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.

The Science Behind Funny

 

Art Parody via Pin-interest

It all starts when I came across a blog post with the title “Three Types of Jokes Ellen Uses to Make People Like Her”, which pointed out very specific aspects in Ellen’s content, explaining why has she managed to be the most likable celebrity host over the years. A few arresting observations made about her were self-depreciating humor, or the humor which focuses on one’s own self, rather than on making fun of others. Consider this “I sat on my ass all day long, drinkin’ tequila and imaginin’ ghosts of baby goats”. This sentence, parts of which are spoken frequently by Ellen, implies that she is unproductive and useless at home, but it does not come off as critical to the ears.

OK. So, it might seem, far of a stretch to call something ‘science’, but as we will see later, in greater detail that characteristics like these are shared by most giant comedic performances and literature in our culture. Another worthy to mention observation would be the presence of a story, or a story-like background. A very good example of this, would be when Ellen tells the story of Finding Dory….to comment on the travel ban, even though she makes it very clear that she finds politics exceptionally boring.

What makes Ellen funny takes us to another question, what makes something funny in the first place?

Scott Weems in his book, “Ha! The Science of when we laugh and why” takes up the challenge to answer exactly that. He gives an example of the movie Pompeii, which is about the destruction of the city, Pompeii in historic Rome, by a volcano. The audience, which remains in laughter the whole time during the movie, which was not meant to be funny, is explained by him in terms of conflict and surprise. Why do people laugh at tragedies? is another nook in the bigger story. Charlie Chaplin, in the settings of class-divisions in Victorian era and the monotony brought by Industrial life, or Bean, an all-lonely fella with whom nothing right ever happens. The answer is conflict and surprise, something which Daniel Dennett et el also mention in their book “Inside Jokes”.

To sum up, there are two major things which makes something funny. One is incongruity. It is an instance when an absurd iteration of a normal event takes place, thus disrupting our expectations. Good humor makes excellent use of what we already know about the world and the predictive faculties of our brains. It takes the normal chain of events, which exhibits in the form of unwritten, unsaid rules of our daily lives and then derails them.

Another is conflict, which is an integral part of all forms of art. Good humor involves some sort of conflict with the external agents, which builds the emotional and intellectual tension wanting to keep us going, pretty much what a good novel or story does to our minds. Humorous conflict then branches further into irony and satire, a more sophisticated way to express conflict. Consider this, we know that our society is obsessed with sex, but we also know that we hate to admit it. (I am not talking about the West here, where in most countries porn is legalized. I am talking about particularly puritanical societies such as India or Pakistan, marked by strict segregation of the sexes which ranks repeatedly on the frequent consumers of porn)

Moreover, there is another convoluted question which underpins all of this “Why do we have humor?” Many have explained it in terms of the function it serves, and some still give it an evolutionary color that is humor serves as a coping mechanism in the face of uncertainty. Well, that sort of explanation is good, the problem is that it can be made about every other thing. What purpose did Neanderthals making laborious pearl jewelry serve? What function did pre-historic humanoids carving paintings on cave walls serve? I mean, one could say it provided a hobby in their long free times, to prevent them from dying of boredom. We can see, this is a slippery area. However, there is another way to look at it. Mainly, that humor or any other complex intellectual activity is the result of some of the cognitive and psychological faculties which evolution equipped us with. This is especially true of religion and art. Humor is not one thing, it is a combination of separate propensities coming together once in a while to get us into a chuckle.

Now, some might find this a naïve approach, especially when you look at humor, which historically has been used to perpetuate stereotypes, roll bad ideas, or objectify. This is true, and that is why it is important to differentiate between shallow humor, lacking in sophisticated understanding of social wits, the kind which might make someone laugh in the moment but is going to alienate someone and thus is not not capable of reproducing the effect. Deep humor on the other hand cuts right through the fabric of power dynamics and institutionalism and has the potential to sweep audiences on their feet over and over again. Put in another way, the latter has a strong mental takeaway and induces a lasting effect. 

We don't know yet, what more there is to humor, or that when we will be able to dissect any of that. Till then, lets keep our fingers crossed and keep...humoring.

Further Reading 

Inside Jokes. M.Hurley & Dennet. 

Ha! The Science of When we laugh and why? Weems, Scott.

Imagining Other Worlds

Will our encounter with alien life change everything?

Star-nosed mole. Image by Google

In 2009, Jonathan Foer in his mind provoking book Eating Animals wrote: “If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?”

Thought-experiments involving aliens, have been great mental tools to debate and answer several of the philosophical queries and moral dilemmas like these. Other similar speculations had heartened us to ask questions such as “How will religions stand the discovery of aliens?” “What sort of power hierarchies will emerge once we encountered extraterrestrials as we imagine them?” “What sort of moral obligations will we have towards our galactic neighbors?” The possibilities are boundless, but our imagination, as it turns out, not very much.

We seem to know a lot about alien life, thanks to sci-fi sensations of 20^th century. Sometime gluey eyed monsters, blue, green, usually with two hands, two feet and a head. How bloody anthropomorphic! For centuries, we have looked up at sky wondering about the presence of other worlds and possibly other lives. Put another way, we have done a good job in casting our own image unto the universe. Our inklings have never left the bounds of our earthly existence. And why not? Is not everything we have ever dreamed, penned and painted bears witness? From homo-fictitious to gods and supernatural.

This explains our quirky methods till date to hunt for our galactic brothers (or rivals). The short-wave radio waves which we hope to catch as a “sign” from outside world, which SETI has been doing for long. The biggest assumption being that the alien life must have technology advanced enough to send radio signals for communication. Too far-fetched? According to astronomer, Avi Loeb, we might as well search for spectroscopic signatures of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the atmospheres of alien planets, in the hopes of finding fridge-using aliens. Or perhaps hairspray-using ones. And yet others propose to look for polluting cities, Dyson circles for electricity, nuclear-war torn planets. Sounds…familiar.

Any attempt at musing on alien life, is in actuality a musing about us, our own very selves. Our tribalism instinct has drawn our fear of an invading human-hating monsters. Same could be said about techno-phobias and artificial intelligences. And so, the philosophical queries and moral dilemmas reflect our own mental epidemics. We can shot our best guess, that earth-centric religions will have a very hard time grappling with the alien find. Most rabbis, imams and popes will be extremely disappointed at the non-mention of alien life in their holy books. Maybe, Golden Rule works, which basically states that you should treat others like you want to be treated, something used a lot in vegan ethics and animal rights arguments. Maybe, there are other better ways to organize society, than ours’ crude hierarchical ones. For science, however even finding a bacteria will be revolutionary. Any rudimentary form of life, will change everything. Maybe, that life form is so unfamiliar that we won’t be able to recognize it as life at all.  And maybe, we do happen to find legged and armed species, because in the course of earthling’s evolution, locomotion devices such as arms and legs have appeared and evolved separately and independently quite a times. Or maybe, we have been wrong all along and we should focus on finding other species on earth, which to our awe and even astonishment can be deemed as 'aliens' themselves. Nevertheless, whatever the case, it will be the ultimate test for our scientific understanding.

And so maybe, we should keep our fingers crossed and till then, let our imagination venture far.