The Empathic Screen: Cinema and Neuroscience

by Vittorio Gallese, Michele Guerra, Frances Anderson (Translator)

Why do people go to the movies? What does it mean to watch a movie? To what extent is the perceived fictional nature of movies different from our daily perception of the real world?

We live in a time where the power of images has strongly invaded our everyday life, and we need new instruments and methods to better understand our relationship with the virtual worlds we inhabit every day. Taking cinema as the beginning of our relationship with the world of moving images, and cognitive neuroscience as a paradigm to understand how the images engage us, The Empathic Screen develops a new theory of film experience, exploring our brain-body interaction when engaging with and watching a film. In this book, film theory and neuroscience meet to shed new light on cinema masterpieces, such as The Shining, The Silence of the Lambs, and Toy Story, and explore the great directors from the classical period to the present.

Taking a radical new approach to understanding the cinema, the book will be fascinating reading for cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, psychologists, philosophers, and film and media scholars.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science

262 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 2015

About the author

Vittorio Gallese is professor of human physiology at the University of Parma, Italy with appointments in the departments of neuroscience, psychiatry and psychology. He is an expert in neurophysiology, neuroscience, social neuroscience, and philosophy of mind. Gallese is one of the discoverers of mirror neurons. His research attempts to elucidate the functional organization of brain mechanisms underlying social cognition, including action understanding, empathy, and theory of mind.

Reviews

[Pate Duncan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Modest findings in neuroscience are given the inflated theoretical importance of explaining the foundations of our empathetic engagement with film while also somehow working as a unifying theoretical epoxy that smooths over the schisms between continental, analytic, psychoanalytic, cognitivist, classical, and postmodern philosophy and film theory. Hogwash stretched thin by a vested interest in making mirror neurons a magic bullet (Gallese pretty much discovered them) and Guerra’s fast-and-loose application of film theory of all stripes as the specific mechanism for such importance.

[Silvia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Compré "The Empathic Screen" de Vittorio Gallese y Michele Guerra, para armar mi bibliografía básica del marco teórico de mi trabajo final de Maestría. El tema de mi TFM se trató del paso de la Neurocinemática (disciplina emanada de la aplicación de las neurociencias para entender la experiencia cinematográfica desde el espectador) y el Neuromarketing (metodología actual en los estudios de mercado que utiliza las herramientas de las neurociencias y los descubrimientos neurocientíficos para entender las respuestas no-conscientes del consumidor). El libro de Gallese es básicamente un compendio de las investigaciones que el autor ha realizado en la última década con respecto a la empatía y las emociones , desde la perspectiva del cerebro.
La obra es muy útil sobre todo para comprender los fenómenos que ocurren dentro de nosotros cuando nos entregamos al placer del cine. En este sentido, como gran aportación del libro de Gallese es la validación de la Teoría de la Simulación Encarnada (Embodied Simulation Theory), que propone que la experiencia cinematográfica surge desde dentro del individuo -comenzando desde la percepción misma -, y no, como tradicionalmente se pensaba al hablar de la teoría del cine, de la interpretación en tercera persona de un espectador desde su cognición.
Particularmente interesante el papel de las neuronas espejo y los capítulos sobre la edición y la yuxtaposición de imágenes, que empírica e intuitivamente, emplearon de forma magistral cineastas como Godard, Fellini, Hitchcock y Kubrick, por ejemplo, y la activación de los centros emocionales de las audiencias.
Muy recomendable.

[Louis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bello, strafigo, interessante, se solo non dovessi ridare l'esame di fisiologia per la terza volta