Cognitive Character Engagement and the Extended Mind in Bahram Tavakkoli’s Wandering in the Fog

The present study has a cognitive approach to empathy and character engagement in cinema. In discussing how through empathy and engagement with real and fictional characters, we extend our minds and enhance our cognitive abilities, the present paper studies Bahram Tavakkoli’s Wandering in the Fog (2010), to show how Andy Clark and David Chalmers’s idea of the extended mind as joined with Murray Smith’s tripartite model of cognitive character engagement is at work, both in real life and in film, about how we align with and empathize with other people and things in the world and extend our minds. Tavakkoli’s film is thus analyzed cognitively to describe how we try to extend ourselves by engaging with our environments and other agents, real or fictional. Attempts will therefore be made to discover by studying this film as a miniature model to describe the way extended cognition can build through active externalism.