{"id":106,"date":"2011-09-12T11:03:14","date_gmt":"2011-09-12T18:03:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/?p=106"},"modified":"2011-09-12T11:03:14","modified_gmt":"2011-09-12T18:03:14","slug":"this-is-your-brain-on-art-sizzle-sizzle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/2011\/09\/this-is-your-brain-on-art-sizzle-sizzle.html","title":{"rendered":"This Is Your Brain On Art (sizzle sizzle)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo: “O is for Occipital Lobe” by Eric on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons license.<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n

Kristin Shumaker is a closet neuroscientist masquerading as a lowly, hardworking production manager at Dell\u2019Arte<\/a>, a theatre and school in Blue Lake, California.\u00a0 She spends most of her time now coordinating the busy production schedule of the Dell\u2019Arte organization, but in a past life she studied biology, and she has remained fascinated with the physiological effects of theatre.\u00a0 She wants to know what art does to the brain.<\/div>\n

She\u2019s not the only one.\u00a0 But unlike many of the others, she decided to do something about it.\u00a0 So on October 30, 2010, Shumaker pasted a bunch of electrodes to her forehead, hooked them up to a computer, and tracked her brain\u2019s electrical signals while watching a live performance.\u00a0 She recorded the humming of her synapses, so to speak, and now she\u2019s trying to figure out what it means.<\/p>\n

This is a follow-up post to an earlier post, \u201cSyncing Brainwaves Through the Fourth Wall<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 After I wrote that, I heard about someone right in my own backyard who was actually attempting to examine brainwaves in conjunction with theatrical attendance.\u00a0 Pretty cool stuff!\u00a0 A version of this will appear in print in Theatre Bay Area<\/em> <\/a>magazine in October.<\/p>\n

Working in conjunction with the psychology department at Humboldt State University, Shumaker is attempting to to use electroencephalography<\/a>, more commonly known as EEG, to measure what\u2019s the science world calls \u201caffect,\u201d and what most laypeople would call \u201cemotion.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m looking at what are called alpha asymmetry scores,\u201d Shumaker says.\u00a0 \u201cWhen you take readings of electrical activity through electrodes on the skin above the prefrontal cortex, you can tell by the changing differences between the scores on the left and right sides what is happening with affect, or emotion\u2014so the actual emotional experiences of a person can be tracked, in a way, using these asymmetry scores.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shumaker believes that research like this may actually be able to shed some light on some of the fundamentals that make theatre so unique and transformative.<\/p>\n

\u201cTheatre is an excellent medium for helping us start to understand aesthetic experiences that are extremely complicated,\u201d says Shumaker.\u00a0 \u201cUnlike simple conversation, which is complex enough, theatre combines everything from physical movement to auditory and visual stimuli.\u201d<\/p>\n

For what is viewed as a largely passive group, the audience is actually very active during any sort of interaction.\u00a0 Think about it.\u00a0 What is it like when you\u2019re in a really good theatrical event?\u00a0 Your body and your brain are on a sort of stationary rollercoaster\u2014you experience emotions, physical responses, things both so big you can\u2019t ignore them (a jerk when surprised) and so small you\u2019d never notice (an eye twitch, a smirk).<\/p>\n

What\u2019s hard is that our standard methods of trying to assess an audience\u2019s experience generally fall short in terms of being able to accurately gauge immediate response.\u00a0 This can happen for a variety of reasons, ranging from general politesse to a wish to avoid quantifying their experience.<\/p>\n

The way Shumaker puts it is, \u201cPost-performance surveys and lobby chatter, from a social psychology standpoint, just aren\u2019t super useful.\u00a0 People have all kinds of tricks of memory and biases that they reflect when they talk about something.\u00a0 Getting to something physiological gives us a clearer picture of what people are actually experiencing.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a way, brain research is the hard-science twin of Theatre Bay Area\u2019s ongoing research into the intrinsic impact of art<\/a>.\u00a0 Whereas with intrinsic impact we\u2019re talking about abstract concepts like empathy, emotion, social connection and intelligence, the avenues being explored in neural research are actually attempting to show the development of pathways, of connections.\u00a0 And each strengthens, or has the potential to strengthen the other.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a potential, hypothetically, many, many years from now, that you could ask somebody about the impact of a piece of art on, for example, their empathetic response to others, and then you could go back and look at their brain activity as they experienced the art piece.\u00a0 Essentially, hypothetically, you could see empathy forming in the brain like a line drawing slowly filling with color.\u00a0 Maybe.<\/p>\n

Imagine a world in which particular answers on a paper (or online) survey about an event were correlated with known brain activity\u2014actual changes in the brain occurring\u2014and we would be able to reasonably extrapolate our immediate and long-term effects based on a few simple questions.\u00a0 Or imagine further that we are able to image a particular section of the brain and actually watch the synapses connect, pathways form\u2014and then go back later and see how (and if) that pathways are still in use.\u00a0 What if there was a way to visualize increased empathy?\u00a0 To showcase deeper critical thinking?<\/p>\n

Right now, unfortunately, the technology isn\u2019t really there (and it\u2019s unclear what it would actually be able to show, if it were).\u00a0 There are two technologies, fMRI<\/a> and EEG, and each is both useful and problematic in its own way.\u00a0 fMRI is very spatially exact (you can tell exactly where something is happening in the brain), but is both hard to use remotely (it\u2019s bulky) and not terribly exact in terms of time (it measures changes in blood flow and temperature, which doesn\u2019t happen instantaneously).\u00a0 EEG, on the other hand, is great on time (can measure exactly when something happens), and you can see things down to parts of seconds, and it can travel (it\u2019s just a set of electrodes that can be connected wirelessly to a computer), but you can\u2019t pinpoint where in the brain something is happening (it measures impulses on the scalp, so can only get general positioning).\u00a0 What is needed, really, is the best of both.<\/p>\n

Of course, theatre people often don\u2019t really need fancy machines to tell you what\u2019s going on in the brains of the audience.\u00a0 They just have to walk into a darkened hall during a show, \u201cfeel the room,\u201d and they\u2019ll know.<\/p>\n

This is the type of phenomenon that really interests Kristin Shumaker.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the theatre,\u201d says Shumaker, \u201cas much time as I spend looking at what\u2019s happening on stage, I also look at what\u2019s going on in the house.\u00a0 And now, I\u2019m actually in the position to watch the people who have worked on the show, too.\u00a0 So not only am I looking at the audience\u2019s reaction, I\u2019m looking at the reactions of the people who created the show to that audience\u2019s reaction.\u201d<\/p>\n

If at its core art is about transformation of the individual, is it really so much to ask that that transformation be manifest, not simply theoretical \u2013 that in essence we be able to show what communication through art is actually, physically doing to people? Have we wandered into the world of science fiction?\u00a0 Are we asking too much, boxing ourselves in, attempting to demonstrate a physical manifestation of something that is closer to affecting the soul?<\/p>\n

Watching is how we learn everything we do.\u00a0 It\u2019s how we learn to use a spoon, it\u2019s how we learn to stand, walk, ride a bike.\u00a0 We watch our parents to learn how to live with others.\u00a0 We gain empathy from seeing empathy in action, we gain prejudice from seeing prejudice take place.<\/p>\n

In a way, theatre is a bottled-up version of the most basic moral and intellectual lessons of life.\u00a0 As someone said, \u201cLife without the boring bits.\u201d\u00a0 Another way of saying that is that theatre, and all the arts, are like an incredibly concentrated perfume, pulling in all of the most valuable things we hold within ourselves as human and placing them on stage for an audience to see, and dropping the boring bits at home.<\/p>\n

Theatre artists may look at a lot of this and say, \u201cWell, yeah.\u201d\u00a0 That\u2019s often the case.\u00a0 We are experts at inherently knowing the effect that we have on people, the power of the work that we do.\u00a0 It\u2019s not a coincidence that Kristin Shumaker is so alone in attempting to tackle this question of measuring brain activity while watching performance.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel like I\u2019m in a tough place right now because I\u2019m doing this essentially as an amateur,\u201d she says.\u00a0 \u201cBut the professionals, so to speak, haven\u2019t really thought about culture yet.\u00a0 It seems to them like it\u2019s just too big a question to take on, you know?\u00a0 Too many variables.\u00a0 But I think they\u2019ll get there.\u201d<\/p>\n

When we say we are reflecting back the human experience on the audience, we\u2019re not just blowing smoke. While Shumaker has yet to be able to scale up her work, and is also still sorting out how to take the piles of data generated by just one person watching one show and turn them into something analyzable, a lot of this research suggests that the storytelling mode that is so central to live theatre is literally causing brains to hum in tune, to transform, to engage.\u00a0 To crackle with common electricity, creating a flickering synchronicity across audience members that allows us all to experience something together and engage in communal discourse\u2013even while sitting silent in a darkened room.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photo: “O is for Occipital Lobe” by Eric on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons license. Kristin Shumaker is a closet neuroscientist masquerading as a lowly, hardworking production manager at Dell\u2019Arte, a theatre and school in Blue Lake, California.\u00a0 She spends most of her time now coordinating the busy production schedule of the Dell\u2019Arte organization, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":107,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5,4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-106","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-advocacy","8":"category-main","9":"category-research","10":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}