MIT shows how the brain perceives movies – hassteveclarkresignedyet

our brains have to do a lot of work when we watch a movie. There are plots to follow, dialogues to interpret, visuals to see, and more. Now scientists have created a detailed map of how the human brain functions during the process. Using data from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology mapped which brain networks are activated when subjects watch excerpts from different movies. They also saw how different executive networks in the brain prioritized when viewing easy and complex scenes. The findings are described in a a study published Nov. 6 in the journal Cell Press neuron.

Inside the brain, different areas are interconnected. These different connections form functional networks which relate to how we perceive the world around us and behave. Most of the research on functional brain networks were based on fMRI scans of people at rest. However, many parts of the brain or cortex are not fully active unless there is external modeling.

in a new studythe team wanted to investigate whether watching movies while undergoing an fMRI scan could provide some insight into how the brain’s functional networks respond to a series of complex audio and visual stimuli.

“With fMRI, there’s no stimulus at rest—people are just thinking internally, so you don’t know what activated those networks,” study co-author and MIT neuroscientist Reza Rajimer. the statement says. “But with our movie, we can go back and figure out how different brain networks respond to different aspects of the movie.”

To depict our brains in movies, the team used a previously collected fMRI data set from The Human Connectome Project. The data included whole-brain scans of 176 young adults taken while watching 60 minutes of short clips. Scenes ranged from independent films including Two men and Welcome to Bridgeville and bigger Hollywood juggernauts like Alone at home, beginningand The Empire strikes back.

The team averaged the brain activity of all participants used artificial intelligence to group and identify the brain networks that were activatedin particular in the cerebral cortex. The cortex is the outer layer of the brain and participates in many higher functions of the human brain including memory, learning, reasoning, problem solving, and emotions.

They then explored how activity in these different networks connected what was in each scene, including people, animals, objects, music, language and narrative.

a cluster of graphs — (A) Cluster labeled as action perception network and mirror neuron system. (B) Action categories used in the action localizer experiment. (C) Group-mean mixed-effects maps for the contrast of dynamic person–object interactions (yellow activations) versus dynamic person–person interactions (blue activations) based on fMRI data from an independent group of 22 subjects. Data were analyzed in FreeSurfer on the fsaverage surface (see STAR Methods for more information), then the activation maps were transferred to the fs_lr surface using a spherical transformation. Maps show FDR-adjusted significance values in logarithmic format.
(D) Bar graph showing percent signal change values for dynamic and static stimuli of the six action categories in the action perception and social cognition clusters. Percent signal change values were calculated based on the contrast of each stimulus versus fixation condition. For the social cognition cluster, only the vertices of the right hemisphere were included in the analysis due to the strong hemispheric lateralization of this cluster. Error bars indicate one standard error of the mean across subjects. (E) Cluster labeled as attention and eye movement network.
*(F) Dorsal attention network from 7-network parcellation of Yeo. (C) and (F) show the boundaries of the respective clusters. AUTHORITY: Rajimehr et. al. 2024 year*

They found 24 different brain networks were related to certain aspects of sensory or cognitive processing, including recognition of human faces and bodies, movements, places and landmarks, social interactions, inanimate objects, and language.

The scan also showed feedback between areas of the brain that allow people to plan, solve problems and prioritize information is called domains of executive control– and areas of the brain with more specific functions.

When the content of the film was difficult to track or more ambiguous as during beginningactivity was increased in the executive regions of the brain. However, during more comprehensible scenes, areas of the brain with specific functions, such as language processing, were most dominant.

“Executive control areas are typically active in complex tasks when the cognitive load is high,” Rajimer says. “It appears that when movie scenes are fairly easy to understand, such as clear conversation, the language areas are active.”

However, during a complex scene with lots of context, complex wording, and ambiguity about what’s going on, more cognitive effort is required.

“So the brain switches to using common domains of executive control,” Rajimer said.

According to the teamshape research can examine how brain network function differs between people of different ages or developmental or psychiatric disorders.

“We are now looking more deeply at how the specific content in each frame of a movie drives these networks—for example, the semantic and social context, or the relationship between people and the background scene,” Rajimer says.