Inside Out: A Lesson in Psychology

If the animation, Inside Out was shown to us by our college professor in Psychology 101, perhaps I would have had a stronger grasp and a clear, albeit animated (pun intended) picture of the inner workings of the brain instead of just seeing it as a white mass with the vision, tastes, memory, etc. parts.

The 2015 Pixar movie takes a daring leap by giving life to the universal emotions of joy, sadness, disgust, fear, and anger and setting it in where else, but the brain. It’s a rather risky move from Pixar’s usual personifying of animals, toys, and machines. But it has been a well-calculated move, as proven by its $90.4 million earnings at the domestic box office and $132 million in global sales. With an 11 year-old girl as its main human character trying to adjust in a new home and school and with her emotions playing such a big role in this change, we get another coming-of-age family movie… and a lesson in psychology.

The way the mind works has been cleverly engineered in this movie. Let’s take a look at Riley’s head. So we have the five emotions namely, Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger. They stay in the Headquarters where they have the upper hand of deciding on Riley’s responses for whatever stimulus is presented (for example: Dad feeds Riley broccoli, Disgust decides it’s yucky, so Riley refuses to eat it). Every experience is preserved in a ball of memory, the color of which depends on the emotion Riley felt; gold for joy, blue for sadness, green for disgust, grey for fear, and red for anger. These balls get released to the long-term memory outside the Headquarters. Then, we have the five core memories. They are the most important ones because they power the islands that represent Riley’s personality; the Goofball Island, the Hockey Island, the Friendship Island, the Honesty Island, and the Family Island. All core memories are of the color of joy, until Sadness touched one of it in an accident that brought her and Joy into the deeper recesses of Riley’s brain. As Joy and Sadness took the trek back to the headquarters, they encountered adventures that gave us some psychological and neuroscientific terms set in laymen’s cartoon.

When all five core memories were vacuumed out of the headquarters together with Joy and Sadness, all of Riley’s personality islands stopped working. From here, we could see Riley becoming rebellious as Fear, Disgust, and Anger conflict on how to best respond in their new environment without Joy to lead them. Riley’s numb-like responses gave us a glimpse of what goes on in the brain when we have that little thing called depression.

It’s interesting how the movie tried to simplify emotions and the processes of the brain by animating them. Long term memory is an endless swarm of corridors and shelves.  Mind workers throw unnecessary memories in the dump like phone numbers, names of presidents, and years of piano lessons. There were instances in the plot when they tried to take things too literally like the train of thought and the dream productions. That might seem like a misleading concept to young viewers, but it’s better than making them bored to death with too technical terms.

More than the emotions, there is Riley herself who a lot of young children can relate to. The movie with the aid of its apt musical sequence makes you understand that in life, sadness is inevitable and we have to accept, embrace it even, in order to appreciate more what it means to be happy.

Now, that’s not only just a lesson in psychology, but also a lesson in life.