Wherefore art thou, Romeo? Method acting requires less brain power than being yourself
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Publicly released:
2019-03-13 11:01
Actors experience a 'loss of self' when they portray fictional characters, according to Canadian researchers who scanned the brains of actors while they were recreating the famous balcony scene in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Once the actors were in character, brain activity reduced across the board, particularly in the frontal lobes. The authors suggest this means that playing a character deactivates several sections of your brain.
Journal/conference: Royal Society Open Science
Link to research (DOI): 10.1098/rsos.181908
Organisation/s: McMaster University, Canada
Media release
From: The Royal Society
The neuroscience of Romeo and Juliet: An fMRI study of acting
Everyone plays multiple roles in daily life – for example “spouse” or “employee” – but these roles are all facets of the “self”. Compared to such everyday role-playing, actors are required to portray other people and to adopt their gestures, emotions, and behaviors. Consequently, actors must think and behave as the characters they are pretending to be. We used functional MRI to identify brain regions preferentially activated when actors portray a fictional character. The results showed that, compared to being oneself, portraying a character produced global reductions in brain activity. Portraying a character through acting might therefore represent a “loss of self”.
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