Deep Media

What Once Was Lost Will Soon Be All Over TV

When Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, the show-runners who kept Lost going for six seasons, negotiated an end to the series back in 2007, they did more than guarantee that it wouldn't wander aimlessly until it expired of old age, the way most successful TV shows do. They also guaranteed that a year or so after the series finale, the writers and actors who'd kept it going would get a fresh chance to rethink television. That time has now arrived, with the result that the upcoming season—just announced by the networks in the spring upfront—will have three different shows from Lost alums. And not a smoke monster or a polar bear in the bunch. 

There is, however, an evil queen and a Prince Charming in Once Upon a Time, the new ABC series from exec producers Adam Horowitz and Eddy Kitsis (airing Sundays at 8:00, just before Desperate Housewives). Horowitz and Kitsis, who worked on J.J. Abrams's Felicity before Lost and did the screenplay for Disney's TRON reboot, wrote many of the Hurley episodes and were responsible for planting the fictional '70s rock band Geronimo Jackson in the show (and on iTunes). Now they've ventured into the realm of fairy tales. 

The idea dates back to a decade ago, to when they were working on Felicity. "We wanted to get back to basics, and fairy tales are what got us started," says Horowitz. "This was a way of, not retelling them, but using them as a jumping-off point—what if this stuff was real and it leaked into our world?" No one was interested at the time, but the idea came up again years later when they were having lunch with Lindelof at Chin Chin. "We were doing notes on the Jack episode in season four ['Something Nice Back Home'], and he asked us what we were thinking about after this show." Fairy tales, it turned out. 

 

Brand Empathy: How Mirror Neurons Can Reduce the Gap Between Brand and Self

Contagious Magazine, the London-based quarterly, is the most seductively gorgeous marketing publication around, and remarkably insightful in the bargain. So when production editor Emily Hare and North American editor Nick Parish said they wanted to run an essay based on The Art of Immersion's discussion of the role of empathy in advertising, I was more than happy to pull something together. This is the piece that resulted, from the current issue of Contagious: 

In the early 1990s, long before social networking existed on the web – almost before the web itself existed, in fact – a monkey in Italy made a wholly unexpected contribution to our future under-standing of the phenomenon of empathy. The monkey, which was part of an experiment in a neuroscience lab at the University of Parma, was watching a research assistant eat an ice cream cone. Because the scientists were trying to map the part of monkey brains involved in rehearsing things, the animal had needles in its head – needles so thin they had been implanted in individual neurons. As the lab assistant lifted the cone to his lips, one of the researchers noticed a particular neuron lighting up in the monkey’s brain – the same neuron that would have lit up if the monkey itself had made such a motion. The scientists tried putting a piece of food on a table, taking it off the table, taking it from another researcher’s hand, each time with the identical result: the same neurons that fired when the monkey did something also fired when the monkey watched a person doing it.

Mirroring mechanisms

The scientists at Parma had stumbled across what’s come to be known as "mirror neurons" – cells that mirror the experience of cells in other brains, almost as if the observer and the observed were one. Subsequent research has revealed the same phenomenon in humans. A study at University of California, Los Angeles, used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to show that the area of the brain that’s activated when people watch someone else move a finger is also activated when they move their own finger. Researchers at Washington University in St Louis found the same correlation when they conducted fMRI scans of people reading stories from a book about a day in the life of a schoolboy.