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"Playing is the least mysterious of all trades," said Marlon Brando. But for scientists, knowing what's going on in an actor's head has always been a headache.
Now, researchers have said that spies show different patterns of brain activity depending on whether they have a character or not.
Dr. Steven Brown, the first author of research at McMaster University in Canada, said: "It seems like when you play, you repress yourself; almost as if the character possessed you. "
In the journal Royal Society Open Science, Brown and his colleagues report how 15 method actors, mostly theater students, were trained to play a role in Shakespeare – Romeo or Juliet – in a theater workshop. They were invited to answer various questions. answered in character. They were then invited to the lab, where their brains were scanned during a series of experiments.
Once inside the MRI scanner, the actors were asked to think about their answer to a number of cool puzzles that unfolded on the screen and that could have happened to the lovers. cursed, such as: would they organize a party? And would they tell their parents that they had fallen in love?
Each actor was asked to answer different questions based on four different premises assigned in a random order. In one, they were asked their own perspective; in another case, they were asked to say how they thought a close friend would react, while in a third case, they were asked to answer as if it were Romeo or Romeo. of Juliette.
The other principle involved the actors – who all had a Canadian accent – reacted from their own point of view, but with an English accent.
The results revealed that brain activity differed according to the tested scenario.
When the team looked at the trends observed when the actor thought about how his friend might react and compared them to those triggered by his own response, she found a drop in activity in certain areas of the prefrontal cortex. These changes were similar to those seen in previous "mind theory" experiments – in other words, the ability to infer how others might think or feel. .
When the actors were in the character, the team noticed a similar change, suggesting that when they acted, individuals use certain knowledge, or inferences, of third persons on their character.
However, the team also reported finding a further reduction in activity in two areas of the prefrontal cortex related to self-sense, compared to when actors reacted autonomously.
"The disabling associated with a reduction, a deletion, knowledge of your own traits corresponds, I think, to what the act may involve," Brown said. A similar drop in activation occurred when the actors changed focus, but responded from their own perspective – something suggested by Brown supports the idea that the gestures can be a useful way to play a role.
Only by responding as a Romeo or Juliet did the actors also show an increase in activity in an area called the Precuné, which is related to consciousness and aspects of attention, among others, compared to the situation where they answered themselves.
"The actors have to divide their consciousness, they have to somehow watch themselves and be in the character at the same time," Brown said, through an explanation.
However, Professor Philip Davis, director of the Center for Research on Reading, Literature, and Society at the University of Liverpool, was not impressed by the research, claiming that play, c & # 39; is much more than improvising one's character or "pretending" to be someone's embodying the text and the language.
Indeed, says Davis, far from being suppressed, the actors are inspired by it. "This [research] suggests that you isolate yourself and do something else – you disable yourself, "he said. "But in fact, [actors] also use parts of oneself that they would not use otherwise. "
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