movies make a hive mind
Mar. 11th, 2004 10:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
novapsycheGood, bad and ugly is same in brains of beholders
A brain imaging study showed people's brains reacted in a surprisingly similar manner as they watched the classic Clint Eastwood Western "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly."
About 30 percent of brain activity in key visual, auditory and face recognition areas was virtually identical in five different people shown a sequence from the film, the researchers said.
"This strong intersubject correlation shows that, despite the completely free viewing of dynamical, complex scenes, individual brains 'tick together' ... when exposed to the same visual environment," they wrote in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
Uri Hasson of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging for their study. This scanner can provide a "live" look at brain activity.
When shown the same 30-minute sequence from the film, close to 30 percent of one person's brain response could be predicted by another's, the researchers said.
The brain areas that were in sync included the visual and auditory areas, the fusiform gyrus, which responds to faces, and the collateral sulcus, which responds to images of outdoor scenes.
"Such responses imply that a large extent of the human cortex is stereotypically responsive to naturalistic audiovisual stimuli," they wrote.
Just to test, they also scanned the volunteers as they lay quietly, and their brain patterns barely matched.
A brain imaging study showed people's brains reacted in a surprisingly similar manner as they watched the classic Clint Eastwood Western "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly."
About 30 percent of brain activity in key visual, auditory and face recognition areas was virtually identical in five different people shown a sequence from the film, the researchers said.
"This strong intersubject correlation shows that, despite the completely free viewing of dynamical, complex scenes, individual brains 'tick together' ... when exposed to the same visual environment," they wrote in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
Uri Hasson of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging for their study. This scanner can provide a "live" look at brain activity.
When shown the same 30-minute sequence from the film, close to 30 percent of one person's brain response could be predicted by another's, the researchers said.
The brain areas that were in sync included the visual and auditory areas, the fusiform gyrus, which responds to faces, and the collateral sulcus, which responds to images of outdoor scenes.
"Such responses imply that a large extent of the human cortex is stereotypically responsive to naturalistic audiovisual stimuli," they wrote.
Just to test, they also scanned the volunteers as they lay quietly, and their brain patterns barely matched.