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Brain Imaging Monitors Effect of Movie Magic
from New Scientist
CRASH! A deafening roar and the cinema screen explodes with light. The scene is certainly startling, but is this movie stirring up the right emotional reactions deep down? Rather than ask your opinion, it's now possible to cut out the middleman and go straight to your brain for the verdict.
This new approach, known as neurocinematics, is beginning to make itself felt in movie-making and could one day help regulatory bodies implement appropriate age restrictions on films. Neurocinematics is a term coined by Uri Hasson at Princeton University, who was among the first to investigate how the brain responds to movies using an fMRI brain scanner.
His team looked at the similarity in the brain responses of a group of viewers to different types of films. When volunteers watched a section of Alfred Hitchcock's Bang! You're Dead, for example, they found that about 65 percent of the frontal cortex--the part of the brain involved in attention and perception--was responding in the same way in all the viewers.
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