Have you ever wondered why we react to scary music and cinema even though we are consciously aware it’s just a movie? How are movies able to create this unreal fear in our minds? Having never been able to sit through a horror movie despite several attempts, the fear caused is not unreal at all, it feels so true causing anxious aftermaths.
Our emotions vary with the emotions that are displayed on the screen. We laugh with our protagonists, we develop this hatred towards the villain of the movie. Those of you who have watched Guddi will understand my intent here.
While filmmakers have been able to evoke emotional responses in viewers for more than a century, it’s only now that modern neuroscience can show us what’s happening in someone’s brain.
- Neurocinematics is a term coined by Uri Hasson, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute.
- Neurocinematics is how the audience responds to a movie or film based on their brain activity.
Neurocinematics- The neural-science behind cinema
Neuro-marketers have been employing various biometric devices and other techniques to understand us. Our eye movements, heart rate are the primary indicators of our reactions. More insight into neural activity is obtained using EEG and fMRI. These are used to examine brain waves and record brain activity.
There was always this dilemma among scientists on the problem of probing through people’s brain activity in real-time. You can’t use a 5-ton fMRI scanner to monitor people’s brain activity as they go about their lives. Even if you could, each person’s experience is so different it would be impossible to interpret the findings. The simple stimuli that vision scientists use to obtain more insight into brain activity do not match with the complexity of the sensory information our brains deal with on a daily basis. Every waking second, a torrent of information flows into our brains through our eyes and ears.
Movies are somewhere in between the chaos of reality and a simplified lab experiment, says Princeton psychologist Uri Hasson. They’re complex and life-like. But the same clip can be shown to different people and quantified frame-by-frame to study visual elements like color and motion, as well as sound.
Uri Hasson presents in the Oscars Event -a clip from the Monaco racing scene in Iron Man 2 to the first row of the audience. The eye-tracking footage captured from ten audience members earlier in the Dunn lobby demonstrated the remarkable consistency of where the ten focused their attention as their eyes took in the action.
“I’d like to thank my neuroscience partners who helped us enhance the film’s script, characters, and scenes. “
Of course, this is a far-fetched acceptance speech for a winning director to thank the neuromarketing companies for the success of their movies. The present trend is that the trailers and specific scenes from a movie are tested on a sample audience to see whether the reception to the scene is as expected. The Harry Potter movies’ trailers have been analyzed this way.
What does James Cameron say?
Oscar-winning director James Cameron had told Variety magazine during the making of the epic hit Avatar that “a functional-MRI study of brain activity would show that more neurons are actively engaged in processing a 3-D movie than the same film seen in 2-D.
While some filmmakers are thrilled at using technology to make more effective movies, others are not so happy with the idea. They believe it is killing creativity and invading human privacy. All these studies on how media can cause certain effects in our brains when applied to other fields like social media can cause serious trouble.
We all know how political advertising has started to play an important role in our elections. The first such impact was noticed in the 2016 US elections. U.S. Advertising Research Foundation has been consulting various experts to define regulatory standards on this, says Ron Wright of Sands Research.
Final Words
I am sure many of us have been influenced by watching movies. Some sports movies have encouraged us to learn more about the sport. The portrayal of a certain profession in a movie has inspired us to take up that profession. Movies do play an important role in our life. They are reflections of our culture, present society, and thought processes. We can always take good and bad from any situation. Similarly, we can also earn to do the same from the movies – analyze what is the takeaway.
It is no conundrum to say that filmmakers are trying to create that impact in our brains with or without technology. But did we not sign up for this cinematic experience? So next time when you feel really happy or agitated or immediately motivated – Calm down, Netflix and Chill. (PS: Netflix did not pay me to write this).
