In the nearly twenty years since their publication, Gilles Deleuze's books about cinema have proven as daunting as they are enticing -- a new aesthetics of film, one equally at home with Henri Bergson and Wim Wenders, Friedrich Nietzsche and Orson Welles, that also takes its place in the philosopher's immense and difficult oeuvre. With this collection, the first to focus solely and extensively on Deleuze's cinematic work, the nature and reach of that work finally become clear. Composed of a substantial introduction, twelve original essays produced for this volume, and a new English translation of a personal, intriguing, and little-known interview with Deleuze on his cinema books, The Brain Is the Screen is a sustained engagement with Deleuze's cinematic philosophy that leads to a new view of the larger confrontation of philosophy with cinematic images.

The first broad-ranging collection on Deleuze’s essential works on cinema. In the nearly twenty years since their publication, Gilles Deleuze’s books about cinema have proven as daunting as they are enticing—a new aesthetics of film, one equally at home with Henri Bergson and Wim Wenders, Friedrich Nietzsche and Orson Welles, that also takes its place in the philosopher’s immense and difficult oeuvre. With this collection, the first to focus solely and extensively on Deleuze’s cinematic work, the nature and reach of that work finally become clear. Composed of a substantial introduction, twelve original essays produced for this volume, and a new English translation of a personal, intriguing, and little-known interview with Deleuze on his cinema books, The Brain Is the Screen is a sustained engagement with Deleuze’s cinematic philosophy that leads to a new view of the larger confrontation of philosophy with cinematic images.Contributors: Éric Alliez, U of Vienna; Dudley Andrew, U of Iowa; Peter Canning; Tom Conley, Harvard U; András Bálint Kovács, ELTE U, Budapest; Gregg Lambert, Syracuse U; Laura U. Marks, Carleton U; Jean-Clet Martin, Collége International de Philosophie, Paris; Angelo Restivo; Martin Schwab, U of Michigan; François Zourabichvili, Collége International de Philosophie.Gregory Flaxman is a doctoral student in the Program of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania.

An award-winning neurologist on the Stone-Age roots of our screen addictions, and what to do about them. The human brain hasn’t changed much since the Stone Age, let alone in the mere thirty years of the Screen Age. That’s why, according to neurologist Richard Cytowic—who, Oliver Sacks observed, “changed the way we think of the human brain”—our brains are so poorly equipped to resist the incursions of Big Tech: They are programmed for the wildly different needs of a prehistoric world. In Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age, Cytowic explains exactly how this programming works—from the brain’s point of view. What he reveals in this book shows why we are easily addicted to screen devices; why young, developing brains are particularly vulnerable; why we need silence; and what we can do to push back. In the engaging storytelling style of his popular TED Talk, Cytowic draws an easily comprehensible picture of the Stone Age brain’s workings—the function of neurotransmitters like dopamine in basic instincts for survival such as desire and reward; the role of comparison in emotion, and emotion in competition; and, most significantly, the orienting reflex, one of the unconscious circuits that automatically focus, shift, and sustain attention. Given this picture, the nature of our susceptibility to digital devices becomes clear, along with the possibility of how to break their spell. Full of practical actions that we can start taking right away, Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age offers compelling evidence that we can change the way we use technology, resist its addictive power over us, and take back the control we have lost.

This collection of essays is driven by the question of how we know what we know, and in particular how we can be certain about something even when we know it is an illusion. The contention of the book is that this age-old question has acquired a new urgency as certain trends in science, technology and ideas have taken the discussion of consciousness out of the philosophy department and deposited it in the world at large. As a consequence, a body of literature from many fields has produced its own sets of concerns and methods under the rubric of Consciousness Studies. Each contribution in this collection deals with issues and questions that lots of people have been thinking about for many years in many different contexts, things such as the nature of film, cinema, world, mind and so on. Those of us fascinated by these diverse yet related issues may have often felt we were working in a disciplinary no-man's-land. Now suddenly, it seems with Consciousness Studies we have a coherent intellectual home - albeit one that is self-consciously eclectic. The essays included in Screen Consciousness: Cinema, Mind and World are from a range of disciplines -- art, philosophy, film theory, anthropology and technology studies -- each represented by significant international figures, and each concerned with how their field is being transformed by the new discipline of Consciousness Studies. Together they attempt to reconcile the oncoming rush of new data from science and technology about how we know what we know, with the insights gained from the long view of history, philosophy and art. Each of the contributions seeks to interpose Consciousness Studies between film and mind, where for cultural theorists psychoanalysis had traditionally stood. This is more than simply updating Film Studies or nodding in the direction of cognitive film theory. Film, with all its sentient, sensuous and social qualities, is a common reference point between all these forces, and Consciousness Studies provides the intellectual impetus for this book to revisit familiar problems with fresh insight.

Arguing that today's viewers move through a character's brain instead of looking through his or her eyes or mental landscape, this book approaches twenty-first-century globalized cinema through the concept of the "neuro-image." Pisters explains why this concept has emerged now, and she elaborates its threefold nature through research from three domains—Deleuzian (schizoanalytic) philosophy, digital networked screen culture, and neuroscientific research. These domains return in the book's tripartite structure. Part One, on the brain as "neuroscreen," suggests rich connections between film theory, mental illness, and cognitive neuroscience. Part Two explores neuro-images from a philosophical perspective, paying close attention to their ontological, epistemological, and aesthetic dimensions. Political and ethical aspects of the neuro-image are discussed in Part Three. Topics covered along the way include the omnipresence of surveillance, the blurring of the false and the real and the affective powers of the neo-baroque, and the use of neuro-images in politics, historical memory, and war.

How is watching a movie similar to dreaming? What goes on in our minds when we become absorbed in a movie? How does looking “into” a movie screen allow us to experience the thoughts and feelings of a movie’s characters? These and related questions are at the heart of The Power of Movies, a thoughtful, invigorating, and remarkably accessible book about a phenomenon seemingly beyond reach of our understanding. Colin McGinn–“an ingenious philosopher who thinks like a laser and writes like a dream,” according to Steven Pinker–enhances our understanding of both movies and ourselves in this book of rare and refreshing insight.