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Your Brain After a “Boo!”: The Neuroscience Behind Horror Films
Nagarakanti, Sindhu Callahan, Anna Miller, Laura Anne Rahman, Ridwana
Nagarakanti, Sindhu
Callahan, Anna
Miller, Laura Anne
Rahman, Ridwana
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2024-05-20
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Psychology and Neuroscience
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As Marion Crane steps into her shower at the Bates Motel and closes the curtain behind her, she experiences a short-lived sense of security. The soothing sounds of running water accompany the satisfaction spread across her face. Her expressions of relief quickly turn into terror, as a faceless figure attacks a now petrified and helpless Marion, and the sequence ends with a close-up shot of Marion’s lifeless eyes. The camera pans to the soothing sounds of water that the audience once associated with safety [1]. This shower scene from Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 horror film, constitutes one of horror’s most iconic sequences. So, what exactly makes this scene so terrifying for the audience? Is it the suspenseful shadow slowly appearing through the shower curtain? The sudden close-up shots showing fear on Marion Crane’s once untroubled face? Or, could it be the unsettling violin screeches that accompany the equally unsettling sequence?
Films, especially horror movies, engage the audiences’ brains through acting performances, sound, and cinematography. The connections between neuroscience and cinema reveal an emerging field of “neurocinema.” For example, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) allows researchers to explore brain activity during the duration of a film [2]. fMRI identifies blood-oxygen-level-dependent changes that occur during neuronal activity, after the brain encounters a stimulus or performs a task; a large increase in activity in specific brain regions is measured by the intensity of images shown from the fMRI [3]. Watching a movie in an fMRI machine allows researchers to investigate how our brains respond to a movie stimulus by identifying brain regions where response times were similar between participants of a study using a technique called inter-subject correlation (ISC) [2]. With a push for the use of naturalistic stimuli in cognitive neuroscience research, exploring the effects of horror films on the human brain can also approximate how our brains behave in our everyday lives [4]. Therefore, investigating how horror films impact our brains encourages further research on the brain’s intersection with cinema.
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Sabio, J., Nagarakanti, S., Callahan, A., Miller, L.A., Rahman, R., & Schmidt, H. (2024). Your Brain After a “Boo!”: The Neuroscience Behind Horror Films. Grey Matters, 7, 38- 41.
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Available at: https://greymatterstu.squarespace.com/fcspring24/your-brain-after-a-boo-the-neuroscience-behind-horror-films
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Grey Matters, Iss. 7, Spring 2024
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