Apologies for the break in transmission. I am busy relocating from Sydney, Australia to live and work in San Francisco. Until then, here's a reading list to help mind the gap.

http://www.bschool.com/blog/

Many thanks to the B-School for including me in their list.  

"T.V.
It satellite links our United States of Unconsciousness
Apathetic, therapeutic and extremely addictive
The methadone metronome pumping out 150 channels 24 hours a day
You can flip through all of them and still there’s nothing worth watching"
Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy 'Television, the drug of the nation'

Switching on the TV does not switch off your mind. Far from being a passive repository in which TV dumps its trash, our brains are firing up and fine-tuning mental models of ourselves in the world. TV is one of the great content dispensers. It matters little whether we’re consuming terrestrial broadcast, Mac or mobile. It’s the content that makes or breaks the moment, not the medium. Don’t kill the messenger.

Professor Emeritus Keith Oatley examines the magic that happens when we plug our brains into great content. Oatley researches the psychological effects of engaging with fiction. He believes fiction is a kind of simulation that runs in our mind. Oatley has found that exposure to fiction improves our ability to empathise with others. It enhances our emotional and social acuity. Had Osama bin Laden watched the right TV shows he wouldn’t now be trying to fill our screens with dread. If only it was that easy. But a good dose of content is sometimes just what the doctor ordered.

Fiction as simulation takes us into alternate realities with unique systems and rules. We suspend disbelief. Suddenly, anything seems possible. Life becomes a box of chocolates. Telephone lines provide safe exits from the 'Matrix'. We see dead people. We get that feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.

Engaging with fiction helps us practice our predictive models and map out future scenarios. In The Great Escape, as McQueen’s Cooler King turns his motorcycle towards the barbed wire fence we consider the likely plot outcomes. We witness the consequences of actions and learn from more experiences than our daily lives afford. Saving Private Ryan throws us onto the beaches of Normandy, giving us an understanding of the ravaging fog of war. Our fellow inmates at Shawshank teach us that self-worth and possibility come from within; we are able to escape circumstance. The simulation lets us play possible selves in possible worlds.

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert talks about how in everyday life we use our imaginations to simulate the future. His work suggests we are very poor at learning from experience. We tend not to take the right things into consideration when estimating what is likely to make us happy. Great content may help provide an antidote. Our mind needs all the training it can get on the flight simulator of life.

Fiction simulates social forces, enabling us to explore the pitfalls and promises of our own social lives. We spend years on the inside of Carrie Bradshaw’s New York clique where close friendships balance life caught between singledom in the city and living with Mr Right. We witness how social relations can be complicated in Patrick Marber’s Closer, corrosive in Atonement, and downright poisonous in Dangerous Liaisons. We laugh and hopefully learn from the follies of our Friends. 

In everyday life we infer what others are thinking and feeling by drawing on our understanding of ourselves. Fiction allows us to flex what developmental psychologists call our ‘Theory of Mind’. It encourages us to look ourselves in the mirror in order to contemplate the thoughts and feelings of others. We identify with Ripley’s maternal mix of smarts and self-determination yet when she insists on dragging us down into the guts of the mother ship to face her Aliens we question her sanity. Our troubled Californication friend Hank Moody appears to know his personal demons but will he overcome them to win back the love of his life. We get to know characters, often better than they know themselves. This is what makes Ricky Gervais’ Office character so funny; he believes he’s a liked and respected renaissance man, yet we know better. It’s why we’re as shocked as special agent Kujan in The Usual Suspects when we realise that Keyser Söze’s story was dreamt up using a coffee cup logo and flotsam and jetsam off the office bulletin board. We thought we knew how “Verbal” ticked. Fiction is in large part an exercise in theory of mind.

The simulation also enables us to explore emotions. But rather than just observe the emotional highs and lows of characters in a story, our own emotions surge through our veins. We experience them in real time. We feel the rush of adrenaline as the air cavalry carry out their dawn attack to Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” in Apocalypse Now, only to then empathise with the doomed villagers below.

This stirring of feelings has the cleansing effect of Aristotle’s catharsis. However, the simulation model goes a step further. It wraps emotions in a crystal clear sequence of events. We feel every step Harry and Sally make on their journey from friendship to love. When Katie and Hubbell lock in their final embrace in The Way We Were, their tears fall from our eyes; we understand acutely the tragedy and truth that sometimes you cannot be with the one you love. We empathise with Lester’s suburban frustration in American Beauty and fathom the despair of his suicide. Simulations help us make sense of feelings that can be slippery to grasp or hard to stomach in the cold light of day.

Neuro-imaging studies suggest the act of recognising an emotion in someone else can prompt our brains to generate the same emotion. Their feelings are simulated in our skin. The translation of what we see into our own emotions enables us to share the inner feelings of others. It’s the neurophysiological basis of empathy. Research shows people who are deeply moved by unhappy movie endings tend to experience greater brain activation when they see others in pain.

These psychological effects occur whether engaging with a novel, theatre experience or advertisement. They are not restricted to what we conventionally regard as fiction. Consider the simulation that runs in our mind when we follow the plight of characters in the storyline of news reports. We project ourselves into the scene in an attempt to understand the fear and dread that drove people to jump from the Towers on September 11. When Daniel Pearl’s wife makes a plea for her missing husband’s life in a BBC interview, it’s so raw and heartfelt that we are moved to tears. News simulates reality, though it doesn’t always reflect it. The problem with news is the simulation is often all too real.

It seems safe to assume that one day the digital revolution will deliver a fully-immersive virtual reality or, on the flipside, a fully-augmented everyday reality. In fact, the wrap-around media world we will inhabit will turn the expression ‘virtual reality’ from oxymoron to tautology. Underpinning this digital utopia will be the present day promise of more engaging, immersive, participatory experiences. Anxieties aside, exciting new ways to inform, educate and entertain lay ahead.

These media advances need not detract from the fact that fully-immersive participatory media experiences are on our psychological doorstep. Our heads are narrative playgrounds. Content already augments the everyday and transports us into other dimensions. Great content turns the meeting of mind and media into our very own virtual reality.

When simulated reality plays out over a breadth and depth of media platforms, it can infuse our world. The popular TV series Lost isn’t only a long run of self-contained episodes. Vast amounts of official and unofficial content exist beyond the broadcasts, from ads for Oceanic Airlines promoting the series, to websites adding depth to plot features, mobisodes of missing pieces, communities like Lostpedia, online videos of character back-stories, even jigsaw puzzles with clues buried in the pieces; layer-upon-layer promising more information for those willing to lose themselves to the narrative depths. The more you talk with others, the more it makes sense. Multi-media programming like Lost turns content into full-blown social media experience.

The simulation metaphor is a simple yet effective way of conceptualising the complex and active psychological processes accompanying a perfect marriage of mind and media. Applying this thinking to what we do in the world of communications emphasises the importance of great content. While this might sound obvious, for a while there during new media’s honeymoon period it seemed that what was possible was more important than why. Digital leaps will always excite. But we can’t afford to rely on the novelty of rich media when what people actually seek is rich content experiences. People don’t just want stuff to run on their devices. They want simulations to run in their minds.

We are active media consumers with minds willing and able to participate in immersive content experiences. We don’t like being treated like a captive audience. We don’t want to be drip-fed more of the same. We want to be taken on journeys. We seek stories that transport us, even just for a moment, into virtual worlds that move and shake us. We want to be made to think and feel differently. We want to share something bigger than ourselves. We want content that adds something, however small, to the narrative of our lives.

Don’t passively accept the way we are wired. Create content that changes our wiring. Build powerful and positive simulations to run in our minds. If television or any other medium is to be the new drug of the nation, feeding ignorance and breeding radiation, it will be due to mindless content not any medium’s mind-numbing nature. 

“The news of the day is on all the time
All the latest gossip all the latest rhyme
You mind is you temple keep it beautiful and free
Don't let an egg get laid in there by something you can't see”
Bob Dylan “TV Talking Song”  

Television is not a passive medium. Contrary to popular bias, TV is jam-packed with highly participatory, immersive media experiences that actively engage our brains. The failure to acknowledge this leads to prescriptive media thinking and creative mediocrity. Worse still, it blindsides us to one of the most profound interactions between media and mind. Here, the old dog TV could teach new media a trick or two. 

There’s a reason we tend to view TV so passively. Back when colour TV was only just starting to replace the black and white box, a researcher named Krugman was using brain waves to measure media involvement. He attached a single electrode to the occipital region of a 22-year-old secretary and out flowed the truth. Print was active because it triggered fast beta brainwaves indicative of alert concentration and thinking. TV produced slower alpha brainwaves typical of a relaxed, highly receptive state of mind. Krugman concluded that the consumer acts on Print but TV acts on the consumer.

Krugman’s work broke new ground and helped shake the advertising industry of the belief it was in the business of pure persuasion. He inspired other researchers to plug people into laboratory equipment. Their findings came down the wires, adding to the picture. Audiences acquire information from TV and film with little or no active participation. Staring at a TV is hypnotic. Watching TV and film uses low levels of conscious involvement. Adjusting filmic nuts and bolts (e.g. camera edits, zooms, music) pushes different brain buttons. 

Brainwave measurement is a funny old thing. EEG records the electrical activity on the surface of the scalp; a current that’s essentially the cumulative side-effect of hundreds of thousands if not millions of neurons firing in the brain. The typical assumption is that the brain has an electrophysiological “macro-state” that is psychologically meaningful. This brain-power passes through structures like the skull bone and cerebrospinal fluid that smear the signal. Methodological standards vary. Choices about anything from electrode numbers and their configuration to statistical techniques produce conflicting results. Averaging of waves over a period of time is common, reducing the sensitivity of readings and masking complex effects. Factors external to the brain like eye movements and blinks produce confounding electrical activity. Media stimuli vary enormously. Replicating real life situations in laboratories is challenging. All this before turning inward to dissect the functionally-complex, not-so-neat brain structures of the deep. 

Other brain-teasing techniques are now at our fingertips. And who can resist a sneak peek through the cerebral keyhole if it means not having to rely on clumsy consumer commentary? Let the light shine in. Windows are being fitted into the side of our skulls. The puppet masters will soon look and see how to pull our brain strings. The question remains whether they will really understand what they observe. Hold onto your prefrontal cortex.

Lifting the lid on neural nuances is not so easy. Before attempting to dig up the brain, look on the behavioural surface. TV viewing is anything but passive. Think of the man yelling back the answers to the TV quiz. The university student laughing hysterically at the sitcom, reciting the joke for campus the next day. The 8-year-old sending in “user generated content” in the form of drawings to the children’s programme. The 3-year-old reciting the alphabet in sync with Sesame Street. The grumpy old man lobbing insults back at the vacuous talking-head in the ad break. The mother enraged by the opinionated current affairs story. The romcom tears being wiped from cheeks. The newly-weds debating the aesthetics unveiled in the home-renovation show. The recipe writing during cooking programmes. The reality-TV audience voting to determine plot outcomes. Broadcast twitter feeds providing live social discussion among the wider couch community. Channel surfing, programme forwarding and rewinding. The multitasking between screens, hunting down content across platforms and deeper dives into narrative layers online. The list goes on. Viewing is often highly interactive. It always has been. Media convergence is only intensifying the behavioural beat.

Sometimes reality bites and we happily tune in to zone out in front of the TV. This is when our mental state might appear almost meditative. However, it would be wrong to think our brain simply kneels acquiescently at TV’s altar. The neural ball upstairs does not play passive receiver. 

Consider the cliché viewer slumped in the cradling arms of a movie or series. It is in this behavioural vacuum where popcorn meets drool that vast amounts of information seem to be transmitted effortlessly into our submissive skulls. In fact, our mind is motoring. Video demands integration of both audio and visual information, deciphering the filmic language (e.g. camera angles, scene changes, temporal leaps), following plots, getting familiar with settings, understanding characters and discerning the limitations of the fictive universe. It might not feel like hard work, but the brain is toiling away. And it’s not just obediently performing information processing chores. Deep mental movements are occurring that can shake you to the core. 

Tune in next time to find out what really goes on in that head of yours.

What is media psychology? Given psychology’s many professional facets and public faces, it’s important to be clear.

I’m not talking about pop psychologists analysing gossip to diagnose celebrity behaviour on the Entertainment channel. Neither am I referring to therapists soothing fears and sponging tears on TV talk shows. Media psychology doesn’t have anything to do with psychologists making media appearances. That said, it could contribute greatly to the advancement of psychological issues in the media.

Living in the marketing and communications zoo like I do, it’s important to tame a few beasts here too. I do not speak the same dialect as ad men who slice and splice psychology sound-bites into strategies. I’m likely to collide with consultants who pontificate before over-inflated PowerPoint slides and woo naive audiences by prefixing ‘neuro‘ to every methodology they sell. I don’t seek to bundle the brain into proprietary boxes with false promises of crystal-ball insights by next day delivery. I’m no advocate of blunt research instruments being used to bludgeon the life out of creativity. I abhor people and brands being wrapped in evermore-impenetrable layers of marketing madness. And I am not out to crack the cognitive code in consumer heads for commercial gain without concern for the consequences. This is not how I get my kicks.

I believe psychology can help improve and enhance human-media relations. Media psychology does this by applying the science of human behaviour to the development, production, distribution and consumption of media. It demands appreciation of arts, entertainment and media systems. It can help fine tune what we’ve got. It can help create something better. Creativity can be turned into a powerful driver of cultural, social and behavioural change.

Today, we are exposed to more media, consume more messages and surround ourselves with more media appliances than ever before in history. Media has become deeply engrained in our cultural lives. We are all producers, distributors and consumers of media. Each of us is an intersection of converging media and content. Media is the connective tissue that binds us. This tissue grows fast yet tears easily.

We need deeper understanding, more robust approaches and sharper tools to maximise this convergence; to ensure media technologies and creativity feed our connective tissue.

This is my agenda: to beat my own drum at the heart of this complex interplay between media and mind.