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Does watching a film cliffhanger help us understand the brain?

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funds a lot of weird stuff, and in recent years more and more of it has been about the brain.

Its signature work in this field is in brain-computer interfaces and goes back several decades to its Biocybernetics program, which sought to enable direct communication between humans and machines.

In 2013, DARPA made headlines when it announced that it intended to spend more than $70 million over five years to take its research to the next level by developing an implant that could help restore function or memory in people with neuropsychiatric issues.

Less known is DARPA's Narrative Networks (or N2) project which aims to better understand how stories — or narratives — influence human behavior and to develop a set of tools that can help facilitate faster and better communication of information.

“Narratives exert a powerful influence on human thoughts, emotions and behavior and can be particularly important in security contexts,” DARPA researchers explained in a paper published in the Journal of Neuroscience Methods earlier this year. They added that “in conflict resolution and counterterrorism scenarios, detecting the neural response underlying empathy induced by stories is of critical importance.”

This is where the work on the Hitchcock movies comes in.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology recruited undergraduates to be hooked up to MRI machines and watch movie clips that were roughly three minutes long. The excerpts all featured a character facing a potential negative outcome and were taken from suspenseful movies, including three Alfred Hitchcock flicks as well as “Alien,” “Misery,” “Munich” and “Cliffhanger,” among others.

“Governments often use stories to present information, so understanding how we comprehend them is important,” co-author Eric Schumacher, an associate professor of psychology at the Georgia Institute of Technology, explained in an email.

What the researchers found is fascinating: When suspense grew, brain activity in viewers' peripheral vision decreased. Schumacher called it the “neural signature of tunnel vision.” Moments of increasing suspense were also associated with greater interference with a secondary task. In this case, responding by pressing a button when hearing a tone.

Why is this important?

The study demonstrates that when the brain is processing an “emotional threat” if you will, it affects a person's attention both spatially (vision) and conceptually (across different tasks).

“The results suggest that, when we focus on looming potential threats, we decrease our focus on the world around us,” Schumacher and his fellow researchers wrote in the journal Neuroscience.

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