Opinion – Suzana Herculano-Houzel: This is your brain watching a movie

I no longer have a brain to think about the future of Brazil, not at the moment, not for the next two weeks. After the first round, those who did this stuck out their tongues and declared fatigue, sent word that they would come back one day, preferably if and when there was good news. Those who are left are having fun participating in a congress organized by young Polish scientists, also called doctoral candidates.

Poland knew how to get out of the hole into which they were carried by Russia, invested in technology and science, and today has a delightful research program, with all the resources and cutting-edge methods of neuroscience. And it bears the Ukrainian flag everywhere, in solidarity with the refugees who made the Polish population grow by 10% in a few weeks this year — including on the screen in the beautiful auditorium of the Jagiellonian University, founded in the middle of the Middle Ages, who would have thought.

Ministry of Science and organizers spared no efforts. They brought scientists from various European and US countries, chosen by the students, to participate in the event and share their findings. They wanted to hear my new story about how brains do what they can with the resources they have, which I thought was great; every time I tell the story, I discover a new piece that I didn’t even know myself.

And they also invited Lauri Nummenmaa, a researcher at the University of Turku, Finland, who told stories of brains seeing and hearing stories, his specialty. Nummenmaa invites volunteers to watch entire movies inside his scanners while he records their brain activity. It’s the closest you get today to a naturalistic study of what the brain does while you go about your business.

With hundreds of volunteers already scanned watching films like “The Godfather”, “The Shining”, and “Star Wars”, coded scene by scene in terms of visual content, degree of movement, and type and intensity of emotions provoked, Nummenmaa has an enviable amount of data at its disposal for analysis. The stories that have emerged from his laboratory will one day be worthy of his own film, as he realistically captures the pattern of activity in the brains of normal people experiencing real emotions inspired by the lives of others.

My favorite part of their story, however, is the recent discovery that there is no stark difference in which parts of the brain are involved in experiencing different emotions. A fairly large set of structures in the cerebral cortex become more active during strong emotions, all with one fundamental thing in common: they are the structures that form the brain’s self-referential circuit, the one that ties together all the pieces of our individuality. How your body feels, your state of mind, where you are, where you come from, where you are going: all this is born out of the activity of this circuit. Therefore, if strong emotions strongly activate the self-referential system, then strong emotions strengthen the sense of “I”: they make us feel alive. As one of my idols, Bud Craig, says: I don’t “think where I exist”; I feel that I exist.

And all this can be awakened with a good movie. I think I know where I’m going to be in the next two weeks…