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