I found an interesting article on a piece of research that was done by Queen Mary University of London and University College London to determine if the human brain reactivates mental representations of past events during new experiences to make meaning from the new experience (Fadelli, 2023). The actual research paper is a complex read and I do not have the neuroscience knowledge to follow the entire research methodology, however, I was able to follow the descriptive part of the research and conclusions and I believe that it supports the notion that film narrative can have an inadvertent, or in the case of the film I intend to make, intentional educational value.
The researchers already knew from previous research that the brain can replay events from the past, but this was usually linked to spatial navigation tasks, i.e., the ability to replay a route that has been taken previously. This particular research had been done with rodents, not humans, however it is not hard to translate this to a person being able to recall how to get to a place they have been to before by replaying the route.
The researchers already knew that the human brain chunks information into smaller pieces that can later be recalled. An example of chunks or parcels of narrative, might be how you think about the day you have just had in chunks; you drove to work, you had coffee at work, you had a meeting, you went to lunch, you worked at your computer, etc. A parcel, or chunk of information is termed an ‘event’, and switching between one event and the next, happens at ‘event boundaries’ (Hahamy, Dubossarsky and Behrens, 2023, p.1080). Event boundaries happen when the context of what is happening changes.
However, for a person to understand a narrative, to make sense of it, needs more than just chunking or parceling ‘the ongoing stream of information into events and storing them into memory. Following an ongoing narrative requires relations to be drawn between each current event and contextually relevant past events’. The researchers argue that for quite some time already it has been proposed is that ‘remote past information could be integrated with incoming sensory information’ (Hahamy, Dubossarsky and Behrens, 2023, p.1080).
The researchers designed an experiment to see if they could ‘elicit the replay of past events as observed in rodents, but during non-spatial daily experiences’ information’ (Hahamy, Dubossarsky and Behrens, 2023, p.1080). To do this, they asked the experiment participants to watch a movie or listen to audio recordings of a narrated story while recording their brain activity using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner to look for any indications in the brain that the person was replaying past events, particularly during transitions between scenes (Hahamy, Dubossarsky and Behrens, 2023). Trying to identify if this was happening between scenes, was associated with an ‘event boundary’ occurring when a film moved from one scene to the next. Simply put the question they asked was ‘would our brains replay past information that is needed for interpreting a scene we had just perceived?”
They used movies because for them, film simulated real word experiences (apparently, they hadn’t been reading Baudrillard!) and films are made up of events that ‘should be linked together to understand the overall narrative’ (Hahamy, Dubossarsky and Behrens, 2023, p.1080). Apparently, they hadn’t read Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The Time-Image either. Nonetheless, it is understood that what they refer to as ’natural narrative’ for a film would follow a classic linear narrative structure. The film they used was Episode 1 of the BBC’s television series ‘Sherlock’.
This experiment is interesting because my film needs to serve an educational purpose, while at the same time be convincing as a story in its own right. Some of the issues that I want to address from an educational achievement perspective are concerned with mindsets and actions around subjects that may not be encountered on a daily basis, such as incidents with security/cyber-security, not making assumptions about the safety of an operation and developing habits that communicate safety concerns or suspicions. The problem with these issues is that they are not encountered on a daily basis, making them unrelatable for the target audience. When we train air traffic controllers (ATCOs) to deal with situations that don’t often (thankfully) occur in real operations, such as aircraft experiencing various different emergencies or keeping the skies safe when there is a system outage, we use very realistic simulations to expose the ATCOs to these situations and allow them to practice different responses. This training is repeated regularly in the simulator so that the ATCO can retain a mental model of how to respond.
However, the audience I am targeting for the film is a much wider Air Traffic Management (ATM) audience – effectively any personnel working in ATM operations, not just the ATCOs. It is simply not practical to provide simulation for so many different people doing so many different jobs. If people can make sense of current events, by replaying past events (in this case, a past event seen in a film) it could be a very powerful tool for creating awareness and triggering responses from ATM personnel on how to think about and respond to potentially unsafe situations.
The results of the experiment showed that while people were watching the film, they reactivated past events, in real-time, to make sense of each scene. More specifically they conclude that these reactivations are considered as the ‘candidate mechanism for binding temporally distant information into a coherent understanding of ongoing experience’(Hahamy, Dubossarsky and Behrens, 2023, p.1080). The fact that this is happening in real-time is important because it suggests, to me at least, that reactivation of a past event (even if it was in a movie) to help make sense of a current situation that potentially requires an action, can be considered as part of an educational endeavor, and even more so if the film can also provide guidance on how to deal with the new situation.
References:
Fadali,I. (2023) Study finds that the human brain reactivates mental representations of past events during new experiences. MedicalxPress. Available at: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-06-human-brain-reactivates-mental representations.html?utm_medium=email&utm_source=other&utm_campaign=opencourse.GdeNrll1EeSROyIACtiVvg.announcements~opencourse.GdeNrll1EeSROyIACtiVvg.1s1RHF8PRFGwztzDi5eVIQ (Accessed 8 October 2023)
Hahamy, A., Dubossarsky, H. & Behrens, T.E.J. (2023) The human brain reactivates context-specific past information at event boundaries of naturalistic experiences. Nat Neurosci 26, 1080–1089. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-023-01331-6