May 26, 2025 • 48 mins
Why do movies work so well? What does film reveal about the way the brain processes reality? What does any of this have to do with omniscience, simulation, jumping around in time, or why dogs don’t do story? Join Eagleman with guest Jeffrey Zacks, cognitive scientist at Wash U, as we dive into the peculiar magic that happens when the lights go down, the screen glows to life, and we find ourselves pulled into the world of a film.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Why do movies work so well? What does film reveal
about the way that the brain process is reality? And
what does any of this have to do with omniscience
or simulation or jumping around in time, or why dogs
don't do story or what you would think if you
saw aliens bluing all their attention to purple spheres. Welcome
(00:31):
to Entercosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and
an author at Stanford and in these episodes, we examine
brains to understand who we are and where we're going.
(01:00):
There's a peculiar kind of magic that happens when the
lights go down and the screen glows to life, and
we find ourselves pulled into another world. We find ourselves
in lots of new places. We become hobbits or hit men,
or lonely robots or star crossed lovers. We might find
(01:22):
ourselves in a courtroom showdown or an alien invasion. And
for the next two hours, we're not just watching something,
We're feeling it and living it. And I mean this physically.
Your heart beats faster when the protagonists on the screen
is in danger. You can physically weep at losses that
(01:43):
are someone else's. You root for people who don't exist,
and your brain genuinely enjoys triumph when that person succeeds
after all that they went through. So the bottom line
is that you can sit in front of a flat
screen and you're perfectly still, but your brain experiences movement
(02:04):
and depth and emotion and social connection and victories. So
to appreciate how weird this is, imagine that we landed
on some alien planet and we saw that at any
given moment, about half these funny looking aliens are carrying
around purple spheres and they're staring at these things like catnip,
(02:27):
and we would wonder what these purple spheres are. And
if you were a zeno neuroscientist who studied alien brains,
you'd suspect that something is going on with these spheres. Neurally,
whatever it is, the purple sphere is doing something exciting
to the alien's normal brain function. And whatever the sphere
(02:50):
was doing, these aliens liked it, or they couldn't stop
or whatever. So flip the script and imagine what it
would be like if some alien species came here and
they were hovering around over our planet, and what they
would see is billions of humans seating themselves in front
of flat screens. Most of these humans have these screens
(03:13):
installed on their walls where they live, and there are
big spaces where bunches of humans gather around to look
at a single screen, and increasingly the humans have figured
out how to shrink these down to carry these screens
around in their pocket. So the question the alien would
ask is how is it that something made of pixels
of light and little bits of sound can reach so
(03:37):
deep inside of the humans. And that's not a trivial question.
In neuroscience, we're still working to figure out many of
the mysteries of that question. It goes straight to the
heart of what it means to have a brain that
constructs reality, not just from sensory input, but from stories.
(03:58):
Our brains are narrative machines. They carve time into chunks,
they make predictions, they fill in the blanks, they form
internal models of what might happen next. And this is
the neural technology that allows us to navigate the real world.
But it also means that we are astonishingly susceptible to
(04:19):
being pulled into the unreal world, at least for now.
Movies are one of the most sophisticated forms of unreality
that we've invented. They manipulate time and space. They guide
our attention. They compress months into moments, They stretch seconds
into minutes. Often, what movies do is they bypass the
(04:42):
slow machinery of conscious thought and cut straight to the unconscious.
They use music and editing and facial expressions and body
language to cue us about what to feel and when
to feel it. And the most fascinating part is that
we go along with it. We forg get that we're
sitting in a theater or in our living room. Our
(05:04):
brains suspend disbelief, not by turning off, but by doing
exactly what they're wired to do, to make sense of
the world through sensation and story, even when that world
is completely invented. And this gives us some clues about
what is running in our brains under the hood, Because
(05:25):
when we watch a movie, our brains don't just observe.
They simulate, They mirror, they empathize. Brain regions involving vision
and movement and memory and prediction and pain. These all
get involved. When a character throws a punch towards the camera.
Our visual systems cause our motor systems to flinch when
(05:48):
two people kiss on screen. Our oxytocin system stirs when
a plot twist defies our expectations, our rewards circuits light
up like we just solved a puzz And the line
between film and memory can even blur. So sometimes people
will recall a moment from a movie as though it
(06:09):
were from their own memory. Some movie scenes feel more
vivid and emotionally charged than things that actually happen to us.
So all of this leads to a set of questions
that reach beyond the movie theater. What does film reveal
about the way that the brain processes reality. What tricks
(06:30):
of editing or framing or timing speak to our perceptual systems.
How does storytelling, and especially visual storytelling, exploit the quirks
of our cognition. So I'm very happy to be joined
today by doctor Jeff Zachs. He's a professor of psychological
and brain sciences at Washington University in Saint Louis, and
(06:52):
he's the author of Flicker Your Brain on Movies. His
research bridges cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and media studies, and his
book is about what is going on inside your skull
when you're caught up in a story on the screen.
So grab your popcorn and settle in. We're going to
find out what happens when your brain goes to the movies. So, Jeff,
(07:19):
from a neuroscience perspective, what is going on in the
brain when we sit in a dark theater and we
surrender it to story.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
So the first thing is the same stuff that's going
on in the rest of your life. Our brains evolved
to deal with a complex, dynamic environment and being in
front of a film is one of those, and being
out in the world is one of those. And to
be honest, in lots of ways, it doesn't care that much.
(07:48):
Which is which and why is that?
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Why when you're sitting in front of a flickering screen
does your brain not care so much?
Speaker 2 (07:56):
One big reason in evolutionary terms is that movies are young, right,
moves have been around for a little less than one
hundred and thirty years, and we haven't experienced significant brain
evolution in that time. And another important piece is even
those of us who are real media addicts that diet
(08:16):
is being interspersed with a lot of experience being in
a three D world where we're locomoting and acting and
all of that is integrated and training each other up
all the time, and so it's not like the experiences
of being in a screen are reshaping our brains in
a major way.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
Now, the way you set this up in the book
is you talked about the mirror rule and the success
rule as a way of introducing some of these ideas.
Can can you tell us what those are?
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Yeah? Sure. The mirror rule says, other things being equal,
If you see other people doing stuff, you might want
to do things that are congruent with us. So if
somebody smiles, you might want to smile back. If someone
reaches out their hand to shake yours, you might want
on a reciprocate. The success rule is just learning. It says,
(09:05):
over time, the stuff that you have learned how to
do that's worked in the past, do that this time.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
Other things being equal, And how does that apply to
watching a movie? These two rules.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
So one important way that this has big effects on
our perceptions when we're watching film is that we evoke
actions that we might perform, and we evoke emotional states
that we might experience based on what we're seeing other
people do. So, if you're seeing someone who's face is
(09:40):
eight feet high on a big screen, crying in front
of you, You're going to tend to adopt an emotional
tone that's congruent with that. If you see someone who
is lunging towards you out of the screen, you're going
to tend to flinch a little bit. So that would
be an example of the mirror rule in the first
case and the success rule in the second case.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
Okay, so you're in the theater, you're watching a movie.
You're mirroring what you're seeing on the screen. You're maybe
ducking a little bit moving when things are coming at you.
But we get deeply into the story. And one way
that you described this in your book is that we
have an event model of what is happening on the screen.
So let's dive into that.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Yeah. Sure, So as we're wandering around our complex, dynamic world,
there's islands of stability where stuff may be moving, but
it's moving in a consistent way. Like you're on a
swing and the swing is going back and forth, and
then you hop off the swing, and that island of
dynamic stability changes and we kind of march from one
(10:40):
stable regime to another and another. That's just the structure
of human experience. While you're in one of these stable regimes,
it's helpful to have a model in your head of
like what's going on If I'm on the swing, and
then my brain's processing this visual input and this motor input.
It can predict what's going to happen in your future
based on that. As soon as I hop off, it'd
(11:01):
be a good idea to update and change the parameters
of that situation. So we call those mental representations of
the current situation event models. And there's good reason to
think that a decent chunk of what the brain's doing
in normal, everyday living your life is building up a
model of what's happening now and then updating it from
(11:23):
time to time when the situation changes.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
And so when that comes to story, when we're watching
Harry Potter or a Game of Thrones or something like that,
what does an event model look like in that context?
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Yeah, So take Game of Thrones. You know, we're in
a room where there's a bunch of characters talking about
the next battle coming up, and then they walk out
of the room and a couple of them pull off
to the side to scheme and plot. And while they're
in that room, our brain is going to keep track
(11:57):
of who are the characters that are present, where they locate,
so that as you go from over the shoulder shots
and close ups, you're only seeing a couple people at
a time, which is totally like how our normal vision works. Right,
we're looking around the room, but we got a representation
of that whole scene. Then you walk outside and you've
got to update that so that you have a representation
(12:17):
of the subset of characters and the folks that are
not there, you're not expecting them to pop up. And
you're also representing that you're in a different location and
that the geometry of the stuff in that location is different.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
So this is an example. You know, in most of
my episodes, I end up talking about the internal model,
how your brain is locked in silence and darkness. You're
putting together model. One way that we do that, for example,
is with you know, your spouse or your friend or
anything like that. You're running a model of what that
person is like. But in the context of a movie,
you're running a large model of all the things that
(12:50):
have happened and might happen and what's going on there.
And that's a big part of why we live story
and experience story with the kind of depth that we do.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
Is that right, Yeah, totally. And you know that representation
of your spouse or your friend that you're hanging out with,
that's a huge part of your event model in real
life and also in film. You know, if you've got
the two characters who are sneaking off to plot their revenge,
their topic of conversation, their motives, they're affected, the way
(13:23):
that they're moving and where they're headed through the space.
All of that is a super important part of comprehending
what's going to happen. We're intensely social creatures, and so
a big part of ev models most of the time
in our models of the other people in our environment.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
That's right. Now. This is related to an issue, which
is when I was younger, I was really surprised that
movies worked because you're watching some scene, let's say, some
people plotting something inside the castle, and then you cut
to a scene where you have, you know, bearded horsemen
across the planes, and you know, you're suddenly in a
(14:03):
completely different location and different part of the plot, and
people don't scream or get surprised, but they're totally fine
to see the things switch from one to the next
in the space of a frame, So why is that?
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Yeah, so that part is really kind of bonkers that
it works, because in our real life are these continuity constraints. Right,
time doesn't jump around. Space changes like you walk through
a doorway, and that's a huge deal because the affordances
of the space totally change in a way that they
don't as you're walking within a room. But you know,
you don't walk through the doorway and wind up in France.
(14:41):
But in a movie that's totally totally normal. And my
understanding for reading the history is that early filmmakers figured
out that this was doable kind of by accident, right.
The original idea was that what we're going to do
with these cameras is we're going to film stage sets
and we're going to do things kind of like we
do theater. And just as people were putting stuff on
(15:03):
film and then looking back at the recordings and seeing
what happened when you went from one take to the other,
they realized, oh, you can do this, and the brain
is going to use the mechanisms that it uses to
update things when you walk through that doorway and apply
them to the situation where you're walking through a doorway
from one continent to another that might be hundreds of
(15:24):
years apart, and surprisingly it works.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
It strikes me, actually that we do have some discontinuities
in our lives anyway, in the sense that you know,
you go to sleep and then you wake up eight
hours later. That's a discontinuity in time and in space
and time. We often have these things where we notice
something we hadn't seen before. Suddenly a scene changes because
we realize that our friend is standing over there, or
(15:53):
there's a danger over here, and so in a sense
that our model of what's happened is suddenly flipped into
something else. And so we do have a bit of
discontinuity in our lives. But this is a really interesting
question about what do films tell us about brains? Because
as people figured out how to make movies and made
(16:16):
discoveries along the way, it gives us some insight to
what's happening under the hood.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
One of the pieces relates to the top you've covered
multiple times on the pod, which is the way that
this system for representing internal models can multiplex. So the
same machinery that we're using to simulate a model of
what's happening right now. We can drive in that case
(16:42):
the models being driven mostly by what's in front of
our eyeballs. But we can drive that same machinery by
retrieving stuff from episodic memory, by thinking about what might
happen in the future, by thinking about a story that
somebody's telling us. And so if you're wandering through your
environment and you see an old friend and that reminds
(17:06):
you of the last time you saw them, that's another
kind of discontinuity that I think is part of why
the ability to cut across time and space works is
because your brain is used to shifting these models rapidly
and across big shifts in order to think about stuff
that is offline and but related to the current situation.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
Yeah. I think one of the things that's so striking
to me about movies is that we have all these
edits and cuts and changes in camera angles, but we're
not aware of the trickery of that at all. We
just don't even notice it. Even when there's a conversation
between two people and the camera keeps switching angles, we
don't suddenly react in fear that we've changed position. It's
(17:52):
like we're a floating ghost in the scene, and it
doesn't bother us that we're moving positions all over.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
So part of the picture is that, you know, even
though the world out there is stable and doesn't move around,
our visual systems are anything but right. So we're moving
our bodies, we're moving our heads, and we're moving our
eyes a ton, and then we're blinking, and all of
(18:23):
that is maximizing our brain's estimate of the information content
that it's going to get out of the scene. Right.
It's very actively directing the eyeball to the points in
the scene that the brain at that moment thinks are
likely to be important. And it's got to do that
because we have a phobiated eyes you've discussed, and you know,
(18:46):
we've all got this tiny little bit of high resolution
sensor that's got to be pointed at the right stuff.
But I'll tell you one of my buddies in film
stays asked me a question a few weeks ago that
has totally baked noodle on this, which is that explains
the kind of camera motion where the point of view
(19:07):
of the camera is stable, but the camera is rotating
or even panning. Right. But if you think about a
simple life over the shoulder of the shot. It's totally
normal to have the camera's position jump around, So it's
not just that the camera is pointing in different directions,
but the camera's moving around the room discontinuously. And as
(19:30):
far as I know, there's no evidence that brains like
that any less though, that's a very ecologically implausible kind
of camera movement than camera movement like cuts where you're
just rotating the camera. And it seems to me that
that is surprising, Right, There's a lot.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
Of this that I find surprising, and I think this
must come back to the issue of event models. So
a scene from Batman, Let's say your you know, he's
coming off the roof, and you are behind him, the
cameras behind him as he goes off through, and then
you're below him as he's coming down, and then you
suddenly find yourself in a taxi cab sitting below and
(20:14):
a taxiab driver is eating and then the roof suddenly
dentse in as Batman lands on top of the roof.
But it doesn't bother us that we've completely switched points
of view where now with the taxi driver. I guess
it's because we have this event model running about Okay,
batman is falling, and we're happy to switch perspectives on
(20:35):
it all the time.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
I think that's exactly right. I really am mystified that
this works. But I think that the answer is going
to have something to do with the fact that these
representations are not primarily egocentric. They're what we call alicentric, right,
So they're divorced from our personal perspective, And so what
the brain is really caring about in that situation is
(20:57):
what's the thing I want to gather about information about.
So I want to get a good look at the
cab driver. If I were really there, I would kind
of crane my head and focus my eyes on them.
If the camera can just jump to in front of
the cab driver and give me that angle, as long
as it's telling me about the stuff that I'm trying
to learn about, my brain might be okay because it's
(21:19):
not so worried about the personal viewpoint on the scene.
It's building this somewhat perspectiveless representation of the scene.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
That's right, And a loose analogy here is with this
concept of mental ease, which is to say, if you're
bilingual and I tell you a joke in one language,
you might turn right around and tell it in a
second language to someone else. And so what that means
is you haven't stored my joke in a series of phonemes.
But instead it's the concept of the joke, the concept
(21:48):
of the let's call it the event model of this
person said that to this person, and so on, and
it's somehow the same thing. So when Batman is falling,
it's this thing happening in the world, and we appreciate
that we can see that from different perspectives, including the
taxi cab driver's perspective. And what really matters is the
thing itself that's happening, that's not about the egocentric perspective.
(22:30):
Does slow motion challenge the brain in any way that's
different from normal scenes?
Speaker 2 (22:35):
So I don't, I mean, I think you know a
ton more about that than I do. I don't know
that I have any genius ideas about slow mo. But no,
there's there's one there's one thing that I think is important,
which is that we can think about events on a
huge range of time scales, from like the a K
(23:01):
of a quantum particle to the heat depth of the
universe and I think that we do that by recycling
the machinery that we use to build event models on
a human scale, just like we can think about spatial
scales from against subatonic atomic particles or atoms up to
(23:27):
planets and galaxies, and we do that by using microscopes
or telescopes or drawings that take those very disparate spatial
scales and map them on to like the scale of
chairs and coffee cups and stuff. So the brain has
some way of taking these very different time scales and
mapping them onto a human scale, doing radical slowmos or
(23:51):
fast motion.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
That is totally right. It's very surprising to me always
how the brain can extrapolate the sort of things that
it knows and do different scales of space or time.
Let me ask you something else, how does the brain
react to suspense? So what do filmmakers do to generate tension?
And how do our brains respond to that?
Speaker 2 (24:11):
The brain is in to a significant degree of prediction.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Machine.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
Your brain's always trying to figure out what's coming down
the pike, and just being able to do that on
the timescale of a fraction of a second or a
few seconds is hugely helpful. Right, So if there's an
object moving quickly in your general direction, being able to
predict the exact trajectory it's going to tell you whether
you got a duck or not. If you're starting to
(24:38):
talk about your friend's surprise party and you see them
getting close enough that they might hear, being able to
predict what they're going to be able to hear in
a couple seconds is important for avoiding that social folk.
Pa and Hitchcock wrote awesome things about surprise and suspense
and how they work in film. You know, suspense is
(24:59):
often a situation where there's a couple potential outcomes in
play and you don't know how it's going to unfold.
But there's also situations where you have a piece of
information that the characters don't have, and so the ambiguity
(25:19):
is not like about whether there's a bomb in the
trunk that's going to go off, but about how the
characters are going to figure out that there's a bomb
in the trunk and whether they're going to avoid getting
blown up when it goes off. And so that's all
stimulating that prediction system, confronting it with situations where the
(25:44):
entropy is maximal, where you're like super uncertain about what's
going on on dimensions that your brain is invested in.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
And this comes back to the same issue about theory
of mind that we talked about with you know, the
cab driver who doesn't know that something's falling and suddenly
his roof caves in. It's the same thing here. We
know that there's a bomb in the trunk, and we
know that the characters don't know, and so there's the
suspense of hoping that they get there. But again, we're
(26:13):
able to take this omniscient view in a movie that
is sort of surprising. It's a it's an issue of
theory of mind in this case. So you studied how
sometimes people misremember events and films as though they were
real life memories. So what does that tell us about memory?
Speaker 2 (26:33):
More generally, our brains are encoding information about what about
what's in the scene, what happened, and also about meta
information metadata about like how did I learn about that?
Did I learn that somebody got a broken arm because
I was there and I saw it, or because a
(26:54):
mutual friend told me about it, or because I saw
it on the news. If I'm going to reason in
the future about what to do next time, I see
that person, or what to do next time I'm on
the slippery sidewalk where they fell and broke their arm.
It actually doesn't matter so much how I learn the
(27:15):
information what the metadata is. And so it turns out
that we're much better at tracking the what than the metadata,
and so that leads to these confusions, which can be
important for memory errors, especially now that we live in
a social ecology of storytelling, let alone misinformations. Misinformation is
(27:39):
a whole other ball wax, but just you know, just
normal telling each other stories for entertainment leads to the
potential to confuse stuff that I learned in the context
of entertainment with stuff that I learned in the context
that I was actually there, or it was a source
purporting to be ritical, like a news source.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
And this is the sense in which watching movies can
actually reshape our cognitive habits or the things we know,
because we essentially don't have good source memory. What that
means just for the listeners is you know, you know
what a pomegranate is, or you know that Paris is
the capital of France, but you probably can't remember when
(28:24):
and where you learned those items. You just know those
items and it may be the same thing with getting
lots of practice with some idea or heroism or doing
the right thing and so on. Movies can contribute stories
more generally can contribute to that even if you don't
remember the source, it as though it happened to.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
You totally, and we learned both like specific about specific
events like you know, my buddy broke their arm, or
about general facts about the world, like you know, the
pomegranate has seeds that you can eat. And one of
the cool subtle of reasoning that our brains just do
effortless is if I'm reading a fiction story set in
(29:07):
a world that is maybe quite different than my world
or quite different than the real world, right say it's
fantasy or science fiction, and I read that a computer
works a particular way, or I read about I don't
know how a thresher on a farm works, and I
don't know anything about threshers. People are really pretty good
(29:30):
at figuring out like is that a fact that I
can import into my fact knowledge or does that have
to stay in the science fiction world. Which that's a
super subtle form of reasoning.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
Yeah, oh that's a good one. So here's a question.
After you wrote your book. Do you feel that there
are filmmakers who can use findings from neuroscience to design
better or more emotionally impactful stories.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Yeah. And you know, one of the really awesome things
about the scientific life that I've been lucky to lead
is that I get to talk to some of my
heroes about their experiences as filmmakers. And filmmakers are amazing
psychologists and neuroscientists across the board. They don't have to
(30:19):
be like formal students of the field, and most aren't
like most people are busy, but film has been doing
these intensive experiments with many, many repetitions and large sample
sizes over more than one hundred years, with like real
money on the line. So they've learned a ton of things.
And so people even with no you know, who don't
(30:40):
read this stuff for pleasure, know a bunch of things.
And when I, you know, when I ask them questions,
they like they often know the right answers or no
answers that I didn't know were right until I ask them.
And then there are some who are like as you
may imagine, even more fun for me as a geek,
who like actually say, you know, I read this thing
in the nature briefing and like, you know, do you
(31:03):
think this would work?
Speaker 1 (31:04):
And that's super cool too, Great a couple of rapid
fire questions. Is there a particular movie that you exemplifies
what the brain loves about cinema?
Speaker 2 (31:17):
One of my favorite movies of all time is The Shining,
and The Shining is amazing for many reasons, but one
is that it plays with these model building the facilities
that we've talked about by taking just like one dimension,
like the saturation of a red or the geometry of
(31:42):
motion of a tricycle, and exaggerating it just enough so
that it crosses over from being normal to not being
totally absurd, but just being deeply disturbing. This is what
in robotics they call the uncann canny Valley. That movie
lives like half of its life in the Uncanny Valley,
and it's really it contributes a lot to the to
(32:07):
the creepiness of the film.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
Great cool. What do you see is the line between
movies and games? How's that line going to blur as
we move into the future where we can change what
is happening on the screen.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Yeah. I think there's two important dimensions. One is point
of view and field of view. So you know, traditional film,
the width of the screen would be like twenty to
three d degrees of your visual angle. So if you've
got three hundred and sixty degree view, think about you know,
a little bit less than a tenth of that to
twentieth of that. Now we can have headmounted displays or
(32:44):
immersive displays that are the full three sixty. And then
the other thing is in a movie, obviously it's recorded.
You don't have any control over what happens, and in
gaming what you do of x the world. One of
the things that's really striking about movie perception is that
(33:05):
agree to which our brains don't turn off that control part,
Like you know, we do all these little twitchy behaviors
while we're watching that indicate that the brain is trying
to like, you know, get you to run away when
the thing is lunging, or trying to get you to
lean in when it's an emotionally engaging experience. But in games,
of course, like yeah, you got like you got to
(33:25):
duck out of the way, or you're the boulder is
going to land on you. So I think those are
the those are the dimensions that are super exciting, and
those aren't secrets, Like everybody who works in those fields
is working on that stuff. And the question of like,
how do you edit in an environment where you don't
know exactly like in a three sixty wild wide field
(33:48):
of view situation, if you don't know exactly what the
person's looking at, how do you edit? And if you
need them to get a piece of information out of
the scene, how do you make sure that they turn
around and look at the character, you know, look at
the villain creeping in through the window. If they are
looking in the other direction? Is your story still going
(34:10):
to work?
Speaker 1 (34:10):
And I know you and I have both talked about
this issue of what this all is going to mean
in the future for having shared stories. So you know,
we all watch Game of Thrones, we watch the same
version of it, and we can talk about it later.
But if everyone is experiencing their own movie where they
get to do whatever and things happen that's responsive to them,
(34:34):
we no longer have shared literature. What's your take on that?
Speaker 2 (34:37):
Yeah, I think it's a really interesting open question. You know,
I think there's some reason to think that. Well, first
of all, there's a continuum, right, there's like very open
world games where you know, my experience in the game
isn't going to be anything like yours, but still there's
(34:59):
some shared stuff, like how the physics of the game works,
and what kind of objects there are, and what kinds
of things you're trying to do, and what kind of
techniques you're learning. Like being a basketball player and meeting
another basketball player who you've never played any games against.
You don't have specific shared experiences, but you've got this
shared type of experience with the skills and the objects
and the situations that come up. And then there's other
(35:22):
kinds of gaming that are much more plotty, right where
you have choices that you can make, but they're all
going to lead to the same destination, and people like
both of those kinds of experiences.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
Tell us what you mean by a temporal hierarchy and
what you're thinking about in terms of that.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
So, as you're living your life, your brain's predicting what's
going to happen in the near future. You're building up
a model of what's happening now. But it turns out
that you build those models on multiple time scales, So
there are models that update every second or so, tens
of seconds, minutes, and people like Crisot bald Asano and
(36:20):
Linda Gerligs have studied how the patterns of activity change,
so different parts of your brain lurch from one stable
pattern to another on different time scales, and those larger
time scales are associated with integrating more modalities of information
and more complex stuff. And we over many years have
(36:42):
been interested in how at those boundaries you see big
phasic changes in brain activity across the brain, and those
are hierarchically nested, and those turn out to be related.
The magnitude of those turns out to be related to
how much you remember later. So one important thing turns
(37:03):
out to be that you're not just building a model.
You're building a model that has multiple time scales, and
you've got some stable patterns that the brain is actively
maintaining for like tens of minutes, and others that are
being updated very quickly. You know, as you're looking at
a film, right, a film is going to last maybe
forty five minutes for a really short narrative film to
(37:26):
you know, four hours if you're watching Reds, and those
longer films clearly exceed the capacity of our working memory
systems to be able to maintain information in an activated state.
But by building this nested hierarchy and then by reaching
back across long term memory, the brain can build representations
(37:50):
that allow it to track plot development over these long
narrative time scales. Now, there's a whole other deal that
happens when you think about like series fiction that's so
much of us and a lot of time on now,
And it's striking, like how much you can enjoy and
really understand a series even if you can't remember what
the heck was the name of that character from the
(38:10):
other episode, or exactly what happened. And part of that
illustrates like how powerful just the emotional trajectory of the
moment as sustained by what the characters are doing right now,
and importantly the music that's lying under it is and
like just sustaining that experience. If you look at people
like dementia patients, they can have rich, interactive relationships with
(38:32):
their loved ones even if they're not tracking the details
of the plots of their lives over those longer time scales.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
You know, there's an interesting analogy here going on with
large language models, which is that they come to know you,
but of course they can't keep track of everything that
you've ever written into them, because that's just too big
a context window. So what they do is they summarize
along the way, and so what it knows about you
is the summary of the last five months of conversation.
(39:02):
And maybe there's a sense that that's what's happening. When
we watch a series, we just have sort of a
paragraph in our mind that tells us about the emotional
content of what's happening and where it is.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
Yeah, totally. You know, there's the term semanticization of memory.
We think of as something that happens over like decades,
but it's also that stuff is happening also super fast
in the nervous system.
Speaker 1 (39:25):
For the listenership. Can you define what the semanticization of
memory is about.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
Yeah, so there's this term semanticization of memory, which means
that over time things become less like I'm really living this,
reliving this detailed experience, and more like I know this
stuff and I kind of generally know about what's going on.
And that's something that we think about is happening as
memories consolidate over decades, but it also happens super fast
(39:51):
within the experience of say watching a movie.
Speaker 1 (39:56):
There's one last question I was going to ask you.
I was just curious why other animals don't enjoy movies.
As far as we can tell, obviously they're not making movies.
But even if I show to my dog a movie
on the screen and I try to get them interested
because maybe there's another dog, there's a barking dog in
the movie, he just doesn't care at all. It doesn't
hold his.
Speaker 2 (40:17):
It's so funny that you asked that. I mean, maybe
your dog is weird, because I often open my talks
with pictures of like dogs and cats and monkeys pointing
with their heads and grossed looking at screens, and some
people report these like compelling. I mean, just go on
TikTok man. There's like all kinds of videos of pets
(40:39):
interacting with screens and reacting, and I think I think
there's some really actually interesting science, Like lots of pet
animals will react to the sounds in a TV show
as if they were really happening, right, And that'll happen regularly.
The dog starts barking on the screen, and my dog
starts barking, and then there sometimes at least some animals
(41:02):
seem to be doing that same kind of stuff with
the video channel, but like what exactly they're getting out
of it. I think there's some I think there's some
science to be done.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
Right, And this is the question, is is there something
about the human brain that can appreciate story? Whereas if
I followed a dog sniffing around and something happens, and
then something else happens to this dog, I mean my
dog certainly even your dog presumably won't see it there
for half an hour and watch it.
Speaker 2 (41:28):
Yeah, you know, Okay, that is totally interesting. So I
am one hundred percent convinced that our dog has event models,
and that like the capacity to build and update event
models is pretty widely conserved across the mammalian taxa. But
I'm not sure that my dog is tracking this story. Yeah,
(41:49):
and I think we don't know that much about what
aspects of the longer time scale of gold direct did
experience other species are tracking. It's got to be related
to these, you know, these questions about chain goals and
problem solving, which are surprisingly not conserved, right. You know,
(42:13):
on the one hand, you've got these crows and other
corvids who can do these amazing chain goal things, But
then you got lots of mammals who really don't seem
to be able to do very much of that stuff.
And I suspect that the same representations that are important
for action are important for comprehension, and so I think
(42:34):
it's possible that the dog's not tracking that.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Much of the story. Yeah, it seems like this would
be a really good clue for us to dig down
on into the future, because dogs do mirror, and they
do have this successful of reinforcement learning about doing what
worked for them in the past.
Speaker 2 (42:50):
And they represent the locations of objects that are accluded
and stuff. You know, they're clearly building event models exactly,
but how they're integrating those into larger structures. It might
here's a possibility. It might be that dogs are kind
of like amnis are humans. Right, So I can build
(43:10):
a rich, detailed event model, and then as soon as
I walk out that doorway, I can't do anything with
that information from that list event model other than the
general stuff that I learned from it. Right, So I
can do learning, But the ability to pull that old
event model back and relive an experience based on that
(43:32):
that might be different across species. So that gets into
the debates about the degree to which other species share
episodic memory or episodic like memory.
Speaker 1 (43:47):
That's fascinating. And it might also be that the dog
is incapable of taking on the omniscient point of view
and understanding what it's like to be outside the story
here and here and from these different angles. They're all
kinds of aspects to visual storytelling that we naturally fall
into and enjoy. But the interesting question for us for
(44:08):
the future is what are the elements that are missing
or just slightly worse in other animals such that at
least as far as we can tell, they don't do story.
Speaker 2 (44:17):
Yeah, totally. Oh, that's an interesting one.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
So that was Jeff Zach's, professor of psychology at WashU
in Saint Louis. Our conversation tried to raise the curtain
just a bit on one of the most captivating illusions
we engage with movies, and the conversation reminds us that
the way we experience movies is not separate from real life,
but it uses the same neural machinery that we use
(44:47):
to navigate the real world. When a film cuts from
one scene to another, your brain doesn't protest, It just
fills in the blanks. It assumes continuity and it moves forward,
because that's what it evolved to do. When a character cries,
your empathic systems don't ask if it's real. They simply resonate.
(45:10):
When a jump scare makes you flinch, it's not because
you believe you are in danger. It's because your brain
can't not respond as if you were. And all of
this tells us something important, something you hear me say
every week, which is that we live inside our internal models.
We don't catch the sensory details of everything happening around us. Instead,
(45:34):
we construct general models of what is happening out there,
and movies are particularly elegant manipulations of those models. Filmmakers,
whether they know it or not, they are cognitive engineers.
They shape attention, they manipulate time, they activate emotion, and
(45:55):
we as the viewers, we're not just passive recipients. We
are co constructing the experience. When you sit in a movie,
your brain is on fire. It's stitching together fragments of
light and sound into a narrative that feels whole and meaningful.
Moment to moment, seen by scene, you work to make
(46:17):
sense of what is happening. You're guessing what is coming next.
You're feeling your way through the unfolding story. And this
is part of why movies, or more generally, stories matters
so much. It's not just that they entertain or distract us.
It's that they let us practice being human. They sharpen
(46:39):
our empathy, They give us rehearsal space for emotion. They
let us explore lives that we're never gonna live. They
let us practice choices that we are never going to face.
They let us explore futures that we are never going
to see. And all of this can happen inside the
(46:59):
safe contained simulation of a story. So the next time
you find yourself moved by a film where your heart
rate elevates, or your chest titans, or you feel a
catch in your throat, remember it's not just the story
on the screen that's affecting you. It's the extraordinary adaptive
(47:21):
prediction making meaning seeking system in your head, responding exactly
as it was built to do. Go to Eagleman dot
com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.
Check out my newsletter on substack and be a part
of the online chats there, where you can send me
(47:43):
an email at podcasts at eagleman dot com with questions
or discussion. Finally, watch the videos of Inner Cosmos on YouTube,
where you can leave comments until next time. I'm David
Eagleman and this is Inner Cosmos has not a far
Why do movies work so well? What does film reveal
about the way that the brain process is reality? And
what does any of this have to do with omniscience
or simulation or jumping around in time, or why dogs
don't do story or what you would think if you
saw aliens bluing all their attention to purple spheres. Welcome
(00:31):
to Entercosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and
an author at Stanford and in these episodes, we examine
brains to understand who we are and where we're going.
(01:00):
There's a peculiar kind of magic that happens when the
lights go down and the screen glows to life, and
we find ourselves pulled into another world. We find ourselves
in lots of new places. We become hobbits or hit men,
or lonely robots or star crossed lovers. We might find
(01:22):
ourselves in a courtroom showdown or an alien invasion. And
for the next two hours, we're not just watching something,
We're feeling it and living it. And I mean this physically.
Your heart beats faster when the protagonists on the screen
is in danger. You can physically weep at losses that
(01:43):
are someone else's. You root for people who don't exist,
and your brain genuinely enjoys triumph when that person succeeds
after all that they went through. So the bottom line
is that you can sit in front of a flat
screen and you're perfectly still, but your brain experiences movement
(02:04):
and depth and emotion and social connection and victories. So
to appreciate how weird this is, imagine that we landed
on some alien planet and we saw that at any
given moment, about half these funny looking aliens are carrying
around purple spheres and they're staring at these things like catnip,
(02:27):
and we would wonder what these purple spheres are. And
if you were a zeno neuroscientist who studied alien brains,
you'd suspect that something is going on with these spheres. Neurally,
whatever it is, the purple sphere is doing something exciting
to the alien's normal brain function. And whatever the sphere
(02:50):
was doing, these aliens liked it, or they couldn't stop
or whatever. So flip the script and imagine what it
would be like if some alien species came here and
they were hovering around over our planet, and what they
would see is billions of humans seating themselves in front
of flat screens. Most of these humans have these screens
(03:13):
installed on their walls where they live, and there are
big spaces where bunches of humans gather around to look
at a single screen, and increasingly the humans have figured
out how to shrink these down to carry these screens
around in their pocket. So the question the alien would
ask is how is it that something made of pixels
of light and little bits of sound can reach so
(03:37):
deep inside of the humans. And that's not a trivial question.
In neuroscience, we're still working to figure out many of
the mysteries of that question. It goes straight to the
heart of what it means to have a brain that
constructs reality, not just from sensory input, but from stories.
(03:58):
Our brains are narrative machines. They carve time into chunks,
they make predictions, they fill in the blanks, they form
internal models of what might happen next. And this is
the neural technology that allows us to navigate the real world.
But it also means that we are astonishingly susceptible to
(04:19):
being pulled into the unreal world, at least for now.
Movies are one of the most sophisticated forms of unreality
that we've invented. They manipulate time and space. They guide
our attention. They compress months into moments, They stretch seconds
into minutes. Often, what movies do is they bypass the
(04:42):
slow machinery of conscious thought and cut straight to the unconscious.
They use music and editing and facial expressions and body
language to cue us about what to feel and when
to feel it. And the most fascinating part is that
we go along with it. We forg get that we're
sitting in a theater or in our living room. Our
(05:04):
brains suspend disbelief, not by turning off, but by doing
exactly what they're wired to do, to make sense of
the world through sensation and story, even when that world
is completely invented. And this gives us some clues about
what is running in our brains under the hood, Because
(05:25):
when we watch a movie, our brains don't just observe.
They simulate, They mirror, they empathize. Brain regions involving vision
and movement and memory and prediction and pain. These all
get involved. When a character throws a punch towards the camera.
Our visual systems cause our motor systems to flinch when
(05:48):
two people kiss on screen. Our oxytocin system stirs when
a plot twist defies our expectations, our rewards circuits light
up like we just solved a puzz And the line
between film and memory can even blur. So sometimes people
will recall a moment from a movie as though it
(06:09):
were from their own memory. Some movie scenes feel more
vivid and emotionally charged than things that actually happen to us.
So all of this leads to a set of questions
that reach beyond the movie theater. What does film reveal
about the way that the brain processes reality. What tricks
(06:30):
of editing or framing or timing speak to our perceptual systems.
How does storytelling, and especially visual storytelling, exploit the quirks
of our cognition. So I'm very happy to be joined
today by doctor Jeff Zachs. He's a professor of psychological
and brain sciences at Washington University in Saint Louis, and
(06:52):
he's the author of Flicker Your Brain on Movies. His
research bridges cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and media studies, and his
book is about what is going on inside your skull
when you're caught up in a story on the screen.
So grab your popcorn and settle in. We're going to
find out what happens when your brain goes to the movies. So, Jeff,
(07:19):
from a neuroscience perspective, what is going on in the
brain when we sit in a dark theater and we
surrender it to story.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
So the first thing is the same stuff that's going
on in the rest of your life. Our brains evolved
to deal with a complex, dynamic environment and being in
front of a film is one of those, and being
out in the world is one of those. And to
be honest, in lots of ways, it doesn't care that much.
(07:48):
Which is which and why is that?
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Why when you're sitting in front of a flickering screen
does your brain not care so much?
Speaker 2 (07:56):
One big reason in evolutionary terms is that movies are young, right,
moves have been around for a little less than one
hundred and thirty years, and we haven't experienced significant brain
evolution in that time. And another important piece is even
those of us who are real media addicts that diet
(08:16):
is being interspersed with a lot of experience being in
a three D world where we're locomoting and acting and
all of that is integrated and training each other up
all the time, and so it's not like the experiences
of being in a screen are reshaping our brains in
a major way.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
Now, the way you set this up in the book
is you talked about the mirror rule and the success
rule as a way of introducing some of these ideas.
Can can you tell us what those are?
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Yeah? Sure. The mirror rule says, other things being equal,
If you see other people doing stuff, you might want
to do things that are congruent with us. So if
somebody smiles, you might want to smile back. If someone
reaches out their hand to shake yours, you might want
on a reciprocate. The success rule is just learning. It says,
(09:05):
over time, the stuff that you have learned how to
do that's worked in the past, do that this time.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
Other things being equal, And how does that apply to
watching a movie? These two rules.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
So one important way that this has big effects on
our perceptions when we're watching film is that we evoke
actions that we might perform, and we evoke emotional states
that we might experience based on what we're seeing other
people do. So, if you're seeing someone who's face is
(09:40):
eight feet high on a big screen, crying in front
of you, You're going to tend to adopt an emotional
tone that's congruent with that. If you see someone who
is lunging towards you out of the screen, you're going
to tend to flinch a little bit. So that would
be an example of the mirror rule in the first
case and the success rule in the second case.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
Okay, so you're in the theater, you're watching a movie.
You're mirroring what you're seeing on the screen. You're maybe
ducking a little bit moving when things are coming at you.
But we get deeply into the story. And one way
that you described this in your book is that we
have an event model of what is happening on the screen.
So let's dive into that.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Yeah. Sure, So as we're wandering around our complex, dynamic world,
there's islands of stability where stuff may be moving, but
it's moving in a consistent way. Like you're on a
swing and the swing is going back and forth, and
then you hop off the swing, and that island of
dynamic stability changes and we kind of march from one
(10:40):
stable regime to another and another. That's just the structure
of human experience. While you're in one of these stable regimes,
it's helpful to have a model in your head of
like what's going on If I'm on the swing, and
then my brain's processing this visual input and this motor input.
It can predict what's going to happen in your future
based on that. As soon as I hop off, it'd
(11:01):
be a good idea to update and change the parameters
of that situation. So we call those mental representations of
the current situation event models. And there's good reason to
think that a decent chunk of what the brain's doing
in normal, everyday living your life is building up a
model of what's happening now and then updating it from
(11:23):
time to time when the situation changes.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
And so when that comes to story, when we're watching
Harry Potter or a Game of Thrones or something like that,
what does an event model look like in that context?
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Yeah, So take Game of Thrones. You know, we're in
a room where there's a bunch of characters talking about
the next battle coming up, and then they walk out
of the room and a couple of them pull off
to the side to scheme and plot. And while they're
in that room, our brain is going to keep track
(11:57):
of who are the characters that are present, where they locate,
so that as you go from over the shoulder shots
and close ups, you're only seeing a couple people at
a time, which is totally like how our normal vision works. Right,
we're looking around the room, but we got a representation
of that whole scene. Then you walk outside and you've
got to update that so that you have a representation
(12:17):
of the subset of characters and the folks that are
not there, you're not expecting them to pop up. And
you're also representing that you're in a different location and
that the geometry of the stuff in that location is different.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
So this is an example. You know, in most of
my episodes, I end up talking about the internal model,
how your brain is locked in silence and darkness. You're
putting together model. One way that we do that, for example,
is with you know, your spouse or your friend or
anything like that. You're running a model of what that
person is like. But in the context of a movie,
you're running a large model of all the things that
(12:50):
have happened and might happen and what's going on there.
And that's a big part of why we live story
and experience story with the kind of depth that we do.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
Is that right, Yeah, totally. And you know that representation
of your spouse or your friend that you're hanging out with,
that's a huge part of your event model in real
life and also in film. You know, if you've got
the two characters who are sneaking off to plot their revenge,
their topic of conversation, their motives, they're affected, the way
(13:23):
that they're moving and where they're headed through the space.
All of that is a super important part of comprehending
what's going to happen. We're intensely social creatures, and so
a big part of ev models most of the time
in our models of the other people in our environment.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
That's right. Now. This is related to an issue, which
is when I was younger, I was really surprised that
movies worked because you're watching some scene, let's say, some
people plotting something inside the castle, and then you cut
to a scene where you have, you know, bearded horsemen
across the planes, and you know, you're suddenly in a
(14:03):
completely different location and different part of the plot, and
people don't scream or get surprised, but they're totally fine
to see the things switch from one to the next
in the space of a frame, So why is that?
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Yeah, so that part is really kind of bonkers that
it works, because in our real life are these continuity constraints. Right,
time doesn't jump around. Space changes like you walk through
a doorway, and that's a huge deal because the affordances
of the space totally change in a way that they
don't as you're walking within a room. But you know,
you don't walk through the doorway and wind up in France.
(14:41):
But in a movie that's totally totally normal. And my
understanding for reading the history is that early filmmakers figured
out that this was doable kind of by accident, right.
The original idea was that what we're going to do
with these cameras is we're going to film stage sets
and we're going to do things kind of like we
do theater. And just as people were putting stuff on
(15:03):
film and then looking back at the recordings and seeing
what happened when you went from one take to the other,
they realized, oh, you can do this, and the brain
is going to use the mechanisms that it uses to
update things when you walk through that doorway and apply
them to the situation where you're walking through a doorway
from one continent to another that might be hundreds of
(15:24):
years apart, and surprisingly it works.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
It strikes me, actually that we do have some discontinuities
in our lives anyway, in the sense that you know,
you go to sleep and then you wake up eight
hours later. That's a discontinuity in time and in space
and time. We often have these things where we notice
something we hadn't seen before. Suddenly a scene changes because
we realize that our friend is standing over there, or
(15:53):
there's a danger over here, and so in a sense
that our model of what's happened is suddenly flipped into
something else. And so we do have a bit of
discontinuity in our lives. But this is a really interesting
question about what do films tell us about brains? Because
as people figured out how to make movies and made
(16:16):
discoveries along the way, it gives us some insight to
what's happening under the hood.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
One of the pieces relates to the top you've covered
multiple times on the pod, which is the way that
this system for representing internal models can multiplex. So the
same machinery that we're using to simulate a model of
what's happening right now. We can drive in that case
(16:42):
the models being driven mostly by what's in front of
our eyeballs. But we can drive that same machinery by
retrieving stuff from episodic memory, by thinking about what might
happen in the future, by thinking about a story that
somebody's telling us. And so if you're wandering through your
environment and you see an old friend and that reminds
(17:06):
you of the last time you saw them, that's another
kind of discontinuity that I think is part of why
the ability to cut across time and space works is
because your brain is used to shifting these models rapidly
and across big shifts in order to think about stuff
that is offline and but related to the current situation.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
Yeah. I think one of the things that's so striking
to me about movies is that we have all these
edits and cuts and changes in camera angles, but we're
not aware of the trickery of that at all. We
just don't even notice it. Even when there's a conversation
between two people and the camera keeps switching angles, we
don't suddenly react in fear that we've changed position. It's
(17:52):
like we're a floating ghost in the scene, and it
doesn't bother us that we're moving positions all over.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
So part of the picture is that, you know, even
though the world out there is stable and doesn't move around,
our visual systems are anything but right. So we're moving
our bodies, we're moving our heads, and we're moving our
eyes a ton, and then we're blinking, and all of
(18:23):
that is maximizing our brain's estimate of the information content
that it's going to get out of the scene. Right.
It's very actively directing the eyeball to the points in
the scene that the brain at that moment thinks are
likely to be important. And it's got to do that
because we have a phobiated eyes you've discussed, and you know,
(18:46):
we've all got this tiny little bit of high resolution
sensor that's got to be pointed at the right stuff.
But I'll tell you one of my buddies in film
stays asked me a question a few weeks ago that
has totally baked noodle on this, which is that explains
the kind of camera motion where the point of view
(19:07):
of the camera is stable, but the camera is rotating
or even panning. Right. But if you think about a
simple life over the shoulder of the shot. It's totally
normal to have the camera's position jump around, So it's
not just that the camera is pointing in different directions,
but the camera's moving around the room discontinuously. And as
(19:30):
far as I know, there's no evidence that brains like
that any less though, that's a very ecologically implausible kind
of camera movement than camera movement like cuts where you're
just rotating the camera. And it seems to me that
that is surprising, Right, There's a lot.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
Of this that I find surprising, and I think this
must come back to the issue of event models. So
a scene from Batman, Let's say your you know, he's
coming off the roof, and you are behind him, the
cameras behind him as he goes off through, and then
you're below him as he's coming down, and then you
suddenly find yourself in a taxi cab sitting below and
(20:14):
a taxiab driver is eating and then the roof suddenly
dentse in as Batman lands on top of the roof.
But it doesn't bother us that we've completely switched points
of view where now with the taxi driver. I guess
it's because we have this event model running about Okay,
batman is falling, and we're happy to switch perspectives on
(20:35):
it all the time.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
I think that's exactly right. I really am mystified that
this works. But I think that the answer is going
to have something to do with the fact that these
representations are not primarily egocentric. They're what we call alicentric, right,
So they're divorced from our personal perspective, And so what
the brain is really caring about in that situation is
(20:57):
what's the thing I want to gather about information about.
So I want to get a good look at the
cab driver. If I were really there, I would kind
of crane my head and focus my eyes on them.
If the camera can just jump to in front of
the cab driver and give me that angle, as long
as it's telling me about the stuff that I'm trying
to learn about, my brain might be okay because it's
(21:19):
not so worried about the personal viewpoint on the scene.
It's building this somewhat perspectiveless representation of the scene.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
That's right, And a loose analogy here is with this
concept of mental ease, which is to say, if you're
bilingual and I tell you a joke in one language,
you might turn right around and tell it in a
second language to someone else. And so what that means
is you haven't stored my joke in a series of phonemes.
But instead it's the concept of the joke, the concept
(21:48):
of the let's call it the event model of this
person said that to this person, and so on, and
it's somehow the same thing. So when Batman is falling,
it's this thing happening in the world, and we appreciate
that we can see that from different perspectives, including the
taxi cab driver's perspective. And what really matters is the
thing itself that's happening, that's not about the egocentric perspective.
(22:30):
Does slow motion challenge the brain in any way that's
different from normal scenes?
Speaker 2 (22:35):
So I don't, I mean, I think you know a
ton more about that than I do. I don't know
that I have any genius ideas about slow mo. But no,
there's there's one there's one thing that I think is important,
which is that we can think about events on a
huge range of time scales, from like the a K
(23:01):
of a quantum particle to the heat depth of the
universe and I think that we do that by recycling
the machinery that we use to build event models on
a human scale, just like we can think about spatial
scales from against subatonic atomic particles or atoms up to
(23:27):
planets and galaxies, and we do that by using microscopes
or telescopes or drawings that take those very disparate spatial
scales and map them on to like the scale of
chairs and coffee cups and stuff. So the brain has
some way of taking these very different time scales and
mapping them onto a human scale, doing radical slowmos or
(23:51):
fast motion.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
That is totally right. It's very surprising to me always
how the brain can extrapolate the sort of things that
it knows and do different scales of space or time.
Let me ask you something else, how does the brain
react to suspense? So what do filmmakers do to generate tension?
And how do our brains respond to that?
Speaker 2 (24:11):
The brain is in to a significant degree of prediction.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Machine.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
Your brain's always trying to figure out what's coming down
the pike, and just being able to do that on
the timescale of a fraction of a second or a
few seconds is hugely helpful. Right, So if there's an
object moving quickly in your general direction, being able to
predict the exact trajectory it's going to tell you whether
you got a duck or not. If you're starting to
(24:38):
talk about your friend's surprise party and you see them
getting close enough that they might hear, being able to
predict what they're going to be able to hear in
a couple seconds is important for avoiding that social folk.
Pa and Hitchcock wrote awesome things about surprise and suspense
and how they work in film. You know, suspense is
(24:59):
often a situation where there's a couple potential outcomes in
play and you don't know how it's going to unfold.
But there's also situations where you have a piece of
information that the characters don't have, and so the ambiguity
(25:19):
is not like about whether there's a bomb in the
trunk that's going to go off, but about how the
characters are going to figure out that there's a bomb
in the trunk and whether they're going to avoid getting
blown up when it goes off. And so that's all
stimulating that prediction system, confronting it with situations where the
(25:44):
entropy is maximal, where you're like super uncertain about what's
going on on dimensions that your brain is invested in.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
And this comes back to the same issue about theory
of mind that we talked about with you know, the
cab driver who doesn't know that something's falling and suddenly
his roof caves in. It's the same thing here. We
know that there's a bomb in the trunk, and we
know that the characters don't know, and so there's the
suspense of hoping that they get there. But again, we're
(26:13):
able to take this omniscient view in a movie that
is sort of surprising. It's a it's an issue of
theory of mind in this case. So you studied how
sometimes people misremember events and films as though they were
real life memories. So what does that tell us about memory?
Speaker 2 (26:33):
More generally, our brains are encoding information about what about
what's in the scene, what happened, and also about meta
information metadata about like how did I learn about that?
Did I learn that somebody got a broken arm because
I was there and I saw it, or because a
(26:54):
mutual friend told me about it, or because I saw
it on the news. If I'm going to reason in
the future about what to do next time, I see
that person, or what to do next time I'm on
the slippery sidewalk where they fell and broke their arm.
It actually doesn't matter so much how I learn the
(27:15):
information what the metadata is. And so it turns out
that we're much better at tracking the what than the metadata,
and so that leads to these confusions, which can be
important for memory errors, especially now that we live in
a social ecology of storytelling, let alone misinformations. Misinformation is
(27:39):
a whole other ball wax, but just you know, just
normal telling each other stories for entertainment leads to the
potential to confuse stuff that I learned in the context
of entertainment with stuff that I learned in the context
that I was actually there, or it was a source
purporting to be ritical, like a news source.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
And this is the sense in which watching movies can
actually reshape our cognitive habits or the things we know,
because we essentially don't have good source memory. What that
means just for the listeners is you know, you know
what a pomegranate is, or you know that Paris is
the capital of France, but you probably can't remember when
(28:24):
and where you learned those items. You just know those
items and it may be the same thing with getting
lots of practice with some idea or heroism or doing
the right thing and so on. Movies can contribute stories
more generally can contribute to that even if you don't
remember the source, it as though it happened to.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
You totally, and we learned both like specific about specific
events like you know, my buddy broke their arm, or
about general facts about the world, like you know, the
pomegranate has seeds that you can eat. And one of
the cool subtle of reasoning that our brains just do
effortless is if I'm reading a fiction story set in
(29:07):
a world that is maybe quite different than my world
or quite different than the real world, right say it's
fantasy or science fiction, and I read that a computer
works a particular way, or I read about I don't
know how a thresher on a farm works, and I
don't know anything about threshers. People are really pretty good
(29:30):
at figuring out like is that a fact that I
can import into my fact knowledge or does that have
to stay in the science fiction world. Which that's a
super subtle form of reasoning.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
Yeah, oh that's a good one. So here's a question.
After you wrote your book. Do you feel that there
are filmmakers who can use findings from neuroscience to design
better or more emotionally impactful stories.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Yeah. And you know, one of the really awesome things
about the scientific life that I've been lucky to lead
is that I get to talk to some of my
heroes about their experiences as filmmakers. And filmmakers are amazing
psychologists and neuroscientists across the board. They don't have to
(30:19):
be like formal students of the field, and most aren't
like most people are busy, but film has been doing
these intensive experiments with many, many repetitions and large sample
sizes over more than one hundred years, with like real
money on the line. So they've learned a ton of things.
And so people even with no you know, who don't
(30:40):
read this stuff for pleasure, know a bunch of things.
And when I, you know, when I ask them questions,
they like they often know the right answers or no
answers that I didn't know were right until I ask them.
And then there are some who are like as you
may imagine, even more fun for me as a geek,
who like actually say, you know, I read this thing
in the nature briefing and like, you know, do you
(31:03):
think this would work?
Speaker 1 (31:04):
And that's super cool too, Great a couple of rapid
fire questions. Is there a particular movie that you exemplifies
what the brain loves about cinema?
Speaker 2 (31:17):
One of my favorite movies of all time is The Shining,
and The Shining is amazing for many reasons, but one
is that it plays with these model building the facilities
that we've talked about by taking just like one dimension,
like the saturation of a red or the geometry of
(31:42):
motion of a tricycle, and exaggerating it just enough so
that it crosses over from being normal to not being
totally absurd, but just being deeply disturbing. This is what
in robotics they call the uncann canny Valley. That movie
lives like half of its life in the Uncanny Valley,
and it's really it contributes a lot to the to
(32:07):
the creepiness of the film.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
Great cool. What do you see is the line between
movies and games? How's that line going to blur as
we move into the future where we can change what
is happening on the screen.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Yeah. I think there's two important dimensions. One is point
of view and field of view. So you know, traditional film,
the width of the screen would be like twenty to
three d degrees of your visual angle. So if you've
got three hundred and sixty degree view, think about you know,
a little bit less than a tenth of that to
twentieth of that. Now we can have headmounted displays or
(32:44):
immersive displays that are the full three sixty. And then
the other thing is in a movie, obviously it's recorded.
You don't have any control over what happens, and in
gaming what you do of x the world. One of
the things that's really striking about movie perception is that
(33:05):
agree to which our brains don't turn off that control part,
Like you know, we do all these little twitchy behaviors
while we're watching that indicate that the brain is trying
to like, you know, get you to run away when
the thing is lunging, or trying to get you to
lean in when it's an emotionally engaging experience. But in games,
of course, like yeah, you got like you got to
(33:25):
duck out of the way, or you're the boulder is
going to land on you. So I think those are
the those are the dimensions that are super exciting, and
those aren't secrets, Like everybody who works in those fields
is working on that stuff. And the question of like,
how do you edit in an environment where you don't
know exactly like in a three sixty wild wide field
(33:48):
of view situation, if you don't know exactly what the
person's looking at, how do you edit? And if you
need them to get a piece of information out of
the scene, how do you make sure that they turn
around and look at the character, you know, look at
the villain creeping in through the window. If they are
looking in the other direction? Is your story still going
(34:10):
to work?
Speaker 1 (34:10):
And I know you and I have both talked about
this issue of what this all is going to mean
in the future for having shared stories. So you know,
we all watch Game of Thrones, we watch the same
version of it, and we can talk about it later.
But if everyone is experiencing their own movie where they
get to do whatever and things happen that's responsive to them,
(34:34):
we no longer have shared literature. What's your take on that?
Speaker 2 (34:37):
Yeah, I think it's a really interesting open question. You know,
I think there's some reason to think that. Well, first
of all, there's a continuum, right, there's like very open
world games where you know, my experience in the game
isn't going to be anything like yours, but still there's
(34:59):
some shared stuff, like how the physics of the game works,
and what kind of objects there are, and what kinds
of things you're trying to do, and what kind of
techniques you're learning. Like being a basketball player and meeting
another basketball player who you've never played any games against.
You don't have specific shared experiences, but you've got this
shared type of experience with the skills and the objects
and the situations that come up. And then there's other
(35:22):
kinds of gaming that are much more plotty, right where
you have choices that you can make, but they're all
going to lead to the same destination, and people like
both of those kinds of experiences.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
Tell us what you mean by a temporal hierarchy and
what you're thinking about in terms of that.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
So, as you're living your life, your brain's predicting what's
going to happen in the near future. You're building up
a model of what's happening now. But it turns out
that you build those models on multiple time scales, So
there are models that update every second or so, tens
of seconds, minutes, and people like Crisot bald Asano and
(36:20):
Linda Gerligs have studied how the patterns of activity change,
so different parts of your brain lurch from one stable
pattern to another on different time scales, and those larger
time scales are associated with integrating more modalities of information
and more complex stuff. And we over many years have
(36:42):
been interested in how at those boundaries you see big
phasic changes in brain activity across the brain, and those
are hierarchically nested, and those turn out to be related.
The magnitude of those turns out to be related to
how much you remember later. So one important thing turns
(37:03):
out to be that you're not just building a model.
You're building a model that has multiple time scales, and
you've got some stable patterns that the brain is actively
maintaining for like tens of minutes, and others that are
being updated very quickly. You know, as you're looking at
a film, right, a film is going to last maybe
forty five minutes for a really short narrative film to
(37:26):
you know, four hours if you're watching Reds, and those
longer films clearly exceed the capacity of our working memory
systems to be able to maintain information in an activated state.
But by building this nested hierarchy and then by reaching
back across long term memory, the brain can build representations
(37:50):
that allow it to track plot development over these long
narrative time scales. Now, there's a whole other deal that
happens when you think about like series fiction that's so
much of us and a lot of time on now,
And it's striking, like how much you can enjoy and
really understand a series even if you can't remember what
the heck was the name of that character from the
(38:10):
other episode, or exactly what happened. And part of that
illustrates like how powerful just the emotional trajectory of the
moment as sustained by what the characters are doing right now,
and importantly the music that's lying under it is and
like just sustaining that experience. If you look at people
like dementia patients, they can have rich, interactive relationships with
(38:32):
their loved ones even if they're not tracking the details
of the plots of their lives over those longer time scales.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
You know, there's an interesting analogy here going on with
large language models, which is that they come to know you,
but of course they can't keep track of everything that
you've ever written into them, because that's just too big
a context window. So what they do is they summarize
along the way, and so what it knows about you
is the summary of the last five months of conversation.
(39:02):
And maybe there's a sense that that's what's happening. When
we watch a series, we just have sort of a
paragraph in our mind that tells us about the emotional
content of what's happening and where it is.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
Yeah, totally. You know, there's the term semanticization of memory.
We think of as something that happens over like decades,
but it's also that stuff is happening also super fast
in the nervous system.
Speaker 1 (39:25):
For the listenership. Can you define what the semanticization of
memory is about.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
Yeah, so there's this term semanticization of memory, which means
that over time things become less like I'm really living this,
reliving this detailed experience, and more like I know this
stuff and I kind of generally know about what's going on.
And that's something that we think about is happening as
memories consolidate over decades, but it also happens super fast
(39:51):
within the experience of say watching a movie.
Speaker 1 (39:56):
There's one last question I was going to ask you.
I was just curious why other animals don't enjoy movies.
As far as we can tell, obviously they're not making movies.
But even if I show to my dog a movie
on the screen and I try to get them interested
because maybe there's another dog, there's a barking dog in
the movie, he just doesn't care at all. It doesn't
hold his.
Speaker 2 (40:17):
It's so funny that you asked that. I mean, maybe
your dog is weird, because I often open my talks
with pictures of like dogs and cats and monkeys pointing
with their heads and grossed looking at screens, and some
people report these like compelling. I mean, just go on
TikTok man. There's like all kinds of videos of pets
(40:39):
interacting with screens and reacting, and I think I think
there's some really actually interesting science, Like lots of pet
animals will react to the sounds in a TV show
as if they were really happening, right, And that'll happen regularly.
The dog starts barking on the screen, and my dog
starts barking, and then there sometimes at least some animals
(41:02):
seem to be doing that same kind of stuff with
the video channel, but like what exactly they're getting out
of it. I think there's some I think there's some
science to be done.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
Right, And this is the question, is is there something
about the human brain that can appreciate story? Whereas if
I followed a dog sniffing around and something happens, and
then something else happens to this dog, I mean my
dog certainly even your dog presumably won't see it there
for half an hour and watch it.
Speaker 2 (41:28):
Yeah, you know, Okay, that is totally interesting. So I
am one hundred percent convinced that our dog has event models,
and that like the capacity to build and update event
models is pretty widely conserved across the mammalian taxa. But
I'm not sure that my dog is tracking this story. Yeah,
(41:49):
and I think we don't know that much about what
aspects of the longer time scale of gold direct did
experience other species are tracking. It's got to be related
to these, you know, these questions about chain goals and
problem solving, which are surprisingly not conserved, right. You know,
(42:13):
on the one hand, you've got these crows and other
corvids who can do these amazing chain goal things, But
then you got lots of mammals who really don't seem
to be able to do very much of that stuff.
And I suspect that the same representations that are important
for action are important for comprehension, and so I think
(42:34):
it's possible that the dog's not tracking that.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Much of the story. Yeah, it seems like this would
be a really good clue for us to dig down
on into the future, because dogs do mirror, and they
do have this successful of reinforcement learning about doing what
worked for them in the past.
Speaker 2 (42:50):
And they represent the locations of objects that are accluded
and stuff. You know, they're clearly building event models exactly,
but how they're integrating those into larger structures. It might
here's a possibility. It might be that dogs are kind
of like amnis are humans. Right, So I can build
(43:10):
a rich, detailed event model, and then as soon as
I walk out that doorway, I can't do anything with
that information from that list event model other than the
general stuff that I learned from it. Right, So I
can do learning, But the ability to pull that old
event model back and relive an experience based on that
(43:32):
that might be different across species. So that gets into
the debates about the degree to which other species share
episodic memory or episodic like memory.
Speaker 1 (43:47):
That's fascinating. And it might also be that the dog
is incapable of taking on the omniscient point of view
and understanding what it's like to be outside the story
here and here and from these different angles. They're all
kinds of aspects to visual storytelling that we naturally fall
into and enjoy. But the interesting question for us for
(44:08):
the future is what are the elements that are missing
or just slightly worse in other animals such that at
least as far as we can tell, they don't do story.
Speaker 2 (44:17):
Yeah, totally. Oh, that's an interesting one.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
So that was Jeff Zach's, professor of psychology at WashU
in Saint Louis. Our conversation tried to raise the curtain
just a bit on one of the most captivating illusions
we engage with movies, and the conversation reminds us that
the way we experience movies is not separate from real life,
but it uses the same neural machinery that we use
(44:47):
to navigate the real world. When a film cuts from
one scene to another, your brain doesn't protest, It just
fills in the blanks. It assumes continuity and it moves forward,
because that's what it evolved to do. When a character cries,
your empathic systems don't ask if it's real. They simply resonate.
(45:10):
When a jump scare makes you flinch, it's not because
you believe you are in danger. It's because your brain
can't not respond as if you were. And all of
this tells us something important, something you hear me say
every week, which is that we live inside our internal models.
We don't catch the sensory details of everything happening around us. Instead,
(45:34):
we construct general models of what is happening out there,
and movies are particularly elegant manipulations of those models. Filmmakers,
whether they know it or not, they are cognitive engineers.
They shape attention, they manipulate time, they activate emotion, and
(45:55):
we as the viewers, we're not just passive recipients. We
are co constructing the experience. When you sit in a movie,
your brain is on fire. It's stitching together fragments of
light and sound into a narrative that feels whole and meaningful.
Moment to moment, seen by scene, you work to make
(46:17):
sense of what is happening. You're guessing what is coming next.
You're feeling your way through the unfolding story. And this
is part of why movies, or more generally, stories matters
so much. It's not just that they entertain or distract us.
It's that they let us practice being human. They sharpen
(46:39):
our empathy, They give us rehearsal space for emotion. They
let us explore lives that we're never gonna live. They
let us practice choices that we are never going to face.
They let us explore futures that we are never going
to see. And all of this can happen inside the
(46:59):
safe contained simulation of a story. So the next time
you find yourself moved by a film where your heart
rate elevates, or your chest titans, or you feel a
catch in your throat, remember it's not just the story
on the screen that's affecting you. It's the extraordinary adaptive
(47:21):
prediction making meaning seeking system in your head, responding exactly
as it was built to do. Go to Eagleman dot
com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.
Check out my newsletter on substack and be a part
of the online chats there, where you can send me
(47:43):
an email at podcasts at eagleman dot com with questions
or discussion. Finally, watch the videos of Inner Cosmos on YouTube,
where you can leave comments until next time. I'm David
Eagleman and this is Inner Cosmos has not a far
Host
David Eagleman
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