There’s actually nothing going on on his face, but you are reading it in because of what your just saw.
It's the assumptions we're making because we suspend our belief when watching a film.
41 Matching Annotations
- Jun 2026
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artsci.washu.edu artsci.washu.edu
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think of all the sitcoms with loud laugh tracks that compel you to laugh along.
Oh that's true, I never made that connection.
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“Well it’s because there is somebody I care about, either real or fictional, and if something good happens to them, I feel good. If something bad happens to them, I feel bad.”
It's our subconscious mind mimicking what we are aware of and making a connection to it through emotion.
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The stuff that’s going on in your brain and the stuff that’s going on in your guts, that all hangs together, and when one piece of that program is activated, it tends to activate the other pieces.
It's that "gut feeling" we always talk about.
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Your emotions start to line up with what’s happening to your body.
That's the spotlight of consciousness in our mind telling us how to react to something.
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simple learning mechanism that profoundly shapes our behavior, online all the time, and we don’t just turn that off when we go into the theater.
But people do become dull to this mechanism if they are not engaging in it all the time and just staying online.
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These mechanisms are pretty fast, difficult to override, and automatic,
It's like something built in us already, like how consciousness was built in us.
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we have to suspend is our belief, our engagement in the thing, because most of the stuff we experience is real.
That's different, but I get it, because to suspend our belief, we need awareness.
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emersion—it just means that I got sucked into the movie—and I would realize 20 minutes later that I had missed all the stuff that I was trying to attend to.
It's the flow state we enter when we let go control of our consciousness when watching a film.
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www.labroots.com www.labroots.com
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movies can change the whole-brain hierarchical organization
This reminds me of what someone in Michael Pollan's book said about how our consciousness is like a stage and what our consciousness decides to put a spotlight on depends on our subconscious.
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This hierarchy flattens while people watch movies.
Is that why older people like my dad fall asleep in movie theaters?
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The work indicated that the brain doesn't require as much computation during movie-watching compared to when people are at rest,
So our brain and consciousness are working less when watching a film compared to resting. People should watch more films then.
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he Empire Strikes Back, Erin Brockovich, Home Alone, Inception, and Ocean's Eleven.
Those are all amazing films, especially the Ocean's trilogy. They are the throwback movies that I can always rewatch.
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Watching a movie is both motivating and soothing, in a way that is different from just letting our minds wander; it's also not usually stressful in a way that problem-solving tasks can be.
It's like the free/flow state that our consciousness goes into when watching a film, it doesn't mean it's not working. It still is, it's just working in a freer and less stressful way.
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danielmiessler.com danielmiessler.com
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When you’re in a mindful state you can witness the incoming comment, and the thought or feeling of being angry, and the feeling will dissipate under your attention.
It's exactly like how we react to emotions displayed in films.
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There is nothing in your life that you experience outside of the lens of consciousness.
Pollan touches on that in his book, and he came to the conclusion that awareness is part of consciousness.
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I tried and failed to get into meditation for decades.
Me too man, I struggle with meditation as well.
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lfi.org.ly lfi.org.ly
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quench the thirst of the imagination.
When our consciousness is exposed to more, then our imagination is much more as well.
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Purposeful films often lack the commercial support enjoyed by commercial films and superficial entertainment
Like when The Shawshank Redemption first came out, it flopped really badly, cause it didn't have the commercial support like Avengers or Disney movies do, but that film is one of, if not the greatest, film that has purpose and impact on our minds.
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plastic pollution is equal in its impact to hundreds of scientific volumes on global warming.
Films give our brain not just information but perspectives.
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producing a culture that flows through the veins of society.
That's why pop culture references exist, and people who have seen more films or have good taste in films are much more fun to talk to than most boring people.
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especially in realistic films that resemble our daily stories.
When our conscious mind is able to make a connection to other things that are relatable.
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Here, the viewer is transformed from an ordinary recipient into an emotional participant, and the image etches an eternal mark within the folds of their awareness.
Even though what we're watching is fake, that's not the first thing that hits our awareness. It's the emotion and reaction that hit our awareness first.
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responds to images and drama in a way it does not respond to direct moral preaching.
Like the Mirror Rule Zack was talking about.
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into a tangible pulse and deep emotion.
The reason being it's tangible is because when we start watching a movie we forfeit control of our consciousness to the film director when watching a film.
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serving as an educational tool capable of penetrating minds and hearts simultaneously.
That depends on what kind of films you watch, films like Training Day or Goodfellas leave a lasting impression on our minds, but not something like Avengers or something like that.
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Every scene adds a new painting to the recipient’s mind, preserved in their cognitive perception.
When our consciousness makes a real-world connection with the film, it then preserves this new painting.
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In the dusk of darkened halls, as a beam of light slips from the heart of the projector to strike the white screen, worlds of shifting echoes are born. Destinies are forged that the viewer never anticipated.
That was a very poetic and dramatic introduction.
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thisisyourbrain.com thisisyourbrain.com
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And I think when we think about our media diets, we want to think about a very healthy diet that’s not all loaded up on empty sugar.
I like this part, it's telling us to have variety and have some control in our consciousness by acknowledging the need to balance.
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And it’s also the case that exposure to violence chronically has modest but measurable influences on people’s behavior.
So if you're constantly exposed to violence, then your subconscouisnely more likely to act violently.
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And whether they’re in film or in real life, experiences are going to serve as triggers, serve as cues, unmask ideas.
It's like what one of the researchers in Michael Pollan's book said, how our consciousness is a well point and thoughts, actions, and experiences are the river.
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they didn’t distinguish well between information that they’ve gotten from the movies and information they’ve gotten from their buddies or from the newspaper.
Since our brain made this connection subconsciously between what's in the real world and what's in the film through commonality, we can't differentiate it.
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It’s like these are the objects and these are the people. And here’s what they’re doing. And here’s why.
So even when our eyes are being overloaded with stuff, our consciousness when watching a film is only focused on the object, people, and the why.
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And even when we deliberately monitor and try to detect edits as they’re happening, it’s kind of surprising how many you can miss.
I think we're missing it because of the explosion that's going off in the back.
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whereas if you cut frequently and you keep things in close up, everybody’s going to be looking in the same place at the same time.
So engagement is also something that comes from our consciousness.
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Anything that’s a transient signal in your environment, your perceptual systems will tend to Orient towards.
Since cars exploding and gunshots are not something that is normal to us or to our consciousness. We react to it faster and are more engaged in it.
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If we want to drive big signals in the brain, the most powerful way to do it is with movies.
I wonder why that is even though like he said our brain how gone through evolution for millions of years and yet film has only been around for 100 years and somehow our brain has evolved to understand film and be stimulated by it.
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And some of that is this fast, automatic processing.
Our consciousness is mimicking what we see on a subconscious level.
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The mirror rule says that other things being equal, if you see somebody doing something, you might want a prep a response to do that same thing.
That's very interesting and new to me. Is that why babies react to physical reactions instead of words from their parents?
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For example, we can ask people about how tense or relaxed things feel moment by moment.
This goes back to what Christof Koch said in A World Appears, how feeling is consciousness, and to feel is to have consciousness.
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And so to give people experiences that were complex and naturalistic. But repeatable, we turned to movies.
I like how he said that from a neuroscience viewpoint, something that is complex but at the same time is natural and relatable for our brain/consciousness is movies.
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