Our understanding of how the brain works has been greatly expanded over the past several decades. The brain, however, is extraordinarily complex, so even though we know a lot more than we once did, there is still a lot to learn.

The science of mapping the brain is also quite new. One of the ways that experts have learned the most is by analyzing people’s brains in MRI machines. Someone would go into the machine and be asked to lie still and not think about anything specific.

The machine would then analyze the brain activity, which could then be pieced together to see what areas of the brain were active.

While this offered valuable information, it was not able to show the many complex interactions that occur between different parts of the brain. So, that is what a team of neuroscientists at MIT set out to do.

They had access to equipment that could read the brain’s activity, but they needed a way to stimulate the brain so that it could be monitored. To get even more information, they wanted to be able to have multiple different types of stimuli.

To do this, they decided to have the subjects of the study watch movies while hooked up to the brain-scanning machine.

The thought was that researchers could look at the activity in the brain and then compare it to what was happening in the movie. Was it dialogue, introducing new concepts, action, or any number of things. It turns out that this method was very successful.

In a statement by the first author, neuroscientist Reza Rajimehr said:

“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, 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.”

The team had 176 subjects in the study and their machine-learning computers compiled the results from all 176 so that they could be looked at as a group. They got to watch multiple different types of movies including classics like Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Home Alone, and Inception as well as independent films.

The team was able to gather a lot of great information, which they published in the journal Neuron. It seems that this is just the beginning for this type of research though as they now want to bring in more subjects and then analyze each one of their brains individually.

This type of study will undoubtedly help neurologists not only learn how the brain works, but also come up with new treatment methods for brain damage, psychological disorders, and many other things as well.

I am happy to volunteer to watch movies… for science!

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