Let’s see more movies! Study confirms that brain activity relaxes when doing so

Watching movies transforms the way humans live and conceive the world. An investigation carried out by neuroscientists from universities pompeu fabra from Barcelona, ​​from Oxford (UK), from Buenos Aires (Argentina) and aarhus (Denmark) has discovered how brain activity changes and relaxes while watching movies.

The research, published in the journal “Science Advances”, shows that, When watching movies, “the way we feel and think about other situations of daily life is transformed”, according to the authors.

Neuroscientists have used large-scale, high-resolution neuroimaging data from a sample of 176 people collected while watching movie clips such as “The origin”“Social network”, “The Big Scam” “My poor angel”“Erin Brockovich, a bold woman” Y “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back”, to directly investigate how his brain was hierarchically reorganized while watching the films.

Researchers have seen that less brain computing power is needed when watching movies than in response state or doing other tasks. They have also built complete models of brain activity triggered by watching movies at rest and doing other tasks.

In this way, they have shown that the brain hierarchy is flatter when watching movies than when resting or doing other tasks, which suggests that less brain computing power is needed when watching movies than doing other things.

According to the researchers, paradoxically the brain is less driven by its internal dynamics while watching movies than when doing other tasks or when resting.

The study has proven that while we watch movies we momentarily free ourselves from the experience of work stress or problem solving and the brain is limited to absorbing the narrative of the film, which promotes the activation of the brain circuits necessary to generate the great pleasure that watching movies entails, in terms of motivation and tranquility.

According to the director of the UPF Center for Brain and Cognition, Gustavo Deco“This study provides important new information about the causal mechanisms underlying complex changes in the brain’s hierarchy.”

“The use of more naturalistic stimuli, such as those in movies, provides a quick and convenient way to measure important changes in anatomical connectivity, which occur for example in neuropsychiatric disorders, and which may lead to new insights related to vulnerable populations. , including children,” according to Deco.

The researchers have stated that the study “provides new evidence and opens new questions about how movies can change the hierarchical organization of the whole brainnecessary to orchestrate the cerebral calculation”.

According to the authors of the study, their work “shows the truth of the words of the great French film director Jean Luc Godard, who left us recently: ‘Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world’“.