Have you ever watched a scary movie and just couldn’t look away, no matter how awful
it got? Turns out you weren’t the only one in the room.
Hey cinema-philes. Julia here for DNews
Movie makers are master manipulators. They’ve got you twisting your emotions this way and
that way down to a science. And in fact they’re even turning to science to learn more about
how to get even better at making you cry when Mufasa dies or making you scream when Johnny
hatchets through a door.
Recently researchers from the University of Nottingham were curious about how scary movies
make people nervous. So they hooked up people to machines to read their electrodermal activity
(EDA)—or basically how much they sweat.
They showed volunteers 32 scary scenes. With 4 varying types of suspense, like Direct:
First person, we think we’re the character in the film. Shared: When we empathize with
the character. Vicarious: When know the character’s in danger but they don’t. and Composite:
Direct, shared, and vicarious suspense synchronized together.
The researchers found that movies are scariest when the character doesn’t know what’s
going to happen, AND when we experience vicarious suspense. Basically we freak the heck out
when we know something bad is about to happen to a character, but the character has no clue.
Something Alfred Hitchcock was the bomb at.
So when we’re watching a movie, we might all sweat together. And even blink together,
according to a study published Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Researchers from the
University of Tokyo monitored the eye movements and blinks from subjects as they watched a
short clip from… Mr. Bean. They thought that most people might blink at the end of
a scene, at an obvious break. Which was true, but they also found that blinks tended to
happen during implicit breaks. These blinks happened during ‘non-critical’ moments
in scenes, at the end of an action or when the main character wasn’t on screen. The
blinks synced up between 23 and 31 per cent of the time. And maybe this blinking is an
expression of something going on a little deeper.
The crazy thing is, movies can also sync up our brains, according to a study published
in the journal NeuroImage. Using a technique called MEG the researchers from Aalto University
in Finland were able to track brain activity down to fractions of a second. And they found
that people’s brains tend to light up in the same places during the same moments when
watching movies. And this makes sense for things like movement and facial recognition.
And that backed up earlier by studies like one published in 2004 in the journal Science
that found that when people watched a clip of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, their
brains had the same fluctuations at the same time. And you’d expect people’s auditory
and visual cortices to sync up when they are seeing the same thing. That’s what good
directing and editing do, they control your attention. One researcher, Uri Hasson, a psychologist
at Princeton University told Wired that “The movie takes over the brain responses of the
viewers”.
But not all movies have the same effect. Tense dramatic scenes like robberies will dominate
your attention and 70% of your cortex will be synchronized with everyone else. But boring
scenes like people walking in a square will sync up just 5%.
So it seems Hollywood is finding a major ally in all this brain research. Rather than using
test screenings to see how a film will do, maybe they’ll get a little help from NEUROSCIENCE.
And if you’re a movie buff, you’ve probably wondered why we get so attached to fictional
characters - like James Bond. Trace and Ian explore that question in this video