From Scene to Synapse: Rethinking Film Education with Neurocinematics

Why does one scene grip an audience while another falls flat? In the discussion of pacing and payoff, film students tend to rely on intuition. They analyze cut sequences with fellow students, incorporate feedback, and have a shared vocabulary regarding tension, release, and character development. What neurocinematics offers is a fresh paradigm for film education. Through quantifiable neurological and biological indicators, it examines how narrative material shapes audience attention and emotion over time. It is imperative that such a paradigm be incorporated into film education, providing objective findings regarding how narrative affects the audience with each successive moment of the story.

The first question that neurocinematics asked was: “Do the brains of several individuals watching the same film behave in a similar pattern?” Researchers scanned the brains of volunteers and showed them edited scenes of commercial movies. The machine, called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), measured the flow of blood in the brain, which correlates with activity level. Hasson et al. (2008) found that for well-directed scenes, the activity levels of many areas of the brain increased and decreased in very similar ways for different individuals. They termed this “inter-subject correlation,” which measured the strength of the synchronization of the viewers’ brain activity. For scrambled versions of the same scenes, or scenes that lacked any kind of structure, the synchronization was reduced. Decisions about editing and audio influence the synchronization of activity across many brains, and this synchronization can be measured rather than simply hypothesized.

Although few film classrooms will ever have access to fMRI machines, the insights they provide can still shape the way film is taught. The key takeaway for a film education program is the recognition that collective response can serve as a substitute for collective engagement. Scientists have already found a way to express this concept using simpler variables. For instance, Maffei and Angrilli (2019) focused on the rate of blinking during the viewing of emotional video clips. Because blink rate decreases during periods of intense attention, it serves as a useful, low-cost index of engagement. The rate of blinking was found to be low during some points, such as the experience of awe or romantic feelings, but increased during the less engaging parts of the video (Maffei & Angrilli, 2019). For an editor, this would correlate to questions such as which images the eyes linger on, at which points the mind pauses, and the relationship between this data and the length of the shot or the use of camera movement.

Other experiments demonstrate that movies engage attention in different ways depending on which aspects of the story resonate most strongly with a particular audience. Ou et al. (2022) applied the method of movie-watching fMRI to compare autistic and non-autistic individuals. They identified different “events” in the movie, where something important happened, and then analyzed the strength of the synchrony between brain activity in such events. In the parts of the movie where the audience’s attention was focused on the feelings and social interactions of the characters, the synchrony between the autistic and the non-autistic viewers, as well as between the autistic viewers themselves, was lower in the parts of the brain responsible for social and emotional processing (Ou et al., 2022). However, in the parts where the audience’s attention was focused on the objects and the physical space, the attention networks became more synchronized in the autistic viewers. The movie was the same, but the focus in the brain was different. The role of neurocinematics here is to reveal which parts of the movie lead to joint social attention and which parts tend to be more spatial or object-related.

These insights extend beyond attention and social processing to show how stories can engage viewers differently depending on age and cognitive ability. Research by Niu et al. (2022) and Jangraw et al. (2023) extends these findings even further. Niu et al. (2022) concentrated on the thalamus, a relay station that forwards sensory input, and its connection with the larger cortical networks on the surface of the brain during the viewing of a story film by adults of varying ages. The strength of this thalamo-cortical connection varied according to age and was associated with fluid intelligence, the type of flexible problem-solving that underlies learning (Niu et al., 2022). In the second study, Jangraw et al. (2023) asked adolescents and young adults with varying reading competence to listen to long stories and measured the similarity of their individual brain activity patterns with those of all the others, and found that the activity patterns of the competent readers were highly similar across a broad network of regions (Jangraw et al., 2023). These two studies demonstrate that the same story can produce varying levels of synchronized neural activity depending on the viewer.

Individually, these results all point in the same direction. When movies and stories are shown in the same way they are actually experienced, continuously, emotionally, and in time, they leave behind identifiable patterns of shared attention, shared emotion, and shared meaning in the brain (Hasson et al., 2008; Jangraw et al., 2023; Maffei & Angrilli, 2019; Niu et al., 2022; Ou et al., 2022). These patterns do not measure the quality of movies or what constitutes good storytelling. They show where meaning is constructed within story structure: to bind the audience to the emotions of a character, focus attention on a detail, or alienate the audience. This kind of specificity is what film programs aim for in their discussion of beats, reversals, and the form of a scene. Neurocinematics provides an additional level of feedback for such discussions.

Film has always been defined by the shared experience of a roomful of strangers watching the same story unfold at the same time. Neurocinematics does not quantify that experience. Rather, it offers educators and students a new way to understand the way a series of cuts and sounds and story moments moves across a roomful of brains. Applying this way of thinking to film education would bring the way stories work on the brain into alignment with the way stories are currently taught.

References

1. Hasson, U., Landesman, O., Knappmeyer, B., Vallines, I., Rubin, N., & Heeger, D. J. (2008). Neurocinematics: The neuroscience of film. Projections, 2(1), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.3167/proj.2008.020102
2. Jangraw, D. C., Finn, E. S., Bandettini, P. A., Landi, N., Sun, H., Hoeft, F., Chen, G., Pugh, K. R., & Molfese, P. J. (2023). Inter-subject correlation during long narratives reveals widespread neural correlates of reading ability. NeuroImage, 282, 120390. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2023.120390
3. Maffei, A., & Angrilli, A. (2019). Spontaneous blink rate as an index of attention and emotion during film clips viewing. Physiology & Behavior, 204, 256–263. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physbeh.2019.02.037
4. Niu, J., Zheng, Z., Wang, Z., Xu, L., Meng, Q., Zhang, X., Kuang, L., Wang, S., Dong, L., Qiu, J., Jiao, Q., & Cao, W. (2022). Thalamo-cortical inter-subject functional correlation during movie watching across the adult lifespan. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 16, 984571. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2022.984571
5. Ou, W., Zeng, W., Gao, W., He, J., Meng, Y., Fang, X., & Nie, J. (2022). Movie events detecting reveals inter-subject synchrony difference of functional brain activity in autism spectrum disorder. Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, 16, 877204. https://doi.org/10.3389/fncom.2022.877204