The BBC reports that a recent poll of 60 eminent world scientists have voted Ridley Scott's Blade Runner the best science fiction film to date.

The 1982 movie which takes place in 2019 is loosely based on the Philip K. Dick short story Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and is set in a dystopian futuristic vision of Los Angeles.

Chris Frith of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College, London, explains that film won for two reasons: it's discussion of how to tell a human from a machine and the empathy test used by the movie's policemen "is not far away from the sort of thing that cognitive neuroscientists are actually doing today," he said.

I have to agree on this one. In our emerging neurosociety, our survival depends on understanding empathy.

The arts have always been at the cutting edge of cultural consciousness. The recent rise of neurotechnology related themes in movies highlights the increasing public interest and fascination with neuroculture issues.

In addition to the recent thriller Paycheck starring Ben Affleck and the soon to be released romantic comedy Eternal Sunshine in the Spotless Mind starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, a third movie is due out in July that explores the personal and societal implications of memory erasing technologies.

The Final Cut, starring Robin Williams and Mira Sorvino, has William's playing the role of a professional "cutter", someone who edits people’s life-videos after their death for a memorial-service presentation. As Bonn film critic, Lee Marshall describes, William's job is to "respect the living", not the dead.

The ethical implications of emerging neurotechnology will be profound. It is for this reason that I urge all of you who have relationships with any individuals involved in these movies to contact me directly. I have excellent relationships with the leading neuroethicists who are working today to ensure neurotechnology is used for the betterment of humanity tomorrow.

DONATIONS should be directed to the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics (CCLE's achievements to date) and the Center for Bioethics at Stanford University where Judy Illes currently resides.

Note on the importance of funding neuroethics this year: In an election year, most wealthy individual donors decrease their donations towards non-political groups. Moreover, neuroethics is a cutting edge discipline that few profoundly understand.

Please get us in contact with the actors and producers of these films. They are among the few who have thought deeply about the philosophical and societal implications of emerging neurotechnology, while also having the money to donate to the groups who have dedicated their lives to neuropolicy issues.

I challenge the thousand of you who read Brain Waves each day to use your social networks for this purpose. Thank you.

Look out this fall for "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," a new movie directed by Michel Gondry and written with Charlie Kaufman -- Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002), Adaptation. (2002), Being John Malkovich (1999).

Plot Summary: Joel (Jim Carrey) is stunned to discover that his girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet) has had her memories of their tumultuous relationship erased. Out of desperation, he contracts the inventor of the process, Dr. Howard Mierzwaik (Tom Wilkinson), to have Clementine removed from his own memory. But as Joel's memories progressively disappear, he begins to rediscover their earlier passion. From deep within the recesses of his brain, Joel attempts to escape the procedure. As Dr. Mierzwiak and his crew (Kristen Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood) chase him through the maze of his memories, it's clear that Joel just can't get her out of his head.

It will be interesting to see the public reaction around the "right to erase memories," as this romantic comedy wins the hearts and minds of the movie going public. Sometimes art does imitate life.

Other:  Arnold Kling on Milton Friedman's two most important societal issues.  I couldn't agree more with "da men". 

By Pat Kane

In my investigations into the sources for a possible ""play ethic", I've found a schema from the Pennsylvanian educational psychologist Brian Sutton-Smith to be outstandingly productive. The blurb from his 1997 book, The Ambiguity of Play, sets out clearly his relevance to a neurosocial agenda:

Sutton-Smith focuses on play theories rooted in seven distinct "rhetorics"--the ancient discourses of Fate, Power, Communal Identity, and Frivolity and the modern discourses of Progress, the Imaginary, and the Self...This work reveals more distinctions and disjunctions than affinities, with one striking exception: however different their descriptions and interpretations of play, each rhetoric reveals a quirkiness, redundancy, and flexibility. In light of this, Sutton-Smith suggests that play might provide a model of the variability that allows for "natural" selection. As a form of mental feedback, play might nullify the rigidity that sets in after successful adaption, thus reinforcing animal and human variability.

I've discovered that the "seven rhetorics" are effective mapping tools for contemporary social complexity, in the affluent societies at least. Indeed, much of what we used to regard as productive "work" is now better understood within these rhetorics of play.

Certainly, the Modern discourses of play-as-progress (child education and nuturance), play-as-imagination (media, entertainment and interactivity), and play-as-selfhood (therapy, self-motivation, lifestyle mobility) capture much that we recognise in our everyday lives - as generally happy producers, consumers and pro-sumers. But it's the endurance of the darker, more Ancient discourses that fascinates me just as much - and which I think points to the deep location of play in our species-being, at the kind of adaptive level that Sutton-Smith refers to.

Play-as-power? Note the appearance of play and gaming metaphors in the average page of political and world reportage (it's a great exercise for a week's reading) . Play-as-communal identity? From Friends to football hooligans, Big Brother to Matrix heads, we are clearly playing our way to new notions of social cohesion, both positive and negative.

Play-as-sheer-subversion? Again, from Jackass and the Office (or Dilbert in the US) , to the goofy titles of computer viruses, the antic and satiric energies of play are always there to be tapped into, as a low-level form of resistance to the administered life. My favourite recent example of play-as-fate-and-chance comes from the pentitent mathematician John Allen Paulos, who describes his fall into "cognitive delusion" last year, as he chased his WorldCom stocks up and down the markets, with disastrous personal consequences.

As Gerda Smith notes, the risk player (whether a day-trader or a casino high-roller) is expressing a very ancient and transhistorical human belief: that the randomness of existence (our oldest angst) can be conquered. Paulos wryly recovers his mathematical rigour, and demonstrates through some simple proofs just how theological and spiritual this belief is.

Yet his fall proves, at the very least, that the "adaptive potentiation" (Sutton-Smith) of play - flexible, quirky and excessive - is no respecter of professional status. When we're "in play and at play", thank Proteus, the game is always on - and we can't always predict which form of play will emerge as our most effective mode of agency.

The question is: how do we become more capacious and tensile players, ready for this permanent openness and opportunity? What kind of mind could "live creatively" with the seven rhetorics, taking pleasure and productivity out of their affinities and disaffinities, ambiguities and paradoxes? Might well-fashioned "emoticeuticals" - built to enhance play's adaptive legacies in the brain - help us to get there? And now, we cut to a secret neuro-lab in Happy Valley...

All comments welcome.