The Blackberry Walk

Imitation is the deepest function of the brain. Before speech and storytelling, imitation and play were only ways to pass down information about the world from parent to child. You can envisage a trinity of information transferal techniques - storytelling, play, and imitation. In the modern times, storytelling has certainly come to dominate. At school, much of the learning which is done, even in maths and sciences, is story based. When you are told how a plant respires, or how the force of gravity operates, you are, in effect, being told an exceptionally abstract story. However, so much is learnt not from books, but rather from imitation and play. How did you learn how to speak in the first place? How to act around strangers? How to walk, to learn, to socialise... far more, upon reflection, is learnt through play and imitation rather than by simply hitting the books. As Bakemono no Ko points out in the training montage scene where the boy begins to understand how to learn from his master, the monk man likens it to imprinting in ducks. The first being a duck sees when they hatch is their mother, whether they're duck, human, or whatever else. People operate similarly. A young boy sees their mother or father, imprints (say, an archetype) upon them and begins to imitate them, to become like them. In a sense, they sync. Yet every syncing is a two-way street. Bakemono no Ko shows this - just as the boy begins to imitate his master, so too does his master change to match his student. Such a relationship is symbiotic, in a sense, molding both master and student to one another, forming a positive growth spiral. But the emphasis on imitative learning isn't to dismiss story-based learning. The student manages to flit back into Tokyo, where he develops a love for reading and academics. The film, therefore, presents the world of the beasts, where imitative learning without explanations - a more primal way of understanding the world - is paramount, and contrasts it to modern Tokyo where to succeed you must study, using a more storytelling-based understanding of the world. Which one is best? The climax of the show resolves that conundrum - a balance of the two, of course. Now onto the more spooky portion of the article. The film brings out, subtly, the para-psychological element to imitation. During the student's training via imitation, all of a sudden the imitation clicks. He begins to understand rather than just copy. More so, he begins to imitate without looking at what his master is doing, knowing exactly what he would do. At first, this may sound like a beautiful narrative device - which it is - but the phenomenon is, spookily enough, real. The Opportunity rover was sent to Mars in 2004 to gather information about the surface of Mars, eventually discovering there to be water on Mars against all the odds. One of the major difficulties the project faced was actually communicating with the rover. Around eight minutes, it took, to send a communication by satellite to the rover to tell it to move out of the way. And, given this multi-billion dollar piece of kit is roaming the rocky hills of the red planet, you'd want to make sure that the rover doesn't crash. In short, they used imitation to solve the issue. They had pros, much like shamans, pretend to be the Mars Rover to understand how it thinks. One such operator explains what its like to be a Mars rover, saying:

So that's [points to her cell phone on the desk] close-up rock, and then I know that there’s a disconnect [raises hands to either side of her face ] between left and right eyes [on the Rover]. So I have to move my head like this [tilts her head down, rotates at the waist, tilting right hand higher than left], and I have my left eye here [pauses], and then this [swivels to the opposite side, keeping head down, with left hand higher than right] is my view from the right eye. My body by the way is always the Rover, so right here [touches chest] is the front of the Rover, my magnets are right here [touches base of her neck], and my shoulders [touches shoulders] are the front of the solar panels and that's [leans forward, splays arms out behind to either side at 45 degrees] the rest of it. So I have all kinds of things [i.e. antennae] sticking up over here [gestures to back], um [laughs]. But when I'm taking a picture of something in the atmosphere then it helps me to kind of look up [looks up and sits up straighter ], being the Rover, and this is the front of me [touches chest] and then I put my head up [puts head up, looks back and forth ] wherever, to whichever vector I'm looking at ...

But then it becomes somewhat spookier. Just as in Bakemono no Ko, where the student imitates without looking, similar syncronistic effects occur between researcher and rover:

I was working in the garden one day and all of a sudden, I don't know what's going on with my right wrist, I cannot move it - out of nowhere! I get here [to the planning meeting], and Spirit has, its right front wheel is stuck! Things like that, you know? ... I am totally connected to [Spirit]!

Spirit is, by the way, the other rover sent with Opportunity. Another researcher tells a similar story:

Interestingly, I screwed up my shoulder ... and needed surgery on it right about the time that Opportunity's IDD [arm] started having problems [with a stiff shoulder joint], and I broke my toe right before Spirit's wheel [broke], so I'm just saying, maybe it's kind of sympathetic, I don't know, [laughs] I mean I don't think there's any magic involved or anything but maybe it's some kind of subconscious thing, I don't know.

Whatever the cause, this peculiar effect, as seen in Bakemono no Ko, is a field of fascination for the cognitive scientist to run abound in. There is something deeper to this idea of imitation. From the duck looking for its mother, to the shaman attempting to channel a spirit, there's something distinctly interesting about the phenomenon.