MIT has mapped how the brain perceives movies

Our brain we have to work hard when we watch a movie. There are plots to follow, dialogue to interpret, visuals to take in, and more. Now scientists have created a detailed map of how human brain functions during the process. Using data from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has determined which brain networks are activated when subjects watch clips from different films. They also saw how different executive networks in the brain were prioritized when viewing simple and complex scenes. The results are described in The study was published Nov. 6 in the journal Cell Press. Neuron.

Within the brain, different areas are interconnected. These various connections form functional networks which relate to how we perceive the world around us and behave. Most studies on functional brain networks were based on resting-state fMRI scans of people. However, many parts of the brain or cortex are not fully active without external modeling.

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IN new researchThe team wanted to find out whether watching movies during an fMRI scan could provide any insight into how functional brain networks respond to a range of complex audio and visual stimuli.

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

To match our brains to the films, the team used a previously collected fMRI dataset. Human Connectome Project. The data included whole-brain scans of 176 young people taken while viewing a total of Short clips lasting 60 minutes. Scenes varied from independent films, including Two men And Welcome to Bridgeville and larger Hollywood giants such as Home alone, OriginAnd The Empire Strikes Back.

The team averaged the brain activity of all participants and used AI to group and identify activated brain networksespecially in the cerebral cortex. cerebral cortex is the outer layer of the brain and is involved in many of the higher functions of the human brain including memory, learning, reasoning, problem solving and emotions.

They then examined how activity in these different networks related to what was in each scene, including people, animals, objects, music, speech, and narrative.

graph cluster — (A) Cluster labeled 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) and dynamic person-person interactions (cyan 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 details), then activation maps were rescaled to the fs_lr surface using a spherical transform. The maps show Roosevelt-adjusted significance values in logarithmic format.
(D) Histogram shows percentage signal change values for dynamic and static stimuli of six action categories in the action perception and social cognition clusters. Percentage signal change values were calculated based on the contrast of each stimulus condition compared to fixation. For the social cognition cluster, only right hemisphere vertices 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 designated as attention and eye movement network.
*(F) Dorsal attention network from Yeo’s 7-network parcellation. In (C) and (F) the boundaries of the corresponding clusters are shown. CREDIT: Rajimer et al. 2024*

They found 24 different brain networks have been associated with specific aspects of sensory or cognitive processing, including recognition of human faces or bodies, movement, places and landmarks, social interactions, inanimate objects, and speech.

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

When the content of a film was difficult to follow or more ambiguous like during Originactivity was increased in executive control areas of the brain. However, in easier-to-understand scenes, areas of the brain that perform specific functions, such as language processing, predominated.

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“Executive control areas tend to be active during complex tasks when cognitive load is high,” says Rajimehr. “It appears that when movie scenes are fairly easy to understand, such as when there is a clear conversation, the language areas are active.”

However, during a complex scene with a lot of context, complex language, and ambiguity, more cognitive effort is required.

“So the brain switches to using domain-general executive control,” Rajimer said.

According to the teamfiguration research could explore how brain network function differs among people of different ages, developmental disabilities, or psychiatric disorders.

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