Scientists Track Brain Function as Folks Watch Movies

November 6, 2024
Dennis Thompson HealthDay Reporter

A person’s brain performs an intricate juggling act while watching a movie, a new study demonstrates.

Scans showed that 24 different brain networks and regions engage from scene-to-scene, based on hard it is to follow the movie or what’s currently on the screen, researchers reported.

The brain’s “executive control” networks -- regions related to planning, solving problems and prioritizing information -- tend to kick in when a movie’s content is more difficult to follow or ambiguous. But during more easily understandable scenes, the brain hands off processing to regions with specialized functions.

“Executive control domains are usually active in difficult tasks when the cognitive load is high,” said lead investigator Dr. Reza Rajimehr, a research scientist with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“It looks like when the movie scenes are quite easily comprehendible, for example if there’s a clear conversation going on, the language areas are active,” Rajimehr said. “But in situations where there is a complex scene involving context, semantics and ambiguity in the meaning of the scene, more cognitive effort is required, and so the brain switches over to using general executive control domains.”

For the study, researchers analyzed data from functional MRI brain scans taken of 176 young people as they watched an hour’s worth of short clips from movies like Inception, The Social Network and Home Alone.

Using AI, the researchers identified brain networks and tracked how they related to a movie’s scene-by-scene content, including people, animals, objects, music, speech and narrative.

For example, different networks are engaged when people are recognizing human faces or bodies, tracking movement, identifying places and landmarks, observing interactions between humans and inanimate objects, processing speech or interpreting social interactions.

The new study was published Nov. 6 in the journal Neuron.

“Our work is the first attempt to get a layout of different areas and networks of the brain during naturalistic conditions,” Rajimehr said in a journal news release. “With our movie stimulus, we can go back and figure out how different brain networks are responding to different aspects of the movie.”

Future research might look at how brain network function differs between individuals, Rajimehr said.

“In future studies, we can look at the maps of individual subjects, which would allow us to relate the individualized map of each subject to the behavioral profile of that subject,” Rajimehr said. “Now, we’re studying in more depth how specific content in each movie frame drives these networks -- for example, the semantic and social context, or the relationship between people and the background scene.”

More information

Johns Hopkins Medicine has more on brain anatomy.

SOURCE: Cell Press, news release, Nov. 6, 2024

Neurology