The book. What happens in the brains of actors when they perform? From this simple question, Anouk Grinberg makes the material of a rich reflection on the illusion, such as our contemporaries manufacture it. Starting from a discussion with the neurologist Lionel Naccache, she leads the investigation in her book Inside the minds of actors (Odile Jacob, 2021). “Today, neuroscience offers us fantastic knowledge regarding what is going on inside us: nothing is as we think”, she announces. Because to play the comedy, it is to summon in oneself the whole of humanity. “By lying very well, actors carry life, and that fascinates me, she explains. We use artifice to overthrow artifice, with appearances, we go through appearances. »
The book, which progresses through a set of questions and answers alternating the points of view of actors and neurologists, psychiatrists and ethologists, explores this paradox. Anouk Grinberg gleans elements over the pages that she assembles to dismantle received ideas and get as close as possible to a fragmented knowledge of what we are. « To hear it [une pièce], it is a question of silencing in oneself all superiority, all critical sense and of abandoning oneself, of losing oneself in the diversion it brings and the happiness it contains”, thus wrote the actor and director Louis Jouvet.
The role of mirror neurons
To explain the empathy mobilized in this work of impregnation, the primatologist and ethologist Franz de Waal refers to mirror neurons. “Since mirror neurons do not distinguish between our behavior and that of others, they allow one organism to slip into the shoes of another. These neurons merge individuals at the bodily level (…). Humans don’t decide to be empathetic; they are, that’s all. » Neurosciences also make it possible to better understand how the fictions played by the actors are constructed. “Our brain only knows life through the representation we have of it, the fictions it tells itself. These voices which speak in us, which we do not always listen to, but which nevertheless reign over our mental life, connect us all to the world, but also distance us from it. testifies Lionel Naccache.
We can regret redundancies which sometimes lose the reader, but the courage with which Anouk Grinberg does not hesitate to lay himself bare to enrich his reflection is edifying. “We believe ourselves to be rational and we are very irrational. All our thoughts are primarily emotions that nest so low in us that we are almost the last informed. We are driven by forces beyond us,” does she understand. The book ends with a response to Diderot who in his Paradox regarding the actor believed to know that “Extreme sensitivity makes mediocre actors”. “The raw material that we handle is obviously our sensitivity. (…) We blow on our emotions like on embers and then we fight them. (…) In this, it is true, we are not fooled by ourselves. The fight for and once morest emotion takes place between flesh and head. she corrects, at the end of her investigation.
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