Neurovid: Neurocinema

Could film directors someday use brain-scanning techniques to test the funniness, scariness, and emotional content of their films? Well, one producer, Peter Katz, is giving it a try right now with the help of MindSign Neuromarketing. Katz & Co. strapped a young woman into an fMRI to watch a few scenes from his new horror movie Pop Skull. The result is in the YouTube clip above (and in a second clip below the fold).

It’s an interesting idea, and I’m glad to see people exploring it. There are a lot of reasons focus-group testing is inadequate for this sort of work (as well as for work in politics and other areas). Wired’s GeekDad did an interview with Katz and Dr. David Hubbard, a board-certified neurologist who is the leading neurologist on the project — and Hubbard hit the nail on the head as to the problem with traditional focus-group research:

GeekDad: How much of a gap do you perceive there being between the results from old methods of focus group marketing and the results of neurocinema when it comes to screening movies?

Hubbard: Recently we scanned a subject whose brain showed only little reaction to a scary scene. On her questionnaire she dutifully wrote “I liked it,” “very scary,” although she confided to the scan technician that actually she found it boring, as did her brain. Besides the problem of focus group subjects saying what they think the interviewer wants to hear, a bigger problem is that they don’t remember what they saw a minute ago. When you ask them which scene they liked best, they can seldom remember. FMRI eliminates both these problems. We can see directly which scenes excite which regions of the brain every one to two seconds, whether the subject is aware of it, or says so or not.

Where I’d raise doubts, though, is with the idea that fMRI can tell us anything detailed about a person’s emotional reactions. The MindSign team says they looked at activation of the amygdala, because the amygdala is involved in the processing of fear, disgust, and general fight-or-flight response. Putting aside the fact that the activation patterns in the video above are shown for the whole brain (the amygdala is a very small area in the front, center of the brain), it’s still not clear exactly what amygdala activation might mean in measuring a person’s reaction to a film clip. Sure it could mean elevated fear or disgust. But it could also mean emotional processing, memory formation, reward. Perhaps one could take the view that activation is activation, and more is better. That’s what the team here seems to have done, and I suppose that’s okay, as far as it goes.

Still, given the relative infancy of fMRI and our limited understanding of what these types of cognitive results mean, if I were a studio executive shelling out for market research, I’d be more interested in eye tracking (seeing where your eyes are on the screen), skin conductance (measuring stress), and facial EMG (reading your facial expressions for emotional reaction). These techniques would probably be cheaper, they’d allow for a more natural movie-watching experience — sitting up, that is — and they’d give you more actionable information. Eye tracking in particular might be pretty cool for a horror or action movie.

Don’t get me wrong. I think this kind of experimentation is awesome. And I’m even willing to see a certain amount of “bad” science along the way — because you simply can’t get to commercial and way-out-of-the-box applications of this kind of technology without departing from research-journal standards. But it also wouldn’t be great if people shelled out a lot of money for this type of analysis, only to realize they really don’t know what the hell to do with it because it’s so damn vague.

(second clip below the fold)