The Diving Bell And The Butterfly
2015

Coral Gables Art Cinema Coral Gables, FL

with

Dr. Lucina Uddin

Assistant Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychology, University of Miami

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly— How the Brain Creates the Mind

A discussion of the neurology of Locked-In Syndrome as well as how the brain creates the mind.

Coral Gables Art Cinema Coral Gables, FL

Film Synopsis

The true story of Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby who suffers a stroke and has to live with an almost totally paralyzed body; only his left eye isn't paralyzed.

Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), editor-in-chief of French fashion magazine Elle, has a devastating stroke at age 43. The damage to his brain stem results in locked-in syndrome, with which he is almost completely paralyzed and only able to communicate by blinking an eye. Bauby painstakingly dictates his memoir via the only means of expression left to him. Though trapped in his body, Bauby is still able to escape his "diving bell" by letting his imagination take flight like a butterfly. Artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel won the Best Director award at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival for this fiercely beautiful, quietly moving adaptation of Jean-Dominique Bauby's remarkable memoir.

About the Speaker

Dr. Lucina Uddin is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Miami. She is interested broadly in the relationship between brain connectivity and cognition in typical and atypical development. Within a cognitive neuroscience framework, her research combines functional connectivity analyses of resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data and structural connectivity analyses of diffusion tensor imaging data to examine the organization of large-scale brain networks supporting attention and social cognition. Her current projects focus on understanding dynamic network interactions underlying social information processing in neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism.