https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1d5b/0ad40875c4f25bb4361a876324e434ecf2ed.pdf

I have an unusual propensity to unconsciously emulate characters in films whose behavioral traits I find compelling. This phenomenon has fascinated me for many years, partly because I have never heard others discussing it.

It’s entirely unconscious, in that I have no intention to do so, it simply seems to ‘happen to me’. The phenomenon is ordinarily short-lived, and most intense in the first 30 minutes after exposure. Two relatively recent experiences of this found me emulating the thinking and body language (and some speech affects) of Raymond Reddington (The Blacklist), and some of the speech affects and facial expressions of the (female) android from Dark Matter (whose childlike attempts to understand herself and human relationships were intriguing to me).

Last night, while searching the internet for evidence of a book that doesn’t exist (the book itself is a fictional object in an episode of The Blacklist), serendipity entered the situation when I came across an article whose relevance struck me in a profound way (see link below).

A few days prior, I read an anecdotal story about the poet Robert Desnos who was interred in concentration camps where he eventually perished. The story is often referred to in the context of the power of our imagination… and yet I think there’s something more to it.

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“I am thinking of a story I heard a few years ago from my friend Odette, a writer and a survivor of the holocaust. Along with many others who crowd the bed of a large truck, she tells me, the surrealist poet Robert Desnos is being taken away from the barracks of the concentration camp where he has been held prisoner. Leaving the barracks, the mood is somber; everyone knows the truck is headed for the gas chambers. And when the truck arrives no one can speak at all; even the guards fall silent. But this silence is soon interrupted by an energetic man, who jumps into the line and grabs one of the condemned. Improbable as it is, Odette told me, Desnos reads the man’s palm.

Oh, he says, I see you have a very long lifeline. And you are going to have three children. He is exuberant. And his excitement is contagious. First one man, then another, offers up his hand, and the prediction is for longevity, more children, abundant joy.

As Desnos reads more palms, not only does the mood of the prisoners change but that of the guards too. How can one explain it? Perhaps the element of surprise has planted a shadow of doubt in their minds. If hey told themselves these deaths were inevitable, this no longer seems inarguable. They are in any case so disoriented by this sudden change of mood among those they are about to kill that they are unable to go through with the executions. So all the men, along with Desnos, are packed back onto the truck and taken back to the barracks. Desnos has saved his own life and the lives of others by using his imagination.”

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These noticings are part of what inspire me to discount the idea of ‘an individual’, a myth that is of relatively recent socio-cultural origin, and whose foundations I find deeply conflicted with my experience of human beings as creatures who profoundly desire to ‘belong’ to small, tightly-knit groups (think tribes, bands, or sports teams).

I think of us, like dolphins or apes, as ‘pod animals’; creatures whose natures are deeply informed by this desire and its potentials to ‘surpass the possibilities of our individuality’ by acquiring meaningful… or even ‘superhuman’ … identities and roles in groups.

I have often thought of ‘shows’ or films as a representation of dreaming, and, particularly, our lost yet present within us capacity for ‘group dreaming’, but this article sheds light on another facet of this behavior… which is that we can experience the ‘contagion’ of personalities, emotions and motivations… by being exposed to media that represents these to us.

While the article suggests, primarily, the transfer of mood, my own experience leads me to believe that a complex constellation of statuses can be thus transferred … including those of role, character, »gender, skill, affects, gesture, body language and motivation.

Article: Mood Contagion: The Automatic Transfer of Mood Between Persons