We all know Alfred Hitchcock as the "Master of Suspense." The iconic filmmaker has made a career out of giving seemingly simple stories eerie and unimaginable twists.
Other than studying Hitchcock's work in film school, we don't often associate his movies with scientific research, or even science fiction for that matter. However, a recent study shows that the famed director's work can be used to help us better understand the brain.
After watching a Hitchcock film, a man who had been in a vegetative state for 16 years showed brain activity similar to healthy individuals, according to a recent study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In the study, 12 healthy volunteers and the man in a vegetative state watched a 1961 episode of the TV show "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" while lying motionless in a magnetic-resonance scanner.
In the 8-minute clip that is meant to elicit suspense in the viewer, a 5-year-old carries around a partially loaded gun, believing it to be a toy. The girl shouts "Bang!" every time she points the revolver at someone with her finger on the trigger.
The dozen healthy participants had similar brain activity, especially in parts of the brain linked to higher cognition and processing sensory information. Interestingly, the 34-year-old male participant in a vegetative state showed similar patterns of brain activity that were "actually indistinguishable from a healthy participant watching the movie," according to Adrian Owen, one of the authors of the study. The man has also gone to the movie theater every Wednesday since losing consciousness at the age of 18 after being assaulted.
"The reason Alfred Hitchcock is such a great movie-maker in this context is that his movies are filled with layers of inference and deduction, and he uses a lot of foreshadowing," Owen told Nature. "All those things require executive processing. Those aren't things that go on unconsciously."
For example, when the child in the film is about to fire the gun at her mother, viewers may think back to how many bullets she loaded the gun with in the previous scene.
The study may make a case for the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging in detecting the consciousness of people in vegetative states, Russell Poldrack, a cognitive neuroscientist at Stanford University not involved in the study, told Nature. Although he said this is a "solid" case study, Poldrack said he would like to see studies with more non-responsive participants and better proof that certain aspects of the film, such as foreshadowing, relate to similar brain activity between people in healthy and vegetative states.
Whether it's suspense, fear or sadness, Hitchcock's films always inspire a lot of feelings from viewers. It should make us all happy to know that the director's famous works can also be used for something even greater than entertainment.
