Anne's mind may be messed up, but French playwright Florian Zeller certainly knows how to mess with the audience's wits in this play which, like the superb The Father, offers a series of repeated scenes played and rewritten slightly differently, forcing you to question everything you see and the very nature of reality.
There's a quartet of seducers, repeated scenes of strangers breaking in on a couple in bed, and a variety of men who regret what they haven't accomplished — not just the architect but also Allen's opera director, a man whose avant-garde productions were "ahead of their time" (i.e., failures).
A number of studies have shown that anterior hippocampus responds more strongly to novel than repeated scenes.
fMRI data were collected during a target detection task: Participants monitored a series of trial-unique novel and familiar scene images to detect a repeating target scene.
Subjects were tested twice; once while watching a neutral video (nature scenes) and once while watching a video of cocaine-cues (repeating scenes of people taking cocaine).
Subjects were tested on four different days each under a different condition; twice while watching a neutral video (nature scenes), once with placebo and once with MP (20 mg po), and twice while watching a video of cocaine-cues (repeating scenes of people taking cocaine), once with placebo and once with MP.
Opposite these is an English quilt printed with repeating scenes of encounters between Captain Cook and indigenous inhabitants of the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii), including his killing by local residents.
Furthermore, if memory encoding were responsible for activation of posterior hippocampus, one might expect that perceiving a repeated or familiar scene would not engage posterior hippocampus, as there would be nothing new to encode.
The picture, taken by an uncle, captures a scene repeated around the city, as desperate parents look for safe places from airstrikes and the shrapnel they unleash.
