Theater of Thought(2024)

A profile of Dr. Marian Diamond, a brain scientist who is considered one of the founders of modern neuroscience.

The lastest neuroscience discoveries show surprising results: false memories, distortion, modification, déjà vus. Our memory is affected in many ways, and deceives us every day. The very fact of recalling souvenirs modifies them. The everyday consequences are manyfold. To what extent can we rely on our souvenirs? How much credit can we give them during trials? Even more shocking, scientists have proved to be able to manipulate our memory: creating artificial souvenirs, deleting, emphasizing or restoring them on demand.

In recent years, the brain has become the new playground for top-level athletes and their trainers. At a time of standardized physical training, the brain has become the new frontier of effort and performance. Taming and taming it is a priority today for anyone who wants to become and remain the number 1 athlete. The documentary film "Open Brain - In the Brains of Athletes" takes us to the very limits of the human brain, as seen through the eyes of some of the world's finest athletes. These include basketball player Rudy Gobert, Formula 1 driver Charles Leclerc, surfer Justine Dupont and footballer Pierre Emerick Aubameyang.

The daring experimenter Dr. John C. Lilly dedicated his life to radical self-investigation and unlocking the mysteries of consciousness and communication. “My body is my laboratory” was the motto, and his research on the language of dolphins and whales – as well as psychedelics and sensory deprivation – assured his own cult status in 20th-century pop culture as the basis for Ken Russel’s Altered States and Mike Nichols’s The Day of the Dolphin. Directors Michael Almareyda and Courtney Stephens, along with narrator Chloë Sevigny, explore the life of a determined scientist and his experiments into the psychonautical unknown.

"In Search of Memory" is a very personal portrait of Eric Kandel, the "rock star" of neuroscience and the most important brain researcher of the 20th century. A fascinating documentary about the exciting mystery of the brain which arouses a curiosity in life and learning.

An in-depth investigation featuring world renowned philosophers and scientists into the most profound philosophical debate of all time: Do we have free will?

“Ramón y Cajal: drawings on the retina” is a documentary about the Nobel Prize winner that explores, from a contemporary perspective, his fascination with images as a bridge between the reality of the physical world and that created in the brain, with a new integrative approach to his artistic and scientific facets and his legacy, told through the experiences and points of view of researchers, artists, historians, family members, and other experts who consider Cajal a visionary who transcended his own science. In one of the laboratories, a machine answers Cajal's last question: how are images formed in the brain?

In The Doors of Perception (1954), Aldous Huxley wrote that the urge to transcend self-consciousness was "a principle appetite of the soul." He hoped that psychedelics would make the experience of self-transcendence more widely available, and thereby catalyze a transformation in the culture. But experiencing ego dissolution is one thing; integrating it into ordinary life is another. And, as the misadventures of the 1960s attest, building a culture around self-transcendence is a perilous (if inspiring) endeavor. “Unraveling the Dream,” a new film presented by the Waking Up meditation app, explores whether the new science of psychedelics might shed fresh light on Huxley’s vision. Featuring original interviews with Anil Seth, Robin Carhart-Harris, and Shamil Chandaria, the film takes viewers on a sweeping journey to the frontiers of neuroscience and through the rich, turbulent history of psychedelics.

Is it possible to replicate the human brain on a computer? To connect it to machines? Research aimed at understanding the functioning of our biological brain is being matched by spectacular progress in the development of artificial intelligence.

Through interspersed conversation and prose, this experimental documentary follows a poet and a neuroscientist as they explore the definition of love, what it means, and why it matters.

A short doc about how faces are perceived: by scientists, by artists, by animals. How do we remember faces so well if we can barely describe them with words? Why do we see them everywhere? What even are they? What is my face?