MEDICINE

“How are you?” “I have no idea.” 🤔

Alexithymia is a neuropsychological phenomenon, sometimes referred to as “emotional blindness” characterised by significant deficits in the recognition, processing, and expression of one’s own emotions. Indeed, sometimes our feelings seem like an unintelligible mess if we’re particularly stressed or emotional. However, alexithymia is constant, limiting one’s distinction of emotions beyond “happy” vs “unhappy” and can even extend into the understanding of other’s feelings, which can damage relationships. Evidence around the neural correlates of this phenomenon remain inconclusive. However, many suggest that the deficit may arise from an inability to transfer emotional information from the right hemisphere into the language regions of the left hemisphere. Other theorists have suggested that affected individuals could have experienced overwhelming and threatening emotion at early developmental stages, which leads to a psychological defence to be constructed, ejecting almost all emotional representations from consciousness. There is no clear answer: more recent studies have suggested a role of serotonin transport while others credit physical damage – traumatic brain injury is implicated in the development of alexithymia.

💡 Things to consider

• Association with autism spectrum disorder: Alexithymia prevalence in individuals with autism falls between 50-85%, compared to ~10% in the general population. A range of studies suggest a relationship to other emotional deficits, such as emotional face recognition, empathy, and autonomy reactivity. Interestingly, these are found to be independent of other core ASD symptoms, such as difficulties with communication and social interaction. Overall, this suggests a degree of abstract compartmentalisation of emotionality in the brain that can be selectively lost in such individuals.

• Interoception: Some theorists of emotion, namely James-Lange, propose that our emotions are a subjective interpretation of physiological states – fear is merely how we relate an increased heart rate to a feeling. The insula of our brain, particularly anterior regions (aINS), are involved in the processing of these internal sensations, allowing them to be integrated into our cortical interpretation of current emotional state. Indeed, individuals with high alexithymia demonstrate a blunted aINS recruitment when processing emotionally-salient images, suggesting yet another potential mechanism of emotional blindness acquisition.

• Treatment opportunities: It may seem that reduced awareness of negative emotions may reduce anxiety and depression. However, they are paradoxically related: alexithymia impairs the ability to appraise and regulate such emotions – treatment is warranted, yet no clear neural correlate stops this in its tracks. Suggested treatments involve mentalisation and improving the developmental level of people’s emotion schemas. It is encouraged to reduce experiential avoidance: that is, confront experienced emotions head-on instead of rejecting thoughts to avoid having to attempt to regulate them. However, approaches remain in their infancy, so who knows, maybe in the future, there may be enhanced methods to return patients’ emotional awareness.

🔎 Find out more

• A great review: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8456171/

• Mentalisation-based therapy: https://tavistockandportman.nhs.uk/visiting-us/treatments/mentalisation-based-therapy/

MFL

Hiroshima, Mon Amour 🎥

Hiroshima, Mon Amour is a French-Japanese film of the French Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) movement, released in 1959.  It was directed by Alain Resnais, and written by Marguerite Duras, a renowned French author whose literary background shines through in this film’s language and structure.  As the title suggests, the film is set during the aftermath of the US bombing of Hiroshima on 6th August 1945, focussing on how the city and its life have been reconstructed, and how the bombing is memorialised.  Yet, the film also depicts the narrative of two lovers, a Japanese man and a French woman named simply Lui and Elle (‘him’ and ‘her’ in French), and the personal difficulties that they face.

💡 Things to consider

• Narrative levels: Some texts (whether written or performed, as for cinema or theatre) may focus solely on one narrative. However, many texts contain multilevel narratives, or different threads of plot that may have some connections, but run separately throughout, allowing greater development of different characters (and especially their backgrounds), themes, settings, etc.  This technique is employed to great effect by Duras in Hiroshima, Mon Amour.  On the one hand, she presents the narrative of the reconstruction of Hiroshima after the bombing, and of how society chooses to memorialise the atrocious events and the lasting impacts that they have had.  On the other hand, she portrays in detail the development of the short but meaningful relationship between the two principal characters, Lui and Elle.  And this is not all, as the use of multiple narrative levels also allows her to look back on the past.  Thus, we see flashbacks both to the bombing of Hiroshima and its immediate aftermaths, and to the traumatic events of Elle’s childhood in France.

  

  Elle and Lui

• Mise en abyme: This is a French term used in the study of art, literature, cinema, etc., which literally means ‘placement in the abyss’.  It is used to describe the placement of one image inside another of the same type – a sort of ‘picture in picture’ – and may suggest that this sequence recurs to infinity.  It can be used more broadly in reference to any creative work that contains a work of the same form within it, such as a book in a book, a film in a film, etc.  Duras uses this technique to great effect in Hiroshima, Mon Amour, as the premise for the French Elle being in Japan is that she is there to act in a film about the Hiroshima bombings.  Thus, we see a film about Hiroshima being filmed within a film about Hiroshima, which not only adds another facet to the already multileveled narrative, but also provokes a sense of self-reflexivity – the idea of a work reflecting on itself, calling into question the way in which it has been created, and its validity as a creation.

  

  Mise en abyme: a picture within a picture

• Memorialising tragedy:  When discussing real-life tragedies through film or literature, it is important to consider how this can be approached sensitively within an overtly fictional work, without reducing the events to fiction themselves.  This is especially pertinent in the world of cinema, where it is very popular to turn human and natural tragedies into films, such as Titanic, Schindler’s List, Hotel Rwanda or The Pianist.  Many people question the ethics of representing real-life tragedy in a fictional form, as it may risk sensationalising the event, and thus desensitising the audience to the realities of the event, and its impact on human lives.  This is a vital question with regards to Hiroshima, Mon Amour because of the interweaving of an individual love story into the narrative, which some may consider to detract from the discussions of the bombing of Hiroshima itself.  Yet, others view it as an effective means of demonstrating the difficulty of discussing traumatic events, talking around the event rather than tackling it directly.

🔎 Find out more

• Watch the film Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1h30mins, available with English subtitles)

• Why Hiroshima, Mon Amour is still relevant today

• Books based on tragedies

• The tragedy of making real-life tragedy films 

• Turning life into fiction

🍒 The cherry on top

• 🖼️ The Mona Lisa: Did you know that da Vinci painted 4 versions of the Mona Lisa? This website gives you 5 things you didn’t know about the Mona Lisa, and is a great quick read if you’re interested in Art.

• 🥸 Folk Etymologies: This article discusses folk etymologies, or false histories of word and phrase origins. Why do we have a desire to align the history of language to political ‘realities’? This is a great read for those interested in Linguistics, Politics, and Sociology.

• 🤔 Walter Benjamin: Walter Benjamin was a German philosopher whose ideas, forged in the tumultuous era of the early 20th century, continue to inspire discourse on topics ranging from art and literature to politics and technology. This In Our Time podcast on him is great if you’re interested in Philosophy, Politics, or Literature!

👀 Keep your eyes peeled for…

• 26th February - Cambridge Mathematics - Teachers' and Advisers' Q&A

• 27th February - Cambridge She Talks Science Student Conference

• 27th February - St John’s College Cambridge Admissions Clinic

• 27th February - Cambridge Arts and Humanities - Teachers' and Advisers' Q&A

• 27th February - University of Oxford Super-curricular Lecture

• 27th February - UEA Inorganic Chemistry Taster Lecture

• 27th February - UEA Computer Science Taster Lecture

• 28th February - UEA Creative Writing Taster Lecture

• 28th February - UEA History Taster Lecture

• 28th February - University of London A Level French Workshop: Entre les Murs

• 28th February - Magdalene College Cambridge A Level Choices Webinar

• 28th February - Cambridge World of Worlds Residential Application Deadline

• 29th February - Oxford Online Maths Club

• 29th February - St Johns College Cambridge Student Q+A

• 29th February - Cambridge Supporting International Students – Teachers’ and Advisers’ Q&A (session 1)

• 29th February - UEA Biology/Psychology Taster Lecture

• 29th February - UEA English Literature Taster Lecture

• 2nd March - Next Steps for Year 12 Conference

🗳️ Poll

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