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Showing posts from February, 2022

Awakenings - Movie Review

This review was part of an assignment I had to submit in my Basic Neuroscience course at grad school, which I just felt like posting just so. "Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope" is what struck me as I was watching the movie Awakenings. When Dr. Malcolm Sayer (Robin Williams), a researcher by heart and mind, joins a chronic illness hospital in the summer of 1969, despair is his disposition. Despair on being asked to treat patients at limited facilities, with no conviction of them getting better. Through this despair arises hope when he meets Lucy - an old woman who had been seemingly ‘frozen’ for the last 40 years, in spite of which could catch a ball tossed at her perfectly well. With meticulous, yet wild skills of experimentation, observation, and interpretation, Sayer hypothesised that Lucy and several other patients in the hospital are actually suffering from a severe form of Parkinsonism. He proposes that the patient's motor impulses cancel each other ...