10 Documentaries Every Curious Thinker Should Watch

There are instances in life when you know something, but cannot make sense of it in a neat, nice and tidy way. Below are the 10 hand-picked documentaries which will take you to places from the ruthless scientific investigations, to fringes of culture and politics, and to the heartfelt emotions, self and psychology.

Credits to http://worldofwonder.net/tag/secrets-of-the-living-dolls/

1) The Secret Life of Chaos

Can science explain the springing of life? Can it explain chaos, disorder and uncertainty? Till now, science has been expected to explain the order and precision of the natural world. Many other phenomenon such as creation of life, division of cells, movement of sand dunes, unpredictable weather, formation of shores, and economic and financial disasters are seen as areas where science does not have much to say. However, Jim Al-Khalil explores the beauty and neatness of the chaos theory. He uses it to answer questions such as how does order emerge out of chaos? And how come nature has such seamless, and charming patterns, which could only be seen as an act of a Greater Artist.

2) Is Seeing Believing?

This is a sister documentary to “Do you see what I see?”, and covers the mind-gasming topic of reality and perception. It takes us on the journey of various visual and auditory illusions which basically shows how vulnerable our perception is. If you want to understand the contemporary insights of brain and consciousness, this documentary is for you. The world surely will make more sense after watching these two documentaries.

3) Fractals: Hunting the Hidden Dimensions of the Universe

What explains the repetitive shapes of snow flakes, spider-webs, sea stones, sand dunes, and galaxies? There is a neat mathematics, underpinning all seemingly random yet recurring patterns of everyday life. Find out the mathematics of irregular, disorderly solids, and appreciate the power of science.

4) Born Good? Origins of Morality

Are we born good or bad? What explains altruistic behavior in humans possessed by no other species known? What explains psychopathic behavior, discrimination, tribalism and violence? This documentary looks at centuries-old argument, which has kept both philosophers and scientists awake at nights.

Evolution equips us with both social behaviors of cooperation and empathy, and tribalistic instincts of us-versus-them. Cooperation and empathy are common in-group behaviors, while tribalism is expressed as an out-group behavior. People who look like us, think like us, and lead lives like us, are more likely to attract empathy and altruism from our side. Hence, empathy has limitations. And many of our earlier notions about human kindness and love seems to be wrong all this time.

5) Middle sexes: Redefining He and She

What happens to children whose genital inspection fail to categorize them as either male or female? How do ambiguous genitals look like, and how doctors assign the sex of a child at birth? In India, the State has long recognized such people as Hijda, third-sex but the Western world still harbors taboo attitudes towards the “Middle sexes”. The documentary takes us through the personal lives of many people, which includes those whose genitals had been declared ambiguous by doctors at birth, those who had undergone surgeries because of that, and those whose hormonal dynamics after hitting puberty led them to live as a different gender than what they were born and socialized in.

The documentary also looks at an experiment to determine people’s acceptability and tolerance towards such members of society. The results found that men and women who are insecure about their own sexuality are more likely to be discriminatory and harbor phobic attitudes towards the middle-sexians.

6) An Inconvenient Truth

Climate change is real, it’s man-made and it’s going to impact our economic, technological, and social prospects. Al-Gore explores the mismatch between scientific consensus and popular media, and looks at reasons of skepticism among politicians, economists, business owners and the wider public.

7) Secrets of Living Dolls

This is probably the most psychologically exoteric documentary one could watch. It shows men, who choose to live their lives as female dolls. An epic case of cross-dressing and trans-genderism.

8) Nice Guys Finish First

This documentary is a reply by Richard Dawkins to his infamous book, “The Selfish Gene”. He explores cooperative and altruistic behavior, which seems to be at odd with natural selection and cut-throat competitive machine of evolution. He incorporates insights from game theory, prisoner’s dilemma, and some common social behavior examples. Dawkins explains how, even self-less and altruistic individuals, contribute to the survival and propagation of genes of the whole species.

9) The Cost of Free

Google is free, and so is Facebook..or maybe not. The cost of free investigates the hidden price we all pay for using social media and how the age of Internet is re-wiring our brain and feeding onto our evolutionary traits.

10) Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness

It is a series by philosopher Alain De Botton, who looks at various Greek and Roman philosophers and their perspectives of life. The series reminds us how philosophy is still relevant to different spheres of our lives whether it is Socrates on self-confidence, Epicurus on happiness, and Nietzsche on hardship, all can teach us something.

Between Hell and Heritage

The ingenious way how cultures trademark their intellectual heritage

Photo by Sam@Carlton School

Around the twelfth century, amidst the brooding courts-men of the Spanish Caliphate, a meekly figured man with a kind regard for both Aristotelian philosophy and popular ideals of his time, spoke on the vulnerability of the nature of truth. This, however did not earn him much respect, instead he was disdainfully thrown out of the court, and his philosophy labelled as impure and corrupt. That man, which is today hailed as Averroes did struggle quiet, in his time, to avoid problems with the Islamic authorities, moreover this was his unlucky moment.

A sophisticated view of the past would reveal that there is a plethora of similar instances, when the intellectual minority of a community or civilization got into screeching friction with the mass populace. This is not confined to only philosophy or the study of the natural world, but also art, poetry and music. Some of it, do make itself into the popular consciousness, but some of the more non-digestible forms remain seated on the shelves, yellowing and rotting with time, and only occasionally discussed in the academic squares.

Averroes, or more precisely, Ibn-Rushd was not alone in the staggering ‘clash of the philosophies’, there were many who were received and seen with contempt by the larger population in their own times, and even in times today. Amongst them, the more famous or rather infamous were Ibn Sina and Al-Farabi, who were considered “too deviant” that some scholars discussed their status as Muslims. Ibn al-Qayyim (1292- 1350) and other Islamic scholars, clearly declared them as extreme and disbelieving.

The history of intellectual developments, is not simply the history of the people. It is the history of class, caste, economics, and politics. To say that Egyptians made the pyramids, Indians wrote the Kamasutra, Westerners drafted democracy and freedom of thought, and Muslims made algebra would be an exceedingly immature and unsavory assessment of the past. Today, many Christians in the West would proudly boast about the “civilized” modes of thinking possessed by the westerners but they would surely not like to talk about how historically those civilized modes of thinking, which they take for so much granted came about in the first place. And they assuredly would not like to mention the incalculable exiles, torments and blood sheds of the free-thinkers and rationalist who gave and perpetuated the modern ideals by putting the Church’s teachings under scrutiny. But the way cultural trademarks rulebook works, the “credit goes to the whole Western civilization! Big round of applause, everyone”

The Kamasutra and other pieces of writings from the Gupta and subsequent periods, popularly regarded as the golden age of Hindu civilization too divulges a similar picture. The philosophical and sensual writings were the product by and for the elitist rulers and courtesans. The clergy and religious perception of the wider population resembled nowhere close to it. Indians did not write the Kamasutra, the people who had leisure, time in vain and tax money in their pockets did. The masses simply ploughed land, sowed seeds, prayed to gods and harvested food, only to give it away in the taxes.

                                                                                                                                        We don’t know how many Averroes were expelled or scorned at, and how many got into serious troubles, but it is vehemently celebrated as the “golden age of Islamic civilization”. Only a few however, will ever bother to dig and know, for example what al-Razi, whose contributions in chemistry and medicine were unmatchable at the time, thought about miracles and revelation.  And what his “heretical” works such as The Prophet’s fraudulent tricks, or On the refutation of revealed religion undertake about the wider orthodox conceptions.

This takes us back to the ingenious way how cultures mark their intellectual territories through panoramic generalizations and uniformity, throwing the scrupulous contextualization of history, politics, economics and socials far off in the reality dustbin, never to be hunted and picked out again.

Art is not subjective

Throughout history, art has enjoyed a special place in almost all human cultures and often seen as an ‘out of the world’, imaginative and an increasingly subjective endeavor. Whether its lore, mythology, visual art, music or literature, it has been seen as employing some deeper or ‘higher’ forms of conscious reach. But as we put the scientific goggles to stare at the world and the humans living in that world, we might want to shrug our shoulders and say Hmm! What if something else going on?

So, what does the seemingly conclusive heading above actually mean? When I say, art is not subjective, do I mean that everyone has to like the same art and art forms. It would be cool if each person on the planet would listen to the same songs, or read the same books, but that is not what I mean. Then, does it mean that art in human societies serves specific evolutionary functions which in popular thought, is deemed as a way “to attract mates and pass on genes”. That is not quite true, nevertheless, that is not what I mean either.

When I talk about art, I am basically talking about aesthetics and beauty, principles of which are not so subjective or beyond this world, as previously thought to be. There are predictable patterns which manifests themselves across human cultures and even across species, and they can be studied in a scientific way. There are some cognitive and emotional modules, shaped by evolution which explains why some arts find their way in museums, buildings and even worshiped as gods in temples while others don’t quite make it. In a particular cultural tradition, some aesthetic forms continue to get replicated over and over across generations and across geography which can be traced historically such as deliberately enhanced features of iconography in Hindu art.

The all-time creative world of art is subject to cognitive and cerebral laws formulated by billions of years of evolution. What those laws are which invoke awe and ahas in us have remained the domain of artists and craftsmen, who had learned to capitalize on them through trial and experimentation. In other words, they take advantage of our perception and emotional processing systems to charm ‘magic’ on us.

So, how do we know this?  Well, the findings arose from completely unrelated areas of science. Mainly perception and neuroscience. We don’t see how we think we see. There are some ‘perception shortcuts’ which evolution had wired in us during millennia of our struggle with environment. The evidence comes from visual and cognitive illusions which easily trick our brains, even if we know that we are being deceived. But, more important insights come from ethology, the study of animals. Jewel beetles, which are found in Australia were noted to go extinct because they were seen having sex with beer bottles. Well, Jewel beetles are brown and glossy and so are the beer bottles, which humans have the habit of throwing around in the environment. The beetles saw “anything that is brown and glossy, that is our hotie”.

Nikolaas Tinbergen, a Nobel prize winner ethologist, did an experiment with seagulls, whose beaks have a red dot, which they use to feed their infants. Tinbergen took an isolated beak, with no seagull attached and swayed it in front of the infants who showed the exact same response when they were about to get food even though there was no seagull. Then, Tinbergen, took a wooden stick and painted it with red dot, much brighter and bigger than that of a seagull’s beak. And, the infants pecked even vigorously and grew crazy for food. Vilayanur Ramachandran had remarked on this “If those seagulls were to build a museum and pay millions of dollars for an artifact, then that would most probably be the painted wooden stick”.

This new way of looking at art through the lens of neuroscience was coined by Semir Zeki  according to whom art is governed by the laws of the brain which just means that you cannot ignore biology while doing culture. For many years, humanities and the social sciences have shown contempt on 'biologizing' of social and cultural phenomenon which according to them are complex, and cannot be underpinned. 'Reductionist' is the favorite and probably the most common word in the humanities and social sciences which is equivalent to being a baby-eater. 

Nevertheless, findings from different areas continue to shake us and make us re-evaluate our standings. Margaret Livingstone, had pointed to several perceptual tricks which artists and impressionists use to make us clap by manipulating our visual systems. Art reveals how we see, at the back end in processing of our brains. That makes scientists the theorists, and artists the experimentalists. In her documentary video, The Neuroscience of Art, she explains the use of contrast and detail in several paintings. She also shows drawings made by people with brain damages and perception impairments who have difficulty locating distance and spatial network as shown below. 

All of this tells us an important story about our own selves and how we see. Cultures, throughout history, have tried to figure out ways in which we perceive and absorb reality, whether it is auditory systems in sounds and music or visual organization in pictorial or illustrative art forms which enchant us and make us coming for more.  

Further Explore

Huang, Mengfei. "The Neuroscience of Art"
http://web.stanford.edu/group/co-sign/Huang.pdf

Vilayanur, Ramachandran. "Aesthetic Universals and Neurology of Hindu Art". 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZTvHqM-_jE

The Scientist. "Neuroaesthetics"

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/39802/title/Neuroaesthetics/