6 Ways Movies Screw With Your Brain Without You Noticing

There's also the fact that a good crying episode never happens during a moment of trauma, but later on, when things have calmed down. Planning a trip can be stressful, so it's possible that when you're sitting there doing nothing, your body says, "Eh, might as well let it all out now" and turns on the waterworks. Of course, if you're watching a Pixar movie, you can't blame the plane -- those guys have a drill-sergeant-like knack for ruining your tear ducts.

A big part of its success lies in the fact that Bernard Herrmann's score for the film replicated the animal sounds of "panic in nature," hearkening back to our primate days. This made it super terrifying, even if we didn't fully comprehend why. These types of semi-subliminal scores aren't relegated to horror, either. A study found that even dramas employ this tactic, because the goal of tragedy is similarly to unsettle (and serve as an excuse for makeout sessions).

Even crazier, some movie soundtracks are using a sneakier tactic to mess your shit up: infrasound. An "extreme bass wave" that makes Barry White look like Barry Manilow, infrasound is below what the human ear can detect. This can have a disquieting effect on people, even causing anxiety and nausea without the viewer ever knowing why. The movie Irreversible used this tactic, because apparently the producers didn't think the explicit rape scenes would be quite unnerving enough without the magic anxiety music.

So good news: Maybe you felt sick because of science, and not basic human empathy!

Paranormal Activity might have also used infrasound on the soundtrack, which could explain why people who saw it in the theater were in a constant state of fear, whereas people who watched it at home without the proper sound system wondered why they were watching surveillance footage without getting the hourly pay of a security guard.

It seems weird that we somehow accept that. Why isn't it a glaringly obvious, movie-ruining moment when the stunt double shows up in place of the guy we've been watching up until this point? Why doesn't Terminator 2 totally go off the rails when Arnold Schwarzenegger disappears and the love child of Ray Liotta and Madam Tussauds' wax mannequin of David Hasselhoff shows up in his place?

TriStar Pictures

TriStar Pictures
"I'll be back (when it's not so scary)."

Even in less intense scenes, like Captain Picard throwing a punch and tackling a guy, it's plainly obvious that after Patrick Stewart winds up his fist, he is magically replaced by a guy who looks like Stewart's podiatrist.

CBS Television Distribution

CBS Television Distribution
Maybe it's Mirror Universe Picard, but he went bald on his chin?

Why do our brains not call bullshit on this incongruity? According to a study, the answer is something called a "continuity field." Researchers found that if we see two different faces within a small span of time, we perceive them as the same. We evolved this feature so things like light shifting across someone's face won't make us think that they're a different person entirely, and a pair of glasses won't trick us into believing that a famous superhero is, say, a mild-mannered reporter.

This is the reason stunt doubles are usually able to evade our perception in short bursts, and possibly also why we will never not think Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton are the same person.

Well, it turns out that this is a measurable phenomenon. Recruiting a bunch of test subjects presumably looking for a research project that didn't involve shooting lasers at their genitals, a cognitive psychologist at Georgia Tech studied the effects of suspense movies on the human brain. The experiment called for subjects to be shoved into an MRI machine to study their brain patterns as they watched different movie scenes -- mostly from the oeuvre of master of suspense / torturer of women Alfred Hitchcock. The scenes were bordered by a flickering checkerboard pattern -- it was kind of like watching a video while simultaneously playing chess after you ingested your weight in mushrooms.

To simulate the effect, kindly spin your monitor around for five minutes.

The effect was even more distracting than trying to watch a movie in a theater full of rowdy teenagers and/or bored married couples engaging in pseudo-exhibitionist sex acts. And yet, the study revealed that during moments of high suspense, the brain narrowed its focus, tuning out its perception of the periphery, even though it was still as frenetic as a Pokemon at a coke party. The area of the brain associated with the edges of the visual field quieted down, while the one related to the visual center went nuts. What's more, in another study, researchers found that the brain will follow the plot structure of Hitchcock movies even if the viewer is in vegetative state, which should be awesome news for Michael Bay fans.

It turns out that movies are exploiting something our brains evolved to do. According to neuroscientist Jeffrey M. Zacks, your brain "treats what it's seeing on the screen as if it were real," the gullible sap. More to the point, in what he calls the "mirror rule" humans are compelled to behave how those around us do. Unless you're some kind of sociopath, when someone cries, you yourself become sad. If someone's laughing, you're likely to join in, even if you only overheard the end of the joke and have no idea what's so funny. It's how humans have evolved not to seem like total D-bags when interacting with others.

These impulses have been ingrained in our behavior far beyond the relatively recent invention of movies, so our brains are in a sense tricked by a movie which elicits these emotions, despite the lack of actual interaction. Zacks also talks about his "success rule": If a human response is successful, you repeat it, even if you look like a total dork doing it in a movie theater. That's why you may flinch during an action scene, or test yourself for venereal diseases during the 3D Metallica movie.

g-stockstudio/iStock/Getty Images
Or viewing a John Holmes and Ron Jeremy double retrospective.

"You've got to do something a little extra to override those natural responses," says Zacks. So don't feel dumb the next time a 3D movie makes you duck, or you accidentally think Reese Witherspoon is your best friend. That's just how your dumb brain works.

But easily the best example of the Uncanny Valley in cinema is The Polar Express, the story of a boy's trip to the North Pole to see Santa as told by a screensaver-like animation of a bunch of characters who vaguely look like hollow shells of Tom Hanks. Society as a whole seemed creeped out by this movie, but probably didn't understand why. Well, here's a fun explanation: What's the ultimate thing that looks like a person, but isn't alive? Dead people.

Yep, a lot of researchers have theorized that the human horror of the Uncanny Valley is linked to our fear of the sick, or even corpses. We evolved to fear corpses because they're packed with diseases, and we had to learn to avoid potential carriers of that stuff.

Warner Bros.
Or conductors, if you will.

Even putting aside our fear of catching sickness from dead people, remember that we also fear plain old death. Scholars believe that Uncanny Valley inhabitants can "elicit fear because they can provide a conscious or subconscious reminder of death." So the next time you're forced to sit through The Polar Express with your family during the Christmas season, remember that the reason Tom Hanks is so freaky is because your brain is telling you he's a festering corpse, and to stay the hell away. Hopefully, psychologists can now turn their attention to even greater mysteries, like why the fuck do elf versions of Aerosmith show up at the end of this movie. Seriously, why did that happen?

Warner Bros.
He looks more alive than the real Steve Tyler, but that's not saying a lot.

Also check out 4 Flawed Life Lessons Movies Accidentally Taught Us and 6 Mind-Blowing Easter Eggs Hidden In Famous Movies.

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