This Is Your Brain On Movies: Neuroscientists Weigh In On The Brain Science of Cinema
In movies, we explore landscapes far removed from our day-to-day lives. Whether experiencing the fantastical adventures of Star Wars or the dramatic throes of The English Patient, movies demand that our brains engage in a complex firing of neurons and cognitive processes. We enter into manipulated worlds where musical scores enhance feeling; where cinematography clues us into details we’d normally gloss over; where, like omniscient beings, we voyeuristically peek into others’ lives and minds; and where we can travel from Marrakech to Mars without ever having left our seat. Movies reflect reality, yet are anything but.
“Movies are highly complex, multidimensional stimuli,” said Uri Hasson, a neuroscientist and psychologist at Princeton University. “Some areas of the brain analyze sound bites, some analyze word context, some the sentence content, music, emotional aspect, color or motion.” Just as many people must come together to work on different elements of a movie’s script, score, visuals or costumes, he explained, so many areas of the brain must also be engaged in processing those disparate elements.
The relatively new field of neurocinematic studies seeks to untangle our neurological experience of film and, in doing so, learn not only the mechanisms behind movie watching but also how movies might teach us more about ourselves.
