Somewhere Over The Cuckoo's Nest: The Shock Of Hope

November 10, 2009

It's always nice to find out that something scary isn't that scary -- or to see a blind spot you've carried over your received knowledge for years. On last week's Private Practice, an unstable (or is she?) psychiatrist, in recovery from her horrific mangling in last season's cliffhanger, gave a patient electroconvulsive therapy. Between the automatic red flags and Cuckoo's Nest nightmares the phrase brings up, the general weirdness of Violet this season, and the rest of her practice's freakouts about it, you might think this was exactly the wrong wronger wrongest possible course of action. But as Violet explains -- and the science confirms -- ECT has quietly become a respected, if cautiously so, therapy.

We Are Of Peace, Always: The Science & Religion Of V

November 03, 2009

One expects that the scientific and medical wonders of the Visitors in ABC's reboot will be of ongoing interest -- at least for the five episodes we'll get to see before the show goes on a long hiatus. But some of the incidental and/or pretty details in the show's first episode have a stronger basis in current science and technology than you might realize.

We Have Always Lived In The Dollhouse: Neuroleptic Malignant Sierra

October 26, 2009

On the last pre-hiatus episode of the cancelled Whedon epic Dollhouse, we were given a glimpse into the past of one of the show's most beloved characters: Displaced artist Priya Tsetsang, known in the House as active Sierra. While we knew from previous stories ("Needs") the basics of Sierra's entrée into the active life -- kidnapped and sold into Dollhouse slavery by an obsessed lover -- we didn't know the details... Or why, in the unaired and brilliant "Epitaph One" Priya/Sierra was so pointedly and violently dead-set against taking her psychoactive meds.

"Belonging" (written by the talented team that brought us "Epitaph One") explained both in detail, in one of the most emotionally and ethically challenging episodes of the series to date. The obsessed, a selfish and bratty billionaire, used overdoses to fake a psychotic break, resulting in Sierra's institutionalization amid claims of a paranoia scenario as chilling as it was realistic. We knew that her paranoid rantings, classics of the madhouse trope, were not only verifiably true but also part of a grander scheme to punish Priya in the sickest manner imaginable... Something not even Priya could know for sure. Never has the second season's repeated mantra, "I know what I know," been so vertiginously hard to prove.

Freeze Frame: Big Bang Theory's Eidetic Sideswipe

October 20, 2009

On this week's Big Bang Theory -- a show once considered to be low-level comedy at the expense of its characters/audience and now one of the most highly regarded sitcoms by most viewers, including exactly those same people -- we were treated to that age-old confusion surrounding the terms "photographic memory" and "eidetic memory."

Low-grade autistic and all-around geek Sheldon, in his usual uncanny and abrupt manner, informed us that "photographic" was merely an imprecise term for the more obscure-sounding term, but as usual, the show's attempts to both impress with jargon -- while dumbing things down for accessibility's sake -- managed only to sideswipe the point while getting on with its actual purpose, which is to make us laugh.

But having stumbled across the confusion surrounding these terms more than once, we here at the Remote Location decided to take a closer look once and for all at the phenomenon. Turns out the literature, and the internet, aren't exactly sure either. But after looking at a bunch of interesting experiments and case studies, it looks like the answers are as interesting as they are complex. (And/or nonexistent, depending on your definition of "answers.")

This Is Fringe, Not Farscape: The Case Of The Dream Thief

October 16, 2009

In last week's episode of Fringe, a guy went nuts on his coworkers and imagined a lot of demons and scary stuff -- visually, not unlike the gamer kid's fantasies from a House episode earlier this season -- before dying of exhaustion. Come to find out that this is because he has a chip in his head that allows his doctor to induce a sleep state, then siphon off his dreams. We're told that they are intoxicating, not unlike LSD apparently, which is what has made the doctor such an addict.

Cancer? Prison Inmates? Enough. More Zombies.

October 12, 2009

But, you're saying, those Haitian zombies are totally '80s -- and too realistic (and sad) to be that interesting. The zombies of today are apocalyptic Romero monsters, moving very slowly or very fast, hungering for brains. How could they happen? Um, like so many ways.

(The Serpent & The) Rainbow Connection: Real Zombies

October 04, 2009

On a recent episode of the show Supernatural -- whose very name tells you we shouldn't be talking about it on this blog -- we learned that a demonic zombie virus is the Devil's endgame, set to decimate the world's population in five years. I'm not so sure about that. But I am totally interested in the zombie resurgence, and since it's October I thought we could talk about monsters and ghoulies and such this month. So: Zombies. What are they about?

Deaf Mozarts, Or: Save Mary Cherry, Save The World

September 28, 2009

You watching Heroes? Me neither. Not even the trainwreck prospect of watching the youngest kid from The Nanny make out with the babysitter from Malcolm In The Middle could possibly compensate for the incredibly boring ten-plus hours of my life that show took away. But in all the ways its laughable scientific sleight-of-hand tests your gag reflex while insulting your intelligence, they have to do something right every now and then. Even a blind squirrel, as they say, has the potential to develop the mutated gene necessary to locate nuts.

It's Jamais Vu All Over Again! FlashForward's Brain Science

September 24, 2009

FlashForward was interesting, wasn't it? Almost like a real TV show, where things happen. I'll be there -- I was a fan of both Dominic Monaghan and Sonya Walger long before their stints on Lost -- but, as usual, I couldn't help my ears pricking up a little bit when the show's bespoke Men of Science explained the "blackouts" that hit the entire world simultaneously in the first few moments of the pilot.

As much as I love the idea of a worldwide nap -- especially, Dear Reader, as I'm talking to you now -- the science hits a little harder here: Everybody was also given a two-minute preview of their lives some several months hence (in fact, leading up to the day of the first season finale). And how did they "prove" it? Cleverly, actually: By looking at scans of people who were undergoing MRIs at the exact moment of the flash-forwards, and then saying my favorite word in the English language, "hippocampus," about a billion times.

Golden Mean Girls: Plain Jane Drops "Plain," Develops Confidence

September 17, 2009

So one of the other systems of thought about facial beauty involves the "average" composite science you've probably heard about before. Averaged faces are always judged better-looking than unusual ones. You can get a prettier picture with even just a few faces -- even ugly ones! -- and that's usually the whole story we get to hear. I don't like this, because it leads us down a self-pitying track that says we are our differences, which translates in the minefield of beauty as: We are our faults.

But it turns out that the story's a bit more complicated: Averaged faces are still not as lovely as the loveliest faces. A team has defined "specific non-average characteristics" that still end up being more attractive than averageness.