You might rightly judge that title to be half fib, depending on how you read it. The upcoming public reading of Philosophical Zombie Killers, happening on September 14 at 7:30 pm at Freehold Theatre, will certainly, and happily, not be the last public reading of a play of mine. The Sequence is scheduled to be read on October 12 at 2pm at the Bathhouse Theater at Green Lake. (More details here.) But Philosophical Zombie Killers is indeed my last full-length play. I have no plans to write another, and no great prospects for future full production of this, or any other play I have written. On September 15, the day after this reading, I will officially step away from the theatre. I have no plans to return. Of course threads of sadness run through this decision, but it is also interwoven with hope, and anticipation of new adventures. I hope you’ll wish me well. And if you can, I hope you’ll come see this reading. Here, below the fold, is the press release with all the info:
Category: science of theatre
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Cutting-Edge Virtual Brain Palpation (a.k.a. “Theatre”)
My five year-old son was climbing a tree and got to about seven feet off the ground when he told me he wanted to jump off. I balked. “It looks far,” I said.
“I can do it,” he said.
“Won’t it hurt?”
“No,” he assured me. He jumped. His feet slapped the hard dirt, and my own soles dimly rang with the sting of the impact. Turns out, however, that I’m not preternaturally empathic; nor even merely an overly imaginative drama geek dad. Turns out, according to some of the latest research into what have been dubbed “Mirror Neurons”, I am a human being.
As reports Christian Keysers, Scientific Director of the Neuroimaging Center of the University Medical Center Groningen, the same neuron fires in a monkey’s brain when it grabs a peanut as when someone else grabs the peanut. Says Keyser:
This phenomenon is not restricted to physical movement. When someone taps my shoulder, say, my somatosensory cortex makes me feel the sensation. But simply seeing someone else being tapped activates the same area of my brain. If I cut my finger, my cingulate cortex and anterior insula will register the pain—and these areas also become active if I see you cut your finger. The vicarious representations are not quite as strong as those produced when we experience our own sensations, but we nevertheless feel a milder version of what the other person feels.
None of this is all that surprising to my fellow stage artists. We’ve known for millennia that we can get folks in the audience to reassuringly rub their hands just by chopping off some fake hands on stage. In such moments, everybody knows that nobody’s fooling anybody, and yet our bodies do get fooled despite our brains’ reassurances.
These brain circuits can keep us from seeing other individuals as something “out there.” Indeed, we are able to feel their actions, sensations, and emotions inside us, as if we were in their shoes. Others have become us. [emphasis Paul’s]…. These brain circuits thus blur the bright line between your experiences and mine. Our experiences fuse into the joint pool of knowledge that we call culture.
Dear Professor Keysers, my colleagues and I happily wish to inform you that we have been investigating these phenomena for some time. We call it theatre. Welcome to the ongoing experiment.
