Watching a movie is a wonderful experience to share with someone. It provides opportunities to deride the cosmetic surgery of the leading actors, chances to criticise plot lines, and the endless sport of trying to remember where you have seen that actor who played the delicatessen owner before. Even more than all of this, according to new research, watching a movie is binding at the level of your brain physiology.
The ground-breaking part of this new research was the method used to measure brain activity. Many studies on brain activity use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to record changes in blood flow. However, this study employed magnetoencephalography (MEG) which provides information on brain changes within milliseconds and across the entire brain. This allows measurement of brain reaction to a complex phenomenon such as a movie.
The results showed that despite the complexity of a movie from sensory perspective, and the many opportunities to respond to it in an individualised way, brain activity patterns were essentially the same in individuals and happening with fractions of seconds of each other. These synchronised brain responses were found in areas of the brain relating to processing visual stimuli, detection of movement, recognition of people, and cognition.
What a movie does then is induce an involuntary synchronisation of brain activity. This is the power of movies (and probably music) that filmmakers like Elia Kazan, D.W. Griffith, Samuel Goldwyn, and Louis Mayer intuitively understood but now we have the evidence before us. Without you even uttering a word a film binds and bonds you biologically with the people you watch the film with. It is a sharing and transcendent experience that harks back to gazing into a fire but can take you into far flung places and possibilities and all the while your neural pathways are lighting up in a similar way to the person beside you. Now, that’s entertainment!
