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A study has revealed an astonishing phenomenon: in the middle of a performance, when the actors hear their first name, the cortex is able to suppress their own awareness of themselves.
“To be or not to be, that is the question?”, the famous quote from the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare could not better illustrate the latest study conducted by the Neuroscience Institute at University College London. According to their research, when actors adopt a new persona, they are able to suppress their daily “self” at the cerebral level. A datum which means that theater training and acting can have a significant effective impact on the fundamental mechanisms of the human brain. The research, very serious, is published in Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
Brain imaging used in real time, during acting
To verify their theory, the team of scientists did not hesitate to invest the boards, and to work with a theater group which offers interactive productions of Shakespeare for autistic people and their families.
She equipped the actors with wearable brain imaging technologies developed at UCL’s Department of Biomedical Engineering, as well as physiological measuring devices, to assess the actors’ brain activity as they rehearsed scenes from the A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Shakespeare.
Self-awareness fades in favor of the role
The results showed that when the actors heard their own name during the performance, their response was suppressed directly in the brain’s left anterior prefrontal cortex, which is typically associated with self-awareness. The same result was seen consistently in all six actors who were tested in rehearsals multiple times over the course of a week. Meanwhile, when the performers weren’t in acting conditions, they reacted quite normally to hearing their own names. And their prefrontal cortex too.
Dwaynica Greaves, the lead author of the study, confirms these amazing results:
“The cry of a person’s name is a powerful, convincing sound that normally turns the subject’s head. It also engages the prefrontal cortex of the brain. However, our results suggest that actors can learn to suppress their sense of self when they train in acting and adopt a different persona.”
Brains are also synchronized between actors
As part of the study, the researchers also looked at interpersonal coordination between pairs of actors rehearsing together, to see how they synchronize their bodies, heartbeats and brains. Also surprisingly, the team found that during rehearsals there were similar patterns of activity in the right inferior frontal gyrus and the right frontopolar cortex of the brains of two actors working together. Synchronization was not observed on heartbeats or respiration, however, showing that there are specific brain systems that are coordinated during complex social interactions.
According to Dwaynica Greaves, lead author of the study, this latest research opens up an even new field in neuroscience: “Our findings indicate that collaboration with the theater industry could be useful in producing theories about social interaction that could also be studied in the real world”. The theater seems like a playground perfect experimental:
“Our lab will continue to study the effects of theater training on an actor’s sense of self, in the hope that theater training may aid in the development of important social cognitive abilities.”
Neuroscience and Shakespeare could well teach us more about how the brain works…