingly, why are we so addicted to horror?
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