Alice In Wonderland Review

Somehow i have managed to find a temporary social life within the pile of all my work and was able to escape for a weekend to go watch a movie. I recently watched the new Alice in Wonderland from Tim Burton and have decided to post a little review about it. This review does contain spoilers though so anyone does not want to read it should leave now, otherwise please check it out below the break.

*SPOILER WARNING*

 

 

Alice in Wonderland is a unique and brilliant tale of a girl in a strange place…again. In this story director Tim Burton is taking Alice, now 19 years old, back to Wonderland or as he calls it Underland (apparently Alice misheard the name the first time she was there). In this telling Alice Kingsleigh (Mia Wasikowska) had vague dreams of her last trip to Underland, but she does not think of it as something the really happened until she fall once again down the rabbit hole and into the wondrous land of impossible things. She encounters many old friends including The Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) who help her of her true destiny, to sleigh the Jabberwocky and end the Red Queens reign.

This story is not a sequel to the Lewis Carroll novels, nor is it a retelling of the original stories. It is in fact an extension onto the Carroll stories. Burton creates a world where you can feel the emotions of the characters and adds a little more depth to the inhabitants of this world. This movie was an interesting experience of subtle undertones found in the original, and awe inspiring animations. The production quality is superb using a unique blend of colors and the computer animations of both the animals and the Red Queen adds to the wonder of Alice in Wonderland.

Caught in a lie… by your brain

Polygraphs move over, it’s been a good 100 years but its time for a new tool now. The future of lie detectors may very well be found in the brain, well the reading of the brain to be precise. Functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI) is thought to be able to tell if a person is lying.

In short:

“fMRI scanners detect variations in the magnetic properties of blood as oxygen levels change in response to neural activity. The more a section of the brain works, the more oxygen it demands and the brighter it glows on the scan.” It is believed that when a person is lying certain parts of the brain are working (lighting up) in a particular pattern, termed as a “deceit pattern”.

Recently reported in Popular Science magazine, two companies are working on Lie Detecting MRIs. Thanks to the increasing admission of MRI evidence in court cases, there is now an opening for MRI lie detector evidence to be used in courts as well.

It should be noted that there is no such things as a true lie detector. The one that the majority of the public has come to know of is called a polygraph, which measures physical responses like blood pressure and pulse during questioning. There is much debate to this day about the credibility of the polygraph as a lie detector since the factors that cause it to produce results consistent to lying, can also be achieved from a person who is nervous or stressed during the interrogation.

I personally believe that fMRI lie detectors are no better or more accurate then the current 100-year-old polygraph. While fMRI machines are useful tools in the medical field, they are by no means perfect. In an article published by WIRED magazine. It was found that a dead salmon being used in testing an fMRI at Dartmouth apparently showed results of having brain activity.

Photo from WIRED magazine

This shows that MRI results used for the sake of mapping “deceit patterns” in a brain may not be as accurate as one would hope when possibly passing a life sentence or death penalty. Another problem found with using a fMRI result for lie detecting purposes is that no two brains are alike, and the variations in brains makes it difficult to establish a base line to compare the subjects brain scans too. While I am in no way saying that fMRI results are worthless and should not be used, I am just saying they are not fool proof enough to be used as lie detector evidence in a court of law.