This is your brain on Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock, James Vermiere wrote in the Boston Herald on the occasion of the centenary of Hitchcock’s birth in 1999, “delighted in terrifying audiences by manipulating them…More than any other filmmaker, he was a master at messing with our minds.”

“Wait a minute!” I hear you cry (if I happen to be sitting behind you as you read this, creeping up on you, breathing down your neck, about to…Ha! Made you look!). “What does all this stuff about Hitchcock, and your rather lame attempt to capture some of the Hitchcockian spirit in the first half of this paragraph, have to do with science? Have I stumbled upon a new film criticism column by mistake?”

Nay, dear reader. I have not strayed from my allotted subject matter in the slightest: science, you see, has just measured what goes on inside the brains of audience members when they watch certain kinds of film–and in the process, provided empirical evidence that Vermiere knew what he was writing about nine years ago in Boston.

Neuroscientists at New York University used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a technique called inter-subject correlation (ISC) to examine the brain activity of multiple subjects as they watched the same films, and figure out which responses were similar from viewer to viewer.

“Some films lead most viewers through a similar sequence of perceptual, emotional and cognitive states,” the researchers wrote in their study, published in Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind (a journal I had no idea existed until I read about this study). Films with such a tight grip on their viewers’ minds, in other words, produce a high ISC. Other films, either deliberately or by accident, exercise less control, and thus produce a low ISC.

The researchers showed three thirty-minute film clips to stimulate their subjects’ brain activity: one from Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (I apologize for having now planted that movie’s famous whistled theme in your head for the rest of the day), an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents entitled “Bang! You’re Dead,” and an episode of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm.

As a control, subjects also watched a 10-minute, unedited video shot during a concert in New York City’s Washington Square Park.

Hitchcock’s reputation for being a master of audience manipulation was born out by the results: “Bang! You’re Dead” evoked similar responses across all of the viewers in more than 65 percent of the neocortex, the portion of the brain responsible for perception and cognition.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly wasn’t quite as involving, but still evoked similar responses in more than 45 percent of the neocortex.

Curb Your Enthusiasm had a much lower ISC, at 18 percent, and the Washington Square Park video, a.k.a. “unstructured reality,” had an ISC of less than five percent.

What this also means is that, if its content, editing and directing style all line up properly, a movie can exert a considerable amount of control over an audience’s brain activity, and get most of those present to experience it in pretty much the same way.

Possibly fearing a backlash from the makers of Curb Your Enthusiasm (or worse, the Creator of “unstructured reality”), the researchers hasten to add that just because a film clip results in a low ISC doesn’t mean it’s not an engaging piece of work. Some art films, the researcher say by way of example, may elicit intense brain activity, but it differs from person to person depending on their own interpretation of what they’re seeing.

The researchers weren’t just interested in proving that Hitchcock made films that successfully manipulated audiences (Psycho alone proved that). They believe that their technique can lead to more “neurocinematic” studies, allowing other researchers and those in the film industry to better judge a film’s effect on an audience.

Or, if you’re paranoid, to create films and commercials and political ads scientifically designed to suck you in and make you turn off your critical facilities.

Well, at least that last thought drove that spaghetti-western theme music out of my head.

For some reason all I can hear now is the opening to The Twilight Zone.

Permanent link to this article: https://edwardwillett.com/2008/06/this-is-your-brain-on-hitchcock/

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