Primates // Tessa Coates

A stack of hefty hardback books wobbles next to the microphone throughout Tessa Coates's stand-up show. An aged academic tome sharing the title Primates is there, but also Girl's Own Adventures and the Famous Five - and is that a Harry Potter towards the bottom of the pile? Yes it is, and despite the initial suspicion that these books have been chosen solely for their looks, it turns out that they are all pertinent to the show.

Coates begins by thanking the audience profusely for coming, establishing her persona as an earnest, prudish and perhaps rather posh anthropology graduate who is going to share with us her passion for the study of humans, in particular the study of penises. But she adopts an alternative persona - a cool American - in order to express this as 'I love dick'. And she plays another character, her former lecturer, to introduce the subject. With a background in sketch comedy, Coates is a natural at putting on funny characters, but there is surely an anthropological angle to why it is easier to say certain things sincerely only when playing at being someone else.

Anthropology is the frame for the show. While we learn the reason for the human penis having the shape it does and why some sperm have been called 'kamikaze' by scientists, the content is mostly observational comedy about sex, dating and relationships. Perhaps that is a large part of anthropology, too. But if we understand modern human behaviour as simply the results of past evolutionary pressure and biology, does that reduce our experience of life and love? Like scientists from other disciplines (such as neuroscientist Anil Seth), Coates grapples with this dilemma, and earnestly concludes - in the character of the professor - that while life is essentially meaningless, we are all special.

- Michael Regnier

 

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Primates - Tessa Coates

Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That? - Huffington Post

Nothing to Be Afraid Of (Anil K. Seth) - Granta 

The Meaning of Life and the Search for Happiness - Popular Social Science (2013) 

Debating Self, Identity, and Culture in Anthropology - Current Anthropology (1999)

Is the Presented Self Sincere? Goffman, Impression Management and the Postmodern Self - Theory, Culture and Society (1992) 

BRAIN MATTER(S) // Fen'Harel Theatre

Are you right-brained or left-brained? The two performers in the physical theatre production Brain Matter(s) take on the roles of one person’s interconnected brain as they struggle together to negotiate the challenges of life.

The idea that our brains' hemispheres take separate responsibility for emotion and rationality, confidence and doubt, anger and self-control, is one that brain-training gadgets and airport self-help books would love us to buy into. Brain Matter(s) deftly plays on these notions in the actors’ entertaining dialogue and choreography. The two halves are sometimes fitted snugly together as one, but at other times tumble, balance and fight, like an angel and devil warring for control of the one body.

There is some scientific basis to the belief that the two halves of the brain have different specialist functions. It first gained traction in the 19th century when French neurologists Marc Dax and Paul Broca realised that patients who had lost the ability to speak had all sustained damage to the left-hand side of their brain.

Broca’s area is still the name for the functional region in the brain’s left frontal lobe relating to speech production – although it’s sometimes found in the right frontal lobe of left-handed people, just to confuse anyone hoping for a clear-cut two-sided arrangement.

But this finding hints at the truly interesting aspect of brain hemispheres, and the focus of current neuroscience. Do the two halves process information differently? And how do they work together to produce all the complexities of human ability and behaviour? 

The staging of Brain Matters allows plenty of contemporary thinking about such issues. The female performer takes the more rational, ambitious persona, while the male performer is emotional and impulsive.

Another modern notion in neuroscience is that the specialism in our hemispheres gives us more ability to multitask. This production draws on all the performers’ skills to bring us new thinking on the old left-brain right-brain divide.

- RM

Brain Matter(s) ran at Venue 13 until August 27th - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/brain-matter-s 

The myth of left and right brains: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-myths/201206/why-the-left-brain-right-brain-myth-will-probably-never-die

Marc Dax and Paul Broca and the discovery of the speech area of the brain: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17056493

Broca’s specialist language area explained: http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/d/d_10/d_10_cr/d_10_cr_lan/d_10_cr_lan.html

The advantages of having lateral speciality in your brain - multitasking: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1810119/

SHIMMER SHATTER // Sofie Hagen

Sofie Hagen’s show, Shimmer Shatter, busts a few myths about introversion. It clearly indicates that being an introvert does not mean you are cold and closed-off. It doesn’t mean you won’t stand up and be very funny in front of an audience. And it doesn’t mean you are unable to tell people about the strangest and most personal aspects of your life, like the time you married a plank of wood and invited your school friends around as witnesses.   

What is true, though, is that inside an introvert’s brain particular things are happening. The neurotransmitter dopamine is to blame. It makes us all, whatever our personality, more talkative, alert and motivated to take a risk.  

But while extroverts love the thrill of chasing the release of more and more dopamine, for an introvert the joy of dopamine more quickly turns to overstimulation. In fact, as Dr Marti Olsen Laney has recently written, introverts favour the reward of a different neurotransmitter, acetylcholine. Very differently to dopamine, this chemical leads us to turn inwards, to reflect and focus, preferably somewhere calm.  

As an introvert, Sofie Hagen reveals that she favours spending periods of time at parties hidden away in the toilets. She says walls are good because they are a place where a person is not.  

Yet she is still a great people person, and the combination of comedy and honesty in her show has clearly struck a real chord with the audience.

At the moment it feels like introversion is getting all the attention it may never have wanted. Books like Quiet by Susan Cain, and her TED talk, present the introvert/extrovert divide as the most fundamental dimension of personality, with at least a third of people on the introverted side. 

Maybe the time of the introvert has come. With the help of high profile people like Sofie Hagen, perhaps introverts will get their time to speak – if the extroverts of the world can just stop talking for a moment. 

- Rebecca Mileham

Shimmer Shatter ran at Liquid Room Annexe until August 28th - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/sofie-hagen-shimmer-shatter

Why extroverts and introverts are different: http://www.quietrev.com/why-introverts-and-extroverts-are-different-the-science/

BBC article on what makes someone an extrovert: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130717-what-makes-someone-an-extrovert

Dr Marti Olsen Laney’s book: https://www.amazon.com/The-Introvert-Advantage-People-Extrovert/dp/0761123695/?tag=quietrevol-20

Susan Cain’s TED talk The Power of Introverts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0KYU2j0TM4