MEDIA EFFECTS ON DEPRESSIVE SUBJECTS For communication based on neuroethics

A long time ago we looked at a tree. We heard the wind passing through its branches, we felt the different textures in the touch of it, and we smelled the wood’s aroma. We looked at the tonalities, the colors of leaves changing with the moving sun, its shade sliding into different places.

Today we don’t look at the tree anymore, but to an image of it. Through analogical or digital filters, now the tree is inside our house confined in a box. If we try to touch it we feel the cold glass of a TV set. The wind’s sound arrives stereo, and we can increase or decrease it. Its aroma will be that of the moment, perhaps of an environment deodorant, perhaps of the kitchen’s food. We will choose the intensity of colors from the remote control.

We have become small gods playing with nature. We don’t see, hear or feel reality any more, but an image of it.

PHASES AND CONSTRUCTION FOR THE RESEARCH

We start from the premise that to understand the effects of image, sounds and smells in the human being, we have to build parallel horizontal time-lines divided in generations, to be analyzed vertically:

a) The construction of communication filters from pre history up to our days

b) The use of pharmacology, from herbal to actual chemistry, food, drinks and drug use, the discoveries of medicine

c) The social behavior

The construction of these time-lines will allow us to verify the effect and the cause of various media types, their content, colors, forms, shapes and sounds, so that we can build a new integrated communication with science, based on objective ethics and not more subjective ones.

Ex: A form of filter, the journalism. [Part of a)]

Did hieroglyphs scribes, journalists of an era, told us through their points of view facts of life or their imaginary view of it? We will never know using old analytical tools. Only through the analysis of their drown symbols left by them we can deduce the solidity of content. ———–

Research proposal to the Center of Neuroscience - University of Ferrara. Proponent: Paola Victorelli e-mail: alienista@yahoo.com © Copyright 2002 - Instituto Magna Mater – Paola Victorelli

Centro di neuroscienze di Ferrara