You might think that watching a movie would make it easy to observe how our brains work. Simply connect a few viewers entertainment + write for us to an electroencephalograph or an MRI and observe what happens when they watch a movie.
However, who said it would be simple?
By insisting on narrowly focused hypotheses and predictions within tightly controlled experimental parameters, neuroscientists themselves make it difficult. Movies don’t work that way.
A movie might have car chases, weeping lovers, and adoring dogs—a million different stimuli. These are known as “dynamic natural scenes” by neuroscientists. And given all of these different stimuli, how would you construct a hypothesis or prediction?
However, rather than the laboratory’s artificially constrained stimuli, we want to know how humans process natural scenes. Also, as a movie buff, I’d like to know how our brains process regular feature films, not some experimental film made in a laboratory.
That obstacle has been avoided by one researcher and his team. At the Weizmann Institute in Israel, Uri Hasson and Rafael Malach began working on films together. In 2004, they published one groundbreaking paper in the field.
In Israel, Hasson and Malach abandoned the conventional hypothesis-prediction-experiment-conclusion approach. Instead, they simply had five people lie in an MRI scanner and watch the first 30 minutes of Clint Eastwood-starring spaghetti western The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
They asked instead of making Promo Codes for Papa John’s a hypothesis or a prediction: How much are we able to deduce about the brain activity of one viewer from that of another? They refer to it as “intersubject correlation,” or ISC. In effect, they are measuring millisecond-by-millisecond similarities in the brain activity of moviegoers.
Not surprisingly, they discovered that viewers’ brains behaved similarly in some ways and differently in others. The differences between regions were interesting. The brains of the viewers behaved similarly (about 45% of the neocortex!) in the occipital, temporal, and parietal lobes, which are areas that are involved in primary sensory perception as well as some functions of multimodal complex response. In particular, viewers’ brains behaved similarly (high ISC) in the primary visual areas of the occipital and temporal cortex, the auditory region of the Heschl’s gyrus, the language processing area of the Wernicke’s gyrus, some limbic areas for emotion, the fusiform gyrus for face recognition, and the association cortices that partially integrate primary sensory data.
In conclusion, I would say that the viewers’ brains behaved similarly in terms of sensory processing and simple comprehension of the film’s plot. For instance, the eye movements of the viewers were very similar to one another. This seems like low-level processing to me. This is just a summary of the plot, not a subtle film critique. Additionally, if you teach movies, as I do, you are aware that students and regular viewers frequently struggle to agree on “what happened.”)
In contrast, when it came to more complex aspects of information processing, the viewers’ brains behaved differently (low ISC). They did not share activity in the prefrontal, angular, and supramarginal gyrus areas. These “always failed to demonstrate intersubject coherence.” Our brains combine multiple perceptions in the first two of these polymodal areas to produce a complex perception of the environment as a whole. It’s likely that the viewers’ emotional and intellectual comprehension of what they were seeing was directed by the prefrontal areas.
As a result, the experiment reveals something about the film form: Although viewers experience a common effect from the form, their overall aesthetic experience will vary greatly. “Naturally divides the cortex into a system of areas that manifest an across-subject, stereotypical response to external world stimuli versus regions that are linked to unique, individual variations,” the experimenters concluded.
The paper’s commentator for Science Magazine adds: Perhaps even more significant than Hasson et al. Their observation that large areas of activated cortex could not be predicted from the activity in another person’s brain is one of their findings regarding interbrain correlations. The majority of the prefrontal cortex and a portion of the parietal cortex are among these areas. So, there might be enough brain for you and I to have a unique experience of “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”
2004 in Israel was that. Hasson has since moved on to work at Princeton and the renowned film school at New York University. Jim Jarmusch, Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese, and Spike Lee are graduates.)
Using a variety of films, Hasson and his team have experimented with ISC once more. They had to focus on the brain activity that the viewers shared rather than the much more difficult and possibly impossible task of tracing each viewer’s response. In a Projections article, he summarizes their work: The Summer of 2008 issue of Movies and Mind’s Journal
Moreover, you should be aware of that journal if you are interested in the psychology of movie responses or just movies and psychology. It is edited at the University of Michigan by Ira Konigsberg and publishes articles that use psychological approaches ranging from the psychodynamic to robust neuropsychology like Hasson’s experiments. It is, in my opinion, necessary for serious film scholars.
Hasson instructed his subjects to watch the Sergio Leone film as well as an uncut 10-minute clip of people just mingling around at a concert in a New York park called Washington Square. While watching these two very different films, the experimenters compared viewers’ brains. The clip lacked any editing, camera movement, or other of The Good, the Bad, or the Ugly’s sophisticated filmmaking techniques.
First, the group led by Hasson discovered that viewers’ brain activity was “time-locked” to what was shown on screen. That’s not a surprise. As with the brains of all animals, ours is wired to pay attention to anything new in our surroundings. It could be something beneficial to sexuality or survival, an evolutionary advantage. We must concentrate on it and, if necessary, deal with it. Since a movie is a movie, even if it hasn’t been edited or polished. Because it is a moving picture, we pay attention to each new detail because it constantly surprises us.
Second, in both films, viewers’ brains behaved similarly in certain visual and auditory areas as well as in a region involved in object recognition (the lateral occipital cortex). Even the uncut Washington Square film is processed the same way by all of us viewers, just like in the previous experiment. However, the directed and edited movie contained significantly more ISC.
Conclusion: You must build the film’s image sequence in order to control how the audience reacts. We are responding to the entire screen, not just one image. We are responding to a narrative and a sequence of images. I believe that movies are the best way to tell a story since language itself.)