Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Video: Inside an actor's brain
guardian.co.uk: "As part of a new exhibition on human identity, actor Fiona Shaw agreed to have her brain scanned while performing parts of TS Eliot's poem The Waste Land"
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3 comments:
A single case-study of a single actor's brain is interesting, but imagine an elaborate study of brain-scans with a variety of actors and different roles. Something tells me that an opera singer utilizes many similar parts of the brain as a film actor, but there are also differences worth exploring. Acting and performance is such a subjective act, putting data and numbers to it is absolutely fascinating, especially if mapping out bio-chemical reactions of what is actually happening. It would be interesting to see an expansion to several forms of art and how "creativity" can be defined and measured in an MRI scan. It's a little uncomfortable and fascinating thinking that art may someday be explained through brain chemistry.
This is incredibly interesting as art, but it falls short as science. The experiment should be repeated over multiple test subjects with all the controls the scientific method warrants.
However, the human brain is fascinating, especially as we construct and form identities. I am unfamiliar with psychology behind it, but to me, an outside observer, actors in abandoning or changing their selves, run romantically close to controlled mental disorders. There are claims that Heath Ledger OD because of what playing the Joker did to him; what it meant to take on a psychotic killer and loose yourself in the role. I don't know if this is true - it's certainly morbid - but there is a certain romanticism about fluid identity.
This brain scan is fun as a novelty, but to actually reach any sort of new knowledge of conclusion, one would have to repeat this test with thousands of actors from a variety of backgrounds performing a plethora of different dramatic genres. Anything that marries art and science is pretty cool, because we think of the two fields as so fundamentally different but they can actually inform each other in a million different ways.
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