Noé and the Neuroscientists

Gaspar Noé says there is no line between art and pornography. You can make art of anything. You can make an experimental movie with that candle or with this tape recorder. You can make a piece of art with a cat drinking milk. You can make a piece of art with people having sex. There is no line. Anything that is shot or reproduced in an unusual way is considered artistic or experimental.

What can Noé and neuroscience possibly have in common? Neurologist/cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Guillen Fernandez and colleagues from The Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University Nijmegen have been showing clips from Irréversible to participants in fMRI studies.

Irréversible is a 2002 French drama film written and directed by Gaspar Noé, starring Monica Bellucci, Vincent Cassel, and Albert Dupontel. The film employs a non-linear narrative and follows two men as they try to avenge a brutally raped girlfriend. American film critic Robert Ebert called it "a movie so violent and cruel that most people will find it unwatchable." Irréversible competed at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival and won the Stockholm International Film Festival’s award for best film.

Why would researchers show this film to college students? To quickly induce a state of extreme psychological stress. In brief, Fernandez et al. are interested in studying the brain under acute stress.

Hermans et al stated that acute stress shifts the brain into a state that fosters rapid defense mechanisms. Stress-related neuromodulators are thought to trigger this change by altering properties of large-scale neural populations throughout the brain. We investigated this brain-state shift in humans. During exposure to a fear-related acute stressor, responsiveness and interconnectivity within a network including cortical (frontoinsular, dorsal anterior cingulate, inferotemporal, and temporoparietal) and subcortical (amygdala, thalamus, hypothalamus, and midbrain) regions increased as a function of stress response magnitudes. β-adrenergic receptor blockade, but not cortisol synthesis inhibition, diminished this increase. Thus, our findings reveal that noradrenergic activation during acute stress results in prolonged coupling within a distributed network that integrates information exchange between regions involved in autonomic-neuroendocrine control and vigilant attentional reorienting.

 

Hermans, E.J., van Marle, H.J.F., Ossewaarde, L., Henckens, M.J.A.G., Qin, S., van Kesteren, M.T.R., Schoots, V., Cousijn, H., Rijpkema, M., Oostenveld, R., Fernandez, G. (2011). Stress-Related Noradrenergic Activity Prompts Large-Scale Neural Network Reconfiguration. Science, 334(6059), 1151-1153. DOI: 10.1126/science