Watching a movie or TV show might feel like passive entertainment, something you don’t really have to work hard on in order to enjoy, but behind the scenes, your brain is actually super active.
A new study has found that 24 distinct brain networks light up as you watch different types of films. Researchers at MIT tracked the brain to create the most accurate brain map to date.
They determined where the brain becomes most active during various movie scenes, including when Dom Cobb explores a dream world in “Inception,” when Kevin McCallister realizes his family left him home alone in “Home Alone,” and when Leia calls Han a “scruffy-looking nerf-herder in “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.”
During their study, they were able to identify the different brain networks that are needed to process certain scenes.
“Our work is the first attempt to get a layout of different areas and networks of the brain during naturalistic conditions,” said Reza Rajimehr, the first author of the study and a neuroscientist at MIT.
In the past, the majority of brain mapping studies have been done while the brain was not engaged in observing specific scenes.
These studies were still enlightening, but some of the brain’s networks can only be activated with external stimulation.
In the new study, the research team used a functional MRI (fMRI) dataset from the Human Connectome Project.
The dataset consisted of brain scans from 176 young adults who watched 60 minutes of short clips from multiple films.
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An fMRI scan measures brain activity by monitoring where blood flows to the brain. When a brain region becomes active, the blood flow to that part will increase.
“The movie stimulus is a rich stimulus, but on the other hand, it is not a very well-controlled stimulus,” said Rajimehr.
“And when you show a movie to a subject, you may get some idiosyncratic responses, which cannot be generalized to other subjects.”
People do not always process movies in the same way, so to account for this irregularity, the researchers averaged the brain activity across participants, allowing them to map and study brain responses and networks that were common among everyone in the study.
The map helped them identify the active networks during the movie scenes. In total, 24 different brain networks were triggered when watching movies.
The researchers associated each network with certain cognitive processes— observing familiar settings, recognizing human faces, and watching human interactions—to assign them functions, resulting in the most detailed functional map of the brain by far.
The findings showed that the domains of the brain in charge of solving problems, making plans, and prioritizing information were very active when a movie scene was complex and hard to follow. But when a scene was simple, the brain regions involved with language processing were the most active.
This information could help expand research on the brain’s networks in both healthy people and individuals with conditions like schizophrenia. In addition, it could help filmmakers create movies that really engage the brain.
The study was published in the journal Neuron.