“Neurocinema”

According to the guy(s?) at the Neurocritic, a really cool blog -though confusingly liberal with the use of the royal ‘we’- that deals with what’s new and exciting in brain imaging and cognitive neuroscience, Neurocinema is the new en-vogue concept among the big minds in the biz these days.  “What is this Neurocinema,?” you may ask.  The Neurocritic calls it “a new filmmaking process that studies a viewer’s sensorimoter, cognitive, and affective response to film stimuli.”  Researchers are using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure the changes in blood flow to different areas of our brains, or in applied terms, to measure how and which different parts of our brain are stimulated by certain elements of film.  Their analysis of fMRI, along with physiological cues like sweat and heart rate, is becoming an important tool to discovering what scenes ‘work’ and what scenes don’t.

British movie producer, Peter Katz, is apparently a big believer in the Neurocinema buzz.  As a horror movie producer, it’s his job to determine how best to scare viewers, and using fMRI to determine fear responses seems to be an effective way to go about that.  According to an interview with CNN, “[Katz] wanted to understand how to make a horror film quantifiable […] On the timing, [he] wanted to see just how precise [he could] get.”

Even better-known big-shots like James Cameron are starting to hop on the Neurocinema train.  He told Variety 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”.

A little light shed on the joke that is The Great Gatsby- 3D?  Something had to add a little pop to the sordid, society affairs of East and West Egg…

The inspiration for all this?  It all seems to come back to Hasson, and his 2004 and 2008 studies in fMRI. which, using inter-subject correlation analysis (ISC), “[provided] a quantitative neuroscientific assessment of the impact of different styles of filmmaking on viewer’s brains.”

In their 2004 paper, Hasson et al. studied 5 people watching The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly while hooked up to an MRI scanner.  They then assessed the correlations in brain activity among the subjects and found them to be highly significant.

Later, in their 2008 study, Hasson et al. compared their findings from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly to those of subjects viewing an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, and a shot of people congregating at Washington Square Park.  According to the same method of analysis, the Hitchcock scene had the highest correlation among viewers, followed by The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, then Curb Your Enthusiasm, and finally, the Washington Square Park unstructured footage.

The big “so-what” here brings us back to Katz and Cameron- that it is, indeed, possible to structure a film to achieve certain audience results.  As Hasson et al. found, the more highly structured the film was, the more overlap there was in the fMRI scans of the viewers- as in, they were all looking in the same spots, focusing on the same things.  It’s a little creepy, to me at least, to think that a group of people can be sitting in a room, all exercising their own “choice” as to where they want to look, interpreting and presenting attention based on their own personal preferences, and yet, they all look the same place.  Weird.

All in all, Hasson and the rest of these guys are doing some really interesting stuff here with fMRI, and it seems, already, like it’s all being taken very seriously in the film industry.  The fMRI has come a long way since Stroop and friends, that’s for sure.