Genre: Documentary
Number of episodes: 5
Year: 2019
Starring: Emma Stone
Description: Ever wonder what’s happening inside your head? From dreaming to anxiety disorders, discover how your brain works with this illuminating series.
Review: In the mini-series with five episodes of an average of twenty minutes, the makers show in scenes how each part of the brain works. Themes like memory, dreams, anxiety, mindfulness and psychedelics are spotlighted. The documentary series originated from a collaboration between Netflix and Vox, an American news and opinion website.
The purpose of memories is to preserve the past. Then why are they so unreliable? That’s the key question in the first episode: Memory. The episode focuses on how memory works. From the opening scene, several recognizable moments in global history are shown: from the moon landing, the knocking down of the Berlin Wall and the death of Princess Diana to 9/ 11.
The episode shows how fragments locked up in people’s brains about where they were and what they did on September 11th 2001, are actually not accurate at all. Our memories are sometimes inaccurate because different parts of our brain merge memories with different pieces of information. A champion of global memory competitions discusses the technique she uses to study, for example, a series of hundred numbers.
The second episode “Dreams”, focuses on whether our dreams have a real meaning, and whether or not they serve a purpose. During our sleep, our emotional brain is active, while the rational brain is switched off. In addition, we only dream a fifth of the time we sleep. It may not be new information for many, but it is brought in an entertaining way.
The first two episodes are the most interesting, but getting deeper into themes like anxiety, mindfulness and Psychedelics is also very interesting.
Emma stone narrates it and she has a very pleasant voice to listen to. And she does enough to enthuse the viewers about the subject and to lead them through each episode. It’s a but dry material, but through personal interviews, studies, graphs, archive footage and hand-drawn cartoons, the series manages to stimulate curiosity about how our brains work. “The Mind, Explained” is a simplistic but clear documentary series.
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