At the Movies: Brains in Sync

The researchers said the experiment showed ‘‘a surprising tendency for brains to tick together’’.

Overall levels of brain activity rose and fell in a consistent pattern, with peaks corresponding to climactic events like gunfire, the lead researcher, Prof Rafael Malach of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, said. By contrast, there was little correlation among the patterns in a group of subjects in a darkened scanner.

Specific regions flashed on and off simultaneously, Professor Malach said, with the areas known to be involved in the processing of facial images activated in close-ups, while a neighbouring region was turned on for vistas.

The point of the research was not gauging the universality of Clint Eastwood’s appeal. Rather, it sought to find a way around a methodological handicap of the growing field of brain-activation research. Experiments mostly involve static tasks meant to focus on one brain region at a time, Malach said, but the brain does not work that way. Giving subjects a more natural task let researchers ‘‘find what a brain area ‘likes to see’ without the need to have any preconceived notion of its functionality,’’ he said.

The New York Times News Service