ACTORS SHUT DOWN BRAIN PARTS

TO TAKE ON ROLES

To truly inhabit a role, actors must effectively turn off part of their brain, according to a new study based on brain scans of thespians.

In a series of experiments, actors were placed in MRI machines and asked to respond to questions as if they were

Romeo or Juliet during the “balcony scene” from William Shakespeare’s play. Scientists were surprised to see that as the participants mused on concepts ranging from romance to religion, their brains were truly taken over by those of the famous star-crossed lovers. They watched as brain activity dropped off, with a notable deactivation in a part of the frontal lobe.

In the research was led by Dr Steven Brown, a neuroscientist at Canada’s Mcmaster University, who specialises in how the brain behaves while people are participating in music, dance and other art forms. As no one had ever attempted to measure the brain activity underpinning drama, Dr Brown recruited a group of willing, university-trained actors to participate in his new study.

Over the course of four sessions in the MRI machines, the participants had to respond in four different ways — as themselves, as themselves with a British accent, answering for a friend and inally as if they were either Romeo or Juliet. Only while undertaking their Shakespearean role did the people show deactivations in regions across their brains.

Dr Brown suggested these people were actually losing their “sense of self” as they inhabited the characters’ minds. Though this new area of research is still in its early days, the scientists said their study provided the irst step towards understanding how people’s brains change when they take on different roles — whether in their daily lives or on stage.