I'll be the first to admit not every prediction I make ends up being correct and
Maybe not every theory is your favorite or maybe you're just sick of my puns and non-stop meme references well today
I'm gonna do something about it
I want you to think of everything I've ever done that you didn't like bad Star Wars prediction a grown worthy dad joke
Whatever comes to mind now focus on it got it great now. If you'll just do me a favor and look right here
Hello Internet welcome to film theory protecting the world from the scum of poorly cited research so after suffering my
Way through bright on Netflix widely hailed to be the worst movie of 2017, which it's not not by a long shot
but it did provide me some great out of context lines such as
Fairy lives don't matter today
and
You know what they say once with the Dark Lord always with the Dark Lord I decided to take a trip down memory lane to revisit
Will Smith's well maybe not his better early movies
But I at least liked him a lot when I was growing up and first up on the nostalgia trip was men in black
From the time when Will Smith couldn't decide if he was an actor or a rapper sometimes. He was bald
If you called wild wild west rapping or acting that's what I do
Anyway men in black gave us the neuralyzer a device that with one flash makes you forget
Practically anything except the fact that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, that one is locked in there.
I'll let Tommy Lee Jones explain how the neuralyzer works
This..
Is called a neuralyzer this red eye here will isolate the electronic impulses in your brains and more specifically the ones for memory. Everyone looking
at the light gets, zapped their memories of what they've just seen get erased, and the agent replaces it with a
Different memory with a lot fewer aliens .Cool, so it's a sci-fi gadget big whoop right? Well
We've learned a lot about memory since this movie first came out 20 years ago
And I'm telling you right now the neuralyzer has gone from a creation of science fiction
It is something we could totally make today! You ever had deja vu? How do you know the real men in black
Haven't already neuralyzed you and the deja vu is just you experiencing something that was wiped from your memory the first time!
Whoa..
Long story short in order to make a neuralyzer we need to establish
three things: One that memories can be erased; Two that false memories can be forced into people's head's;
And Three that it can all be done with a flash of light so get ready because here comes the MatPat that
Won't let you remember your childhood the same way ever again see I can't rap either Will Smith you're in good company
Sorry
Point number one can memories be erased I mean we've all heard stories of being unable to form any new memories to determine who killed
Your wife so you tattoo Clues on yourself instead of writing them down on paper like a normal person
but is it plausible that we could wipe out specific memories of things that we had just seen it turns out the answer is a
Solid yes, and it comes from a place you might be surprised to hear on a channel that prides itself on science
I'm talking about hypnosis
But not the kind with some spinning
Spiral thing that makes you think you're a chicken or makes you want to subscribe to the Film Theorist channel subscribe to the Film Theorist
Channel subscribe to the Film Theorist Channel. I'm talking about hypnotic induction
Which is a real therapeutic technique to get patients into a deep state of relaxation which increases theta waves in their brain
You know you get all your great ideas in the shower? Well
It's because relaxing in a shower results in a high concentration of theta waves which makes
Connecting otherwise disparate ideas in your brain a whole lot easier. This also applies to memory
But theta waves can also be used against you and hypnosis
Here is the key blocking memories that you'd otherwise be able to recall. For instance and this is nuts
Last year Samsung released an online
Hypnotherapy tool called Unspoil me that walks you through a self Hypnosis session
That's supposed to help you forget movies and TV shows so you could watch them again as if you're watching them for the first time
Full disclosure: I had Chris from our team do it, and yeah, he still remembers the Red Wedding
But he's recently been overcome with this strange urge to buy a phone that spontaneously combusts
No, but all jokes aside after going through this treatment
He could no longer remember how the series ended whether he had even seen the series end in the first place even the main
Character's name and first ridiculous as that might seem the science behind it is actually a hundred percent solid. In
2007 scientists published a study in which they showed participants a movie then hypnotized them to try and make them forget it
When they tested the group that had been hypnotized the subjects couldn't recall details of the movie that they had just watched
Maybe they should have just had hypnotists outside of the emoji movie. That's 90 minutes of my life
I'd like to forget. Anyway the people who had been hypnotized could remember where they had watched the movie and other details surrounding the
Experiment, but they actually couldn't remember what happened in the movie itself, and it's not like they were just forgetful either
They actually demonstrated different kinds of brain activity from a control group
That wasn't hypnotized. This kind of isolating amnesia is exactly what we see
Demonstrated and men in black when normal people come into contact with aliens the men in black
Don't just wipe the person's memory completely. Instead, they isolate one element of the memory
Just like the film study did and they replace that memory with something else. Which of course brings us to our second question
Can you really implant false memories into someone's brain and yet again the answer is yes?
It's actually a lot easier than you might think a Canadian psychologist named Julia
Shaws has demonstrated that when people are asked about their involvement and events that never occurred their memories will actually start to form
Versions of that fictional scenario and the people will eventually believe that it happened here's dr.
Shaw telling one of her subjects about a completely fictitious event. So the other event was your parents
Were telling us about was when you were 14 years old you initiated a physical fight and the police called your parents
the Girl responds pretty much exactly as you would expect from someone who had just had a story made up about him
Man, I gotta say Canadians are so polite even when they're calling people liars! Anyway fast forward
Just a few minutes in this interview, and all of a sudden the same woman suddenly has memories of the event.
All the psychologists had to do was provide a framework for the event get the subjects to try and remember and suddenly their brains fill in what's
missing from the memories
Which is of course everything the memories weren't there to begin with. Some of it is also situational here
the subjects are likely influenced by a desire to comply with an authority figure asking them questions, but that's
Exactly what would be happening if you met the men and black in real life now of course I can see your counter-argument here sure
These false memories might be implanted
But it's not like they're gonna stay in anyone's memory or be trusted for any length of time and yeah
That would totally make a lot of sense if it had any bearing on facts, False memories run
rampant even in situations
Where our memories matter the most like say when you're testifying at a murder trial you ever heard of someone wrongly convicted of a crime
Being exonerated by DNA evidence well statistically
That person was probably convicted in the first place because of a false memory. According to the American Bar Association an astounding
three-fourths of the cases overturned by DNA evidence relied on
Eyewitness testimony for the wrongful conviction. Oh yeah, that's totally the guy. I saw kill her! Well, DNA evidence proves he was in Hawaii.
Sorry, you missed out on years of your life
buddy. Now imagine for a moment that you've just come to the
Realization that aliens not only exist but walk among us on earth because you saw something
absolutely bananas go down and then some very calm in charge looking person in a great suit shows up and flashes something in your
face and tell you that you didn't see what you really thought you saw. Even if the neuralyzer was just a flash of a
Polaroid camera here are pretty likely to walk away believing what they just told you. All right MatPat cut the BS!
You're probably saying right now enraged by my suggestion that your memory is about as reliable as a cable company showing up on time
These examples you're giving me are from carefully controlled experiments that took place over long periods of time
Sure, you might be able to force people to forget things or remember things that never happened
But you can't do it instantaneously with a flash of light. "Are you sure about that ?" Because scientists have already
done it. Oh yeah, loyal theorists the future is here. And to quote Mr. Meeseeks "It's getting weird!"
Opto genetics is a new branch of neuroscience that enables researchers to control
individual neurons through electronic impulses directly into people's brains
It's pretty complicated as one might expect electronic mind control would be but here's the gist of it
Scientists can modify the genomes of mice to be particularly sensitive to certain kinds of light
and they can also map the areas of the brain that are
stimulated when the mice is
experiencing something that would form a good memory like when it's eating food or when it's in its home. In this clip right here a
Mouse is put into a bright box with no hiding place and it responds with fear response. It's cowering in the corner
It's scared of this new environment right, but once they flashed the light into the mouse's brain
They basically
Turned on a switch that activates the good memory and suddenly the mouse starts moving around the box like it's cold turn the light off
again, and the mouse stops immediately
Dead in its tracks turn it back on and it's grooming itself like its back home turn it off again, and well you get the idea.
Now granted mouse brains aren't human brains but as we explored with Dan Harmon in the Pickle Rick episode.
They're structured similarly enough that in a few years
this could easily get
Transferred into the human brain it also proves K's
assertion at the beginning of Men in Black that the light from the neuralyzer is enough to interrupt signals in the brain and
This kind of on/off switch effect from memories actually
Coincides with what we see in later movies in the series in Men in Black 2 we find out that memories that have been
Neuralyzed can be brought back
So it's not so much that they're getting deleted as they are getting switched off
So it would make sense that in black have developed a kind of
optogenetic technology that can activate certain parts of the brain and shut off others instantly with a single remote
Flash of light so there you have it. The neuralyzer is physically possible
But in order for it to be practical with near-future
Technology it would mean that every single human being would have to be genetically
Engineered to be sensitive to certain kinds of light
and then also have
Transponders implanted into their brains to receive the signals that were sent from the neuralyzer. But in the Men in Black universe
that's
Definitely what's happened the entirety of New York City is
Neuralyzed by the Statue of Liberty's torch at the end of Men in Black 2- so we know both that everyone is susceptible to this
Technology and that the Men in Black have engineered the world to keep their secrets under wraps with all the alien technology
they have access to it doesn't seem like too big of a stretch to say that they're putting chips in all of our heads and
As long as they keep neural izing us along the way we won't know the difference
In fact who's to say that we don't have chips in our brains right now and that we've all forgotten the memory because we've already
Been neuralyzed, but hey, that's just a theory!
A Film Theory and
cut