Once upon a time ... a cinematic history of memory

For over 100 years, Hollywood has supplied cinemas around the world with their most popular films. This talk will explore this phenomenal success story and the issues arising from it. How did Hollywood outpace other film industries around the world? Why do many audiences outside the United States prefer American films to their own country’s films? To what extent do Hollywood films promote American culture and ideology to foreign audiences. And where might we find pockets of resistance to the seemingly all-powerful, all-conquering Hollywood?

As humans, how does memory of our past experiences affect our future choices? Are there psychological biases which might cause us to behave less rationally than we think? Can we make mathematical predictions about such situations? And what does all this have to do with theoretical physics research into “non-Markovian statistical mechanics”? In this talk, I will give a light-hearted approach to such questions starting from the statistical mechanics of random walkers and progressing (via discussion of colonoscopies!) to simple decision-making models of behavioural economics.