Mind Altering Cinematography: Psychedelic Re-Orientations of the Unconscious in Film 

Abstract

How psychedelics impact memory is crucial to understanding their therapeutic mechanisms and potential harms, given what is taken from a psychedelic experience (a memory) may have a persisting functional impact. Memory is not a monolith, with various interacting systems such as episodic memory, fear conditioning/extinction, and reward learning. Moreover, drugs differentially impact the formation (encoding), post-encoding stabilization (consolidation), and access (retrieval) of memories. In this talk, I will first discuss how psychedelics impact the encoding, consolidation, and retrieval of episodic memories, with particularly unique effects on encoding. Specifically, psychedelics acutely impair hippocampal-dependent encoding while enhancing cortical-dependent encoding. The acute effects of psychedelics may also enhance fear extinction learning. Finally, psychedelics may enhance reward learning and learning from reward omission, particularly during the acute and post-acute effects, respectively. Together, these findings allude to therapeutic mechanisms of psychedelics, as well as cases in which rigid learning can go awry (e.g., false insights).

Biography

While in the mid-twentieth century film theory developed from and in relation to psychoanalytic conceptions of the unconscious, this presentation proposes to look at the lessons from research in psychedelics, offering a psychedelic re-orientation of the cinematographic unconsciousness. Stanislav Grof’s work on the transformative potential of non-ordinary states of consciousness, based on over fifty years of research, offers a holistic and philosophical approach towards the realms of the human unconscious. This presentation argues that many of the experiences described by Grof, have found another way of expression in cinema, and suggests that our media culture itself belongs to the vast realms of the collective unconscious where we have strange encounters, Good and Bad Trips, that lead to profound questions about what it means to be human in a transforming world in crisis.