What happens in our brains, for example, when Cary Grant is fleeing from the dusting plane in the famous scene from the Hitchcock movie Death on His Heels ? Well, the same question has been asked by the American psychologist Matt Bezdek, director of a curious investigation carried out at the Georgia Institute of Technology with magnetic resonance imaging.
The volunteers watched sequences of ten mythical suspense titles, such as Alien , Misery , The man who knew too much or the aforementioned With death on his heels . While films were being projected in the center of the screen, various checkered patterns appeared at the edges.
After analyzing the resonances, the experts observed that, in the most exciting moments, the calcarine sulcus, the first area of our brain in charge of receiving and processing visual information, took on a clear role. While, on the one hand, the activity of the parts of the calcarine sulcus linked to peripheral vision decreased, at the same time the areas that process the central zone of visual stimuli were turned on. In other words, our mind's attention stops paying attention to what is happening around us, as if a kind of “tunnel vision” were activated.
Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have also found that suspense also puts to work areas of the brain that are concerned with grouping objects by their color and the way they move.
