Hasson U, Landesman O, Knappmeyer B, Vallines I, Rubin N, Heeger DJ. Neurocinematics: The neuroscience of films. Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, 2:1-26, 2008.
Abstract: While the recognition that films can impose a tight grip on viewers' minds dates back to the early days of cinema, until recently there was no way to record the mental states of viewers while watching a film. In this paper, we describe a new method for assessing the effect of a given film on viewers' brain activity. Brain activity was measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during free viewing of films, and inter-subject correlation analysis (ISC, Figure 1) was used to assess similarities in the spatiotemporal responses across viewers' brains during movie watching. Our results demonstrate that some films can exert considerable control over brain activity (Figure 2) and eye movements (Figure 3). However, this was not the case for all types of motion picture sequences (Figure 4), and the level of control over viewers' brain activity differed as a function of movie content (Figure 5), editing (Figure 6), and directing style (Figure 7). We propose that ISC may be useful to film studies by providing a quantitative neuroscientific assessment (Figures 8 and 9) of the impact of different styles of filmmaking upon viewers' brains, and a valuable method for the film industry to better assess its products. Finally, we suggest that this method brings together two separate, largely unrelated disciplines, cognitive neuroscience and film studies, and may open the way for a new interdisciplinary field of "neurocinematic" studies.