ELSC Seminar Series

Narratives powerfully shape our world-views and decisions, to the extent that instead of homo sapiens, we could be called homo narrativus. In this talk, I will relate results obtained by presenting narratives in the form of movies and audiobooks to experimental subjects during functional magnetic resonance imaging of their brain hemodynamic activity. To enable neuroimaging with the complex narrative stimuli, we have developed new methods, including behavioral experience sampling and how to relate that to the fMRI results and brain-activity based classification of emotional states that take place during the narratives. Via various experimental manipulations, a picture is emerging where the brain midline structures, in particular the precuneous, are central for interpretation of narratives in the human brain.