David Lynch Opens a Portal to Our Minds

WDavid Lynch, the chicken director, died this month, not only in losing a great talent, but also a new way to understand people’s minds. I am a social and cultural psychologist, and I study how people understand their lives. Students and I discovered that Lynch’s work makes strong psychological stimuli in the laboratory to reveal some of the internal work of the mind.

I am especially interested in what happens when we fall into a state called by the philosopher Albert Camus “tampering”, when we realize that we are unable to continue to make the meaning in our lives. Sometimes we reach a point where there is nothing more logical. It turns out that studying this particular situation helps to reveal how our minds work. Lynch movies offer a gateway to this disturbing mental state.

In our research, we found that our minds have a sensation system that helps us navigate in our world. Our brains receive a steady flow of sensory inputs, and our sensation manufacture system always monitors things to ensure the addition of everything we face, and we understand what is going on. It is a homogeneous system and works a lot like a thermostat, as it is operated only when we face something meaningless. In these cases, a network of nervous communications is called the brain Building network It sends us a sign, like the red flag waving in front of our face, indicating that there is something wrong and we need to know that.

We gain an insight into a sensation making system when we leave Dumbstruck.

Often, things are revealed to us as we expect, and we are able to feel that we can generally predict and control what is happening in our lives. We run the key in our ignition and the car starts; We say hello to a sales delegate and smile. We go out abroad in the afternoon of September, and the sun is bright. But from time to time, we face something that violates our expectations sharply, and we left in the event that we are confused about what to do: when we turn the key in our ignition, we hear the noise of screaming; The sales representative responds to our greeting by telling us that we go to ourselves; Or we go outside to an unexpected snowstorm in September.

In these types of situations, our sensation manufacture system is stumbled, and we leave us in a fairly astonishment, trying to find out what is going on. We need to restore the feeling that we are able to understand what is happening to us, and this may require some psychological work. Most of the time, the anomalies we face are completely clear, and we can assemble things together and know the error. Then our sensation manufacture system is reset and we can continue to reach our daily life.

We can get a better vision on how our sensation manufacture system works if we faced uninterrupted things, as we left Dumbstruck without a clear way to move forward. But it is difficult to engineer attitudes in the laboratory of psychology that people can drop in “absurdity” – at least not in a way that we can reliably study how the mind responds.

Over the years, we have tried a group of different tactics to make our participants feel meaningless and let them ask “WTF?” , So that we can investigate how the sensation system works. We have made the participants unintended participants in a magic trick where we changed the experimenter who were talking to them with another person wearing the same clothes (significantly, very few people notice awareness of awareness Transforming). We also played Blackjack with our participants with cards that reflect colors, with red clubs and black diamonds (again, almost no one notice what it is mistake). It can be said, although the most effective way to make people in absurdity is to make them watch a clip from one of the lynch films.

You will be surprised by the deep inconvenience Rabbits It can be to watch.

Lynch began making long -length films in the 1970s and was a certain genius touch to address our emotions. His biography, Chris Rodley, also indicated that “mood” or “feeling” that cannot be defined “seeks” that he seeks to transfer is related to some intellectual uncertainty – what he calls “lost in darkness and confusion.” Dreamy and similar to dreams – from annoying excitement, Velvet blueTo drama drama The peak twinWe chose a clip from the beginning of his 2002 short movie Rabbits.

The film, which is similar to a sit-in, contains a rabbits fashion that appears to be a conversation-with the exception that there is nothing to say to him any relationship with what their partners say. They were boycotted by the disintegrated by random laughter paths and applause, which are separated by a long stop, with a strange rear audio tape. The film completely lacks a narration – not ever. But you will be surprised by the deep inconvenience of watching.

Our research found that the main feelings behind our feelings when things are not logical are strange, in which we feel confused and anxious. According to Sigmund Freud, we feel strange when we face the closeness of the familiar to the unfamiliar side. Many people reported their feeling of this during the peak of the most important in the Covid-19s, when the streets of the bustling hometown around the world remained strangely silent. It is the feeling that we feel when we see a robot that looks almost human – but it moves in inhumane ways. We have evaluated the strange feelings of people in many studies with a psychological measure that we created, as people are asked about how they feel isolated or crawl. But the highest level We have ever measured It was when the participants saw a part of Lynch Rabbits.

The strange effects and exit from this film reveal something important about the ways in which people seek to maintain the meaning in their lives. We find that when the participants test this feeling of this feeling, and they cannot know what is going on, they are asked to find other ways restoration Feeling in sense.

Lynch was a certain genius touch to treat our emotions.

Our research found that one reaction is that people over these experiences with the illogical is that they become more committed to other beliefs they have in their lives. So religious people become more religious, liberals become more liberal, and conservatives are more conservative. By doubling their beliefs, people can feel that they understand the world again, thus dispelling their annoying disturbing feelings, and relying on the system of making sensation. I think that part of the reason that the world is very intense these days, is that there are many disturbances that occur in the world (climate change, the Covid-19s, Amnesty International that threatens our jobs), which maintains the system, and leads us to become exaggerated copies In it for ourselves in response to this.

It is worth noting lynch films to devise such strong feelings, perhaps because we are often not sure how to understand what we are witnessing, because the individual parts of the scene do not always look perfectly suitable. This may be because the characters seem to focus on non -relevant topics, like a man from another place talking about the flavors of the gums that are elegant in The peak twin; Or because the different scenes do not seem to have any logical contact with each other, as in the last half of Mulholland Drive; Or because what we see is very logical, such as grilled chicken that wanders in a clear chaos ReaserHead. We may feel terrifying, rebellion, awe, or mixing only, but without being able to solve what we see, our great feelings often remain with us after a long period of credits.

Lynch was hesitant to explain his films. The closest that I heard about him before was to present a perspective in his work in an interview where he described time in a clear spring day, was transferred by a beautiful cherry tree in full flowering. But when he seemed closely, he saw that the trunk was increasing some black and yellow stadium that was covered with red ants. “I discovered that if a person seemed a little closer to this beautiful world,” then he is He said“There are always red ants under it.”

Launch in peace, David Lynch. Thank you for letting us with your beautiful and ingenuity films. It has made us face some of our most effective feelings, and your work has lit some dark holiday for our minds.

Pulse Image: Fran_kie / Shutterstock

• Stephen J. Hein

  Spread on January 27, 2025

  Stephen J. Heine is a social and cultural psychologist at the University of Columbia. It is the last author of Start logically: How can existential psychology help us make a meaningful life in ridiculous times.

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