How Movies Fool Your Brain

Written by Susan K Perry

In my home, we sometimes find ourselves enjoying a movie that’s not much more than an engaging time-waster. At those times, if we haven’t the oomph to switch to something else, we just settle in and enjoy what we think of as a brain-dead movie.
But brains are most certainly not “dead” when they watch a movie. In fact, a surprising amount of activity is going on of which we’re not aware.
Wouldn’t it be interesting to know what’s happening in our brains when we stare at lights on a screen and have what feel like real experiences?

First of all, how do we understand a story? Zacks proposes that understanding occurs because we construct models of the story’s events. “An event model,” he writes, “is representation in your head that corresponds systematically to the situation in the story.” Such a model needn’t be perfect to work. We developed the ability—the neural architecture--to form such models because it helps us deal with the real world.
But how is it that we feel real emotion when watching a made-up movie?
One reason is that we tend to mimic emotions shown by others, including actors. Then we ready our bodies to respond appropriately to the situation, our bodies’ preparing for, say, fight or flight.
The most interesting theory described by Zacks explains why seeing emotion expressed on a screen leads to us actually feeling that emotion. It’s not a new theory. “Posing your face into a frown or smile doesn’t just affect your subjective experience,” explains Zacks, “it also affects your brain’s response.”
Skipping to Part II of the book, called The Tricks That Make Movies Work, we learn how several “tricks” fool our movie-watching brains. For instance, how do our brains make sense of film cuts (actually splices)? In fact, our brains are used to being briefly deprived of visual input when we blink or look around (when you move your eyes, there are very brief episodes of not seeing anything). So cuts in a movie’s action are experienced by our brains as like reality itself.
How do most of us, most of the time, miss so many continuity errors? Experiments have demonstrated a phenomenon called change blindness. Our vision is not persistent. “Visual persistence hangs on for only a fraction of a second,” explains Zacks, “and it is completely wiped out when new objects overlap where the old objects used to be.”

Tags: Psychology, Susan Perry .Movies, Brain