A team made up of researchers from several universities analyzed brain activity during the viewing of several well-known films.
- The study provides intriguing new evidence on how movies can alter the hierarchical organization of the brain necessary for cerebral computation.
- Brain activity is calmer when watching a movie, even more so than when resting or performing daily tasks.
- The brain extracts coherent narratives from still images and sounds and calculates less, which frees us from the stress of everyday life.
In a new article, published on January 13, 2023 in Science Advancesresearchers from the universities of Oxford (United Kingdom), Aarhus (Denmark), Buenos Aires (Argentina) and the UPF have shown what happens in the brain when we watch a film, the favorite hobby of many of us.
Brain activity is calmer when watching a movie
To do this, the scientists used high-resolution neuroimaging data from 176 people watching film clips such as Inception, The Social Network, Ocean’s Eleven, Mom, I missed the plane!, Erin Brockovich, alone against all And Star War: The Empire Strikes Backin order to analyze the hierarchical reorganization of the brain during movie viewing.
Researchers found in brain models that brain activity around the time of movie viewing is calmer when participants were watching movies compared to times when they were resting or performing daily tasks. This suggests that surprisingly less computation is required when watching movies than when resting. Thus, watching a good movie, we would be momentarily freed from the stress and problems of everyday life, while the brain allows itself to absorb the story and activate the circuits responsible for pleasure.
“Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world”
The paper’s lead author, Morten L. Kringelbach, a professor of neuroscience at Oxford University and Aarhus University, explains in a communicated that “This study provides intriguing new evidence on how movies can alter the hierarchical organization of the brain necessary to orchestrate brain computation.”
“The brain extracts coherent narratives from still images and sounds, allowing us to transcend the rat race of survival, if only for a brief moment”, he adds. Before concluding : “the study shows the veracity of the words of the late great French director Jean-Luc Godard: ‘Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world'”.
