Yesterday we posted "Food Rules," the Michael Pollan-inspired entrant in a film contest hosted by the Royal Society for the encouragement of the Arts. In answer to the competition's requirement to enact an RSA-hosted talk through film, the stop-motion short used food to act out an excerpt from Pollan's book, "Food Rules," which doubled as Pollan's the keynote speech at a 2010 RSA event.
Today, we can't get enough of another competitor making use of popular source material -- Korok Chatterjee's visualization of an excerpt from David Brooks' 2011 book "The Social Animal." Just as "Food Rules" aptly used food to illustrate Pollan's points on sustainable farming, Chatterjee found an ideal medium for Brooks' musings on the unconscious, or as Carl Jung would have it, "the shadow aspect." Using one of those conjoined wooden figurines that everyone's seen but no one seems to actually own, a spotlight and some creative puppeteering, Chatterjee gives life to Brooks' description of the unconscious as both a dunce and a secret genius. Since our early days casting alligators on the wall, we've never doubted the informative potential of shadow puppetry: now we finally have proof!
WATCH:
We've posted the Brooks' excerpt below. Head over to the RSA site to view and vote on all the entrants:
"I believe we’re in the middle of this tremendous revolution in understanding who we are, deep down inside. And I think a lot of this research in all these different fields coheres around three foundational principles. And the first foundational principle is that most of our thinking is below conscious awareness, it’s unconscious. And that the conscious mind does maybe 2% of our cognition. But one of the things we’re finding is that the unconscious is actually quite intelligent. That when Freud thought of his conception of the unconscious, it was a tangled web of erotic urges, but really the diversity of unconscious processes are really different systems to understand the world. And sometimes those systems are very dumb, they’re pretty bad at math, but sometimes they’re very smart in helping you detect unconscious patterns in the world, helping you do a conversation, helping you if you’re an academic to work on a problem, and then suddenly the solution to that problem will bubble up from your unconscious and you’ll have a eureka moment."