{"id":3682,"date":"2014-09-08T06:36:48","date_gmt":"2014-09-08T10:36:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=3682"},"modified":"2015-01-03T06:38:21","modified_gmt":"2015-01-03T11:38:21","slug":"movies-on-the-brain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=3682","title":{"rendered":"Movies on the Brain"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Natalie<\/a>Greg Miller\u2019s recent Wired<\/em> article<\/a> about how movies trick your brain into empathizing with characters begins by describing the scene from 2010\u2019s psychological thriller Black Swan<\/em>. In this intense scene, Natalie Portman, playing a ballerina vying for the role of Odette\/Odile in Swan Lake<\/em>, begins to believe black feathers are sprouting from her skin. \u201cWhen people watch this scene,\u201d Miller says, \u201ctheir brain activity bears some resemblance to a pattern that\u2019s been observed in people with schizophrenia,\u201d according to neuroscientist Talma Hendler<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At a recent Hollywood event<\/a>, Black Swan\u2019s director, Darren Aronofsky, said he\u2019d \u201cbe thrilled\u201d if he gave audiences \u201ca temporary taste of psychosis.\u201d It may work that way through the activity in two brain regions shown by functional MRIs to be connected with empathy: one, she calls \u201cmental empathy,\u201d the classic, putting yourself in another person\u2019s shoes feeling; the second, \u201cembodied empathy,\u201d is more visceral, the kind of weak-in-the-knees feeling I get when I see someone else\u2019s cut or injury.<\/p>\n

Having studied people\u2019s reactions to emotional movie scenes, Hendler believes both types of empathy are important in shaping what they experience. Schizophrenics, however, tend to rely more on mental empathy. \u201cIt\u2019s as if they\u2019re having to think through the emotional impact of situations that other people grasp more intuitively and automatically,\u201d she suggested. And in that scene from Black Swan<\/em>, Aronofsky believes viewers\u2019 minds mimic that, by being engaged in trying to figure out whether the feathers are real or Portman\u2019s hallucination.<\/p>\n

Aronofsky, known for his surreal and sometimes disturbing work, uses a filmmaker\u2019s entire toolbox to shape the audience\u2019s emotional reactions. He cited his film Requiem for a Dream<\/em>, in which addictions cause the main characters\u2019 lives to spin out of control (Ellen Burstyn received an Academy Award nomination). He began that movie with wide shots, graduating to tighter and tighter ones, \u201cto convey an increasingly subjective sense of what the characters were experiencing. There\u2019s always a theory of where the camera is and why it\u2019s there.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Greg Miller\u2019s recent Wired article about how movies trick your brain into empathizing with characters begins by describing the scene from 2010\u2019s psychological thriller Black Swan. In this intense scene, Natalie Portman, playing a ballerina vying for the role of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Movies on the Brain","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[74,57,104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-emotions","category-movies","category-the-morgue"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-Xo","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3682"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3683,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3682\/revisions\/3683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}