Zombies

Interesting article in Psychology Today about zombies and why they fall in the uncanny valley realm (though he doesn't use that term).

Pattern Recognition. That guy is staggering, so perhaps he is drunk. But wait! That kid is also staggering, and kids don't get drunk. And that woman is staggering; when was the last time I saw three staggerers at the same time?  Things are not fitting into my usual patterns. I do not recognize this pattern, and I am therefore forced to switch off automatic and to perilously fly manually. Most of the time we're flying by instrument, but not now. Now, we need to look around.

...

And fear sprouts from the depths of your brain, your primitive cortex freaking the hell out and your frontal cortex madly searching the hippocampus for anything even remotely familiar. 

And this is where you experience horror.

Horror is the initially familiar becoming increasingly unfamiliar.  And the easier it is to question what you're seeing, the less familiar it is by definition, and the more familiar it was at first.

You can read the whole thing here.

the uncanny valley response

http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/uncanny_valley/

from the article:
"Disturbing experiences that feel both familiar and strange are instances of the “uncanny,” an intuitive concept, yet one that has defied simple explanation for more than a century. Interest in the particular occurrences of the uncanny, in which humans are bothered by interaction with human-like models, began as a psychological curiosity. But as our ability to design artificial life has increased—along with our dependence on it—getting to the heart of why people respond negatively to realistic models of themselves has taken on a new importance. Attempts to understand the origins of this reaction, known since the 1970s as the “uncanny valley response,” have drawn on everything from repressed fears of castration to an evolutionary mechanism for mate selection, but there has been little empirical evidence to assess the validity of these ideas."

The Uncanny

While looking up quotes about "the uncanny valley" for the press release, I found this essay by Freud on The Uncanny and thought it would complement our dream material. Read it here: http://people.emich.edu/acoykenda/uncanny1.htm

Playing in the Uncanny Valley

I heard a little story on NPR last Friday about the "uncanny valley". More on that in a second, but it made me realize that we're starting to play with the uncanny a lot in rehearsal. Here's a bit from wikipedia on the theory of the uncanny...

The Uncanny (Ger. Das Unheimliche -- literally, "un-home-ly") is a Freudian concept of an instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange.

Because the uncanny is familiar, yet strange, it often creates cognitive dissonance within the experiencing subject due to the paradoxical nature of being attracted to, yet repulsed by an object at the same time. This cognitive dissonance often leads to an outright rejection of the object, as one would rather reject than rationalize.

The uncanny valley is a robotics theory that says that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. There's a certain point around 96% human-like that freaks people out. See the chart below. Is this something we can play with?