Weekly Roundup: Your Brain Watching a Movie, Your Brain's Behavioural Catalogue, Learning Skills, Shocking Research Into Memory Formation
The week's roundup of all things the brain and human behaviour
This week the usual bunch of fascinating research into the brain from watching movies, to engaging in behaviours, to memory refreshing. I’ve also been working hard on the opening chapter of he handbook of Your Brain in Business. Paying subscribers expect a section on high-performing brains: your predictive brain in the next few days.
What Happens in Your Brain While You Watch a Movie?
Almost all brain scanning studies into brain networks are done while individuals are either at rest - which means a person could be thinking about anything - or while doing isolated targeted tasks. However, there are studies into what happens when people watch movies but often isolated scenes.
Reza Rajimehr et al. wanted to find out more about brain networks while engaged in more complex activity and therefore reviewed the data they could find and found studies with a total of 176 individuals watching different types of movies scenes. These were collected as part of the human connectome project - a massive project in the US to identify how the brain connects up.
From this they analysed activity during separate scenes which included people, animals, objects, music, speech, and narrative.
As you can imagine, there is a lot happening. Specifically they identified 24 networks - which I include here, in case you’re interested:
From Reza Rajimehr et al. 2024
Open access here
The researchers noted an inverse relationship between executive control centres in the frontal lobes and other areas. When scenes were ambiguous or hard to understand activity ramped up in executive control functions, working hard to make sense of the scene - while this happened other areas diminished in activity. So watching films can give your cognitive regions a workout! But only under certain conditions.
What also struck me is that there are still large regions that are, grey, practically inactive. This seems to include the motor cortex, logically, watching is a passive activity with no movement, and large temporal regions at the side of the brain. Surprising because this regions associated with language processing but also emotion and memory.
The research averages activity in those 176 individuals, but the researchers are now aiming to zoom in on individuals to see how individual activity differs - I imagine it will be similar but different because of individual associations or preferences. I look forward to that research.
But for now we know that watching movies activates a lot. But from passive activity while watching movies to activity of the brain while processing behaviours.
Your Brain Selects Behaviours From Its Catalogue of Behaviours
I found this research particularly fascinating. For a number reasons - one that I have noticed in my work giving workshops that there seems to be a decrease in the “generalisablity” of behaviour or learning in participants. What I mean is that fewer people can generalise activity, or learning, and think of how to apply this in different scenarios. This is an important feature of intelligence and one that I will discuss more in the chapter on the Section on High-Performing Brains in The Handbook of Your Brain in Business.
An example of generalisable behaviour might be in cooking in everyday life, or in playing sports. When cooking we have certain “modules” that can be selected and used again and again in different recipes and with different foods. The brain can plan and preselect an activity even if cooking a new recipe. Obviously the more “modules” we have the easier it becomes.
Mohamady El-Gaby et al. of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at UCL and University of Oxford conducted a series of clever experiments with mice.
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