Scientists: Hitchcock literally sculpting the viewer into their world – RIA Novosti

MOSCOW, July 27 – RIA Novosti . Neuroscientists have tracked the reaction of the brain spectators thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock and found that they were literally dragging man inward, causing it to ignore the outside world and only pay attention to the plot, according to a paper published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

“Many people often say that they are dissolved in the twists and turns of what is happening on the TV screen or on the canvas cinema, especially when the movie is good – everything around for them to disappear completely. We now have a neurophysiological data that suggest that the audience really” slimming “in the plot of the film,” – said Matt Bezdek (Matt Bezdek) Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta (USA).

Bezdek and his colleagues came to this conclusion by observing the brain activity of several volunteers who viewed “The Man who knew too much, “” North by Northwest “or Hitchcock’s” Alien “by Ridley Scott, being inside magnetic resonance imaging.

How to tell the scientists, footage is not displayed on a blank screen, and inside a kind of frame of flashing and constantly changing “chess” patterns of white and black cells. The frame, on the idea of ​​scientists was to distract the audience from what is happening on television.

These observations helped scientists uncover the curious phenomenon – when the plot of the film advancing disturbing or intriguing moment, the activity of the so-called visual furrow brain responsible for the processing of visual signals, dramatically changed.

As it turned out, at such times the activity in those areas of furrow, who were responsible for peripheral vision and monitoring of the squares, dropped sharply, while neurons were responsible for the central part of the field of view It was the most active. This means that the volunteer does not actually pay any attention to what was happening around him and focus on what is happening in the movie.

This response, which scientists call the “tunnel vision”, was observed in several other areas of the brain who were responsible for the recognition of visual images. As scientists believe, this feature of our nervous system helps us to remember what is happening in the important moments of our lives, and allows quite unexpectedly, to experience what is happening on the screen, as if it happened in reality with us.