Bidirectional brain-body interactions during natural story listening
Jens Madsen and Lucas C. Parra,
Cell Reports, 2024, Vol 43, Issue 4
It is pretty wild to think about, but our eyes move when we listen to stories, and our pupils contract and dilate throughout the story. People make these movements at the same times during the story!
That our pupil size changes throughout a story, is somewhat intuitive, we as an audience have been shown contracting and dilating pupil in movies for years (remember Requiem for a dream?) and even when we look at people, we can tell if they are excited. But what about our eye movements?
Starting this research i did become way more self-conscious about when and how i move my eyes. I find myself moving my eyes when I think, even during a conversation, its not like we stare at the other person. We need to disengage from the conversation. When I engage in a “thought train”, my eyes move rapidly in a seemingly random pattern, but always at “nothing in particular.”
We can investigate whether our eyes move during the same periods of time during story listening by computing how similar our eye movements are to that of other people that listened to the same story. If we find significant ISC, we know that something in the story people move their eyes in a similar way. Below we see the time-resolved inter-subject correlation of 38 subjects as they listen to stories from Modern Love and StoryCorps.
Can you see what in the story that made people move their eyes?