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A suave young man acting like a French Humphrey Boggart walks down the street to chat up the young woman. They bicker and laugh at their daily life in Paris, as the young man casually asks the girl to come run away with him to Rome in order to escape the cops. This scene comes from one of my favorite black and white movies of all time, the French film by Jean Luc Godard Breathless.

A scene from Jean Luc Godard’s Breathless where we see our anti-hero Michel walking down
the streets of Paris with his American “girlfriend” Patricia

When I first saw this film for the first time in my sophomore year at Emory, it helped to inspire a deeper appreciation for film as a form of art all on its own. And I know I’m not alone in sharing that sentiment. In the limited time, I have spent here in Paris, I have understood how much the people here have an appreciation for their movies. From the Hollywood blockbusters to the more local avant-garde films, the streets and metros of Paris have never seemed to be without a shortage of advertisements for upcoming movies. Seeing how prevalent cinema seemed to be saturated throughout all cultures, got me to wondering exactly what is it about cinema makes us drawn to them? What exactly happens within our minds when we watch movies?

One of the interesting things I have found about movies is how watching a movie seems to bring a sense of shared experience and emotion with whoever you’re watching it with. A study conducted in 2008 by Hasson suggests that this particular shared phenomenon is not just isolated in the way that you feel, but also in the way that your brain is activated throughout the movie.

This particular study by Hasson set out to investigate the influence that exposure towards watching popular media has on evoking similar states of awareness. To test this, Hasson utilized a method known as inter-subject correlation (ISC) analysis to investigate the similarity of his subject’s brain activity throughout the experiment. ISC is a method that compares the activity of a specific region within a subject’s brain through a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) test to the activity of other subjects within the same region (Hasson et.al, 2008). Using this method, Hasson first tested for the activity of the brain between 5 humans subjects. The subjects were put in an MRI scanner while watching the opening 30 minutes of Sergio Leone’s 1996 film The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The activity of the brain was recorded throughout the brain and then compared to the other subjects using ISC. After testing, Hasson found that the ISC between all subjects of the study were similar throughout multiple areas of the brain, particularly with the fusiform face gyrus which is associated with face-specific processing within the brain (Hasson et.al, 2008; McCathy et.al, 1997). This suggests that whenever we watch the same scene of a movie, our brains are similarly activated with others who also watched this exact scene. This aids itself in understanding why we seem to have this feeling of a shared experience whenever we watch a movie together with someone.

A figure from Hasson’s study: found that brain activity (this figure showing the fusiform face area) of areas throughout the brain were activated similarly across all subjects

While Hasson’s study does not go completely in depth into the neurophysiological systems that are influenced during movie watching, this question is further examined in a later study conducted by Pitcher in 2019. Within this particular study Pitcher set out to investigate the difference in brain region activity between viewing moving images vs stable images (Pitcher et.al, 2019). Pitcher conducted this study by monitoring the brain activity of 22 participants through fMRI as they watched videos of moving bodies and faces and objects and compared them to the brain activity of the subjects when they viewed static images. Pitcher found that within this study that areas such as the extrastriate body area (involved in perception of the human body and body parts) and the occipital place area (involved in scene perception) are more activated when presented with the videos compared to when they are presented with a static image (Dilks et.al, 2015; Serguei et.al, 2004; Pitcher et.al, 2019). The wider activation of these particular areas of the brain suggests how whenever we watch a movie, there is a greater sense of interactivity as you find yourself engaging to the movement of the people and scenery along with the object itself.

This interactivity of film with its audience is something that I continually find myself enthralled with. It’s an art form that draws us into the world of its characters, engaging us in ways that I have never fully understood. It’s a medium that utilizes itself to connect people from all over the world. From Peru to China, to the USA and Paris. This is a medium that seems to enthrall our souls and neurons.

So to end this off, I say that if you ever wanted to connect with someone on a deeper level, ask them to watch a movie and you’ll have an experience that connects you as deeply as the neuronal level.

References:

Dilks, D. D., Julian, J. B., Paunov, A. M., & Kanwisher, N. (2013). The occipital place area is causally and selectively involved in scene perception. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 33(4),

Hasson U. Landesman O. Knappmeyer B. Vallines I. Rubin N. Heeger D. J. (2008). Neurocinematics: The neuroscience of film. Projections, 2, 1–26.

McCarthy G., Puce A., Gore C. J., & Allison T. (1997). Face-Specific Processing in the Human Fusiform Gyrus, J. Neuroscience 9(5)

Pitcher, D., Ianni, G., & Ungerleider, L. G. (2019). A functional dissociation of face-, body- and scene-selective brain areas based on their response to moving and static stimuli. Scientific reports, 9(1), 8242.

Serguei V A., Christine M S., Gordon L S., & Maurizio C. (2004) Extrastriate body area in human occipital cortex responds to the performance of motor actions. Nature Neuroscience 7(5)

Image 1: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/SqOJaGM-wQg/maxresdefault.jpg

Image 2: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Neurocinematics%3A-The-Neuroscience-of-Film-Hasson-Landesman/9360e9eeb98a3b2c1e28316d5df0073876967371

Walking around the streets of Paris, I quickly noticed the amount of people smoking and cars on the road. In the USA, smoking cigarettes has become pretty uncommon and passing someone smoking is a relatively rare nuisance. However, in Paris smoking is common and you pass multiple people smoking whenever you walk around. Knowing the effects of secondhand smoke and combining that with the traffic here, it made me wonder what effects air quality can have on the brain. As soon as I started searching for articles on the topic, it became concerning how much easier it was to find articles than it was for my past two blog posts.  Even more concerning, was an article by Grineski and Collins (2018) on the effects of air pollution in schools in the United States that found that minority children were more at risk for exposure to polluted air. According to the article, this can cause a child to not do as well in school as their unexposed peers, so what causes this change?

Image I took at the Musee d’Orsay that shows off Parisian traffic.

One article that they had cited that I thought was particularly interesting and relevant was by Calderón-Garcidueñas et al. (2008), they performed autopsies on forty-seven healthy people who had died, mostly of accidents, from either Mexico city, which has extremely high amounts of air pollution or two control cities with very little pollution. They found that air pollution increased the amounts of a peptide associated with Alzheimer’s disease in the brain, even in children. Another study by Rivas et al. (2019) found that air pollution can negatively impact working memory, or the ability to remember and think about things that have just happened in males. They also found that this isn’t isolated to a few individuals and can impact the entire area. However, they found no impact on the working memory of females.

These studies made me wonder why you rarely hear anything about the dangers of air pollution in the USA, so I looked up a map.

Image from: https://www.who.int/images/default-source/imported/pollution-map-jpg.jpg?sfvrsn=2cf9c86b_0

This map shows that the United States tends to have pretty good air quality when compared to the rest of the world. Atlanta seems like it might have a yellow dot by it however, it’s hard to tell without labels and borders. However, all of France is yellow and it appears that it might have an orange dot around Paris. This means that even when I was enjoying what seemed like “cleaner” air on the Provence trip, it was still more polluted than if I were to get out of Atlanta and go to another part of Georgia.

While I’ve enjoyed Paris, this has made me wonder why the air pollution wouldn’t be something that is talked about more? Before coming here, people warned me about the pickpockets and toilets, but no one warned me that I would pass so many people smoking every day or that the traffic could get so much worse than Atlanta traffic especially with a good well-connected public transport system. Learning about this makes me wonder if there is more that could be done to educate people on the negative impacts that air pollution can have. I feel like we only ever hear about its impacts on the lungs or maybe the throat but, with the exception of the scientists doing this research, no one seems to mention that it can even have huge impacts on the brain.

Works Cited

Calderón-Garcidueñas, L., Solt, A. C., Henríquez-Roldán, C., Torres-Jardón, R., Nuse, B., Herritt, L., … Reed, W. (2008). Long-term Air Pollution Exposure Is Associated with Neuroinflammation, an Altered Innate Immune Response, Disruption of the Blood-Brain Barrier, Ultrafine Particulate Deposition, and Accumulation of Amyloid β-42 and α-Synuclein in Children and Young Adults. Toxicologic Pathology, 36(2), 289–310. https://doi.org/10.1177/0192623307313011

Grineski, S. E., & Collins, T. W. (2018). Geographic and social disparities in exposure to air neurotoxicants at U.S. public schools. Environmental research, 161, 580–587. doi:10.1016/j.envres.2017.11.047

Rivas, I., Basagaña, X., Cirach, M., López-Vicente, M., Suades-González, E., Garcia-Esteban, R., . . . Sunyer, J. (2019). Association between Early Life Exposure to Air Pollution and Working Memory and Attention. Environmental Health Perspectives, 127(5), 057002. doi:10.1289/EHP3169

Pictures

https://www.who.int/images/default-source/imported/pollution-map-jpg.jpg?sfvrsn=2cf9c86b_0

Definitions

Amyloid beta. (2019, June 02). Retrieved June 17, 2019, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amyloid_beta

Wander down any street in Paris, and you will be struck by a number of differences from an American city. People speaking dozens of different languages, crowding tables on the sidewalk drinking wine and smoking cigarettes have become a familiar sight to me; but one aspect of Parisian life always manages to grab my attention: the bakeries. Hundreds of them, on every street corner, all bustling with activity and displaying their delicious wares behind wide glass windows. I was not prepared for the sheer amount of bakeries, and by the time I go home I might have gained a pound from croissants alone. What I really need is an intervention, but first I’m going to find out what it is makes those bakeries so difficult to walk away from. 

These frosted biscuits caught my eye from a block down the street (Boulevard Saint-Germain, Paris).

Biology has tied the evolution of human vision to food behavior; it is thought that we developed the ability to see in color in response to demands of the foraging our ancestors had to do to survive (Bompas et al., 2013). But today, visual-cues related to food are everywhere, whether it be Parisian bakeries or billboards with burgers on them. There have been numerous studies investigating the role of food in brain function, and how specific nutrients affect various brain systems. For example, omega-3 fatty acids have been shown to support plasticity and help the brain recover from traumatic brain injury (Wu et al., 2007). Furthermore eating food, especially food rich in sugar, has been shown to activate the same dopamine-reward pathways activated by drugs (Hernandez & Hoebel, 1988). More recently, neuroscientists have been trying to determine a link between the consumption of food and visual cues in our environment. This research is of the utmost importance in our modern world, where advertising for food is everywhere and childhood obesity rates are at catastrophic proportions (Han et al., 2010). Studies have found that images of food can affect the human body in a variety of ways, including increased salivation, neural activity, and reward anticipation; food advertising is simply more powerful than most other forms (Spence et al., 2016).

Just a closer look at what I’ve been trying to resist (Boulangerie Chambelland, Paris).

The effects of food advertising can be more pronounced in individuals who have any sort of food related behavioral issue. A 2019 study used neuroimaging on the brains of adolescents who displayed “loss of control” eating behaviors and found that in these individuals there was increased brain activity when food related images were presented compared to control (Biehl et al., 2019). The researchers also found that obese patients performed poorly compared to controls on a goal oriented task when images of food were presented as distractors (Biehl et al., 2019). In an interesting parallel, another study performed a similar task with anorexic patients and found that they too are more likely to have task performance impeded by visual food cues (Neimeijer et al., 2017). These findings support the popular theory that food can be an addiction; actual changes in neural circuitry occur in patients with abnormal eating behaviors, resulting in a different response to food-related stimuli in the environment (Biehl et a 2019; Neimeijer et al., 2017). The two studies also underscore the effect that visual food stimuli can have; even the control group experienced greater brain activity to food cues compared to neutral cues, with an even greater difference when they were hungry.

Finally, science backs up my mother’s longstanding rule “never go to the grocery store on an empty stomach”. Parisian bakers have stumbled upon principles of neuroscience to draw pedestrians into their shops; seeing delicious pastries in a window captures one’s attention and sets off a series of neurological functions evolved to drive one to eat. It’s really no wonder I grab a coffee and a croissant every time I see a rack of them in a window; you can’t fight science!

Works Cited

Biehl SC, Ansorge U, Naumann E, Svaldi J (2019) Altered Processing of Visual Food Stimuli in Adolescents with Loss of Control Eating. Nutrients 11(2): 210

Bompas A, Kendall G, Sumner P (2013) Spotting Fruit versus Picking Fruit as the Selective Advantage of Human Colour Vision. i-Perception 4: 84-94

Han JC, Lawlor DA, Kimm SY (2010) Childhood obesity. Lancet 375: 1738-1748

Hernandez L & Hoebel BG (1988) Food reward and cocaine increase extracellular dopamine in the nucleus accumbens as measured by microdialysis. Life Sciences 42(18): 1705-1712

Neimeijer RAM, Roefs A, de Jong PJ (2017) Heightened attentional capture by visual food stimuli in anorexia nervosa. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 126(6):805-811

Spence C, Okajima K, Cheok AD, Petit O, Michel C (2016) Eating with our eyes: From visual hunger to digital satiation. Brain and Cognition 110: 53-63

Wu A, Ying Z, Gomez-Pinilla F (2007) Omega-3 fatty acids supplementation restores mechanisms that maintain brain homeostasis in traumatic brain injury. Journal of Neurotrauma 24(10): 1587-1595

The moment I landed in Paris, I was excited to finally use the language that I had been learning for so many years, in a non-classroom setting. During the past few weeks, I have been using all the slang words I’ve learnt.

When I was a kid, my dad was responsible for talking to me in Hindi and my mom in English. If that wasn’t enough, every weekend for around five years, I attended classes at Alliance Française. I don’t even want to calculate how many hours that must add up to… As a kid, at times I dreaded going to these classes (sorry Mom, if you’re reading). But when I started pursuing French as my second major at Emory, I realized how useful it is to know so many languages. After spending these past few weeks in Paris, I was curious to better understand the impact of multilingualism on the brain.

Figure 1: Alliance Française in New Delhi, India – where I spent many, many hours…

Figure 2: Featuring me using my French skills to say “Non merçi” to all the vendors at Sacré Coeur in Paris

Since language is such a critical capability, it is not shocking that an increasing amount of research is being done on the neural substrates of language. The consensus is that there is no “one area” of the brain that is solely responsible for language. It may be helpful to gain a brief overview of the main parts of the brain involved in language. Two of the important brain areas involved in language are Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area. Broca’s area plays a critical role in speech production and Wernicke’s area in speech comprehension (Fujii et al., 2016).  However, these two areas not only “communicate” with each other through the arcuate fasciculus, but they also communicate with other areas in the left and right hemispheres of the brain (Fujii et al., 2016).

Figure 3: Important brain areas for language

But why is knowing multiple languages considered impressive? Apart from enabling communication with people across the world, does being multilingual actually have any positive neurological impact? One study suggested that there may in fact be a neural basis for the ability of “Lifelong bilingualism to maintain youthful cognitive control abilities in aging” (Gold et al., 2013). In this study, 110 participants were asked to engage in task-switching. Task-switching was used since it provides insight into how capable participants are of adjusting to changing stimuli (Gold et al., 2013). But what exactly was the task that the researchers used? Participants were shown objects very quickly in the center of a screen. If the object was blue, they had to respond with one button and if it was red, then with a different button (Gold et al., 2013).  Without any warning, the participants were then asked to react using the same buttons but while concentrating on the shape of the objects (Gold et al., 2013). The results suggested that older adult bilinguals had a decreased reaction time (RT), which means a faster response, than monolinguals when task-switching (Gold et al., 2013).

But how can we know what is going on in the brain while these participants are performing this task? And what do the results really mean? To answer these questions, participants were asked to perform this same task while fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) was performed. fMRI measures brain activity when a person is at rest, to analyze brain activity. The amount of activation of brain areas can be quantified using BOLD signal. A high BOLD signal can be seen when neuronal activity increases in a part of the brain, seen when there is an increase in the cerebral blood flow to that part of the brain (Gold et al., 2013). Similar to the younger adults, bilingual older adults performed better the monolinguals with evidence of less activation (lower BOLD response) in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex (Gold et al., 2013).  These frontal brain regions play critical roles in decision making and “effortful processing” (Gold et al., 2013).  Therefore, less activation of these brain areas may suggest that the reason lifelong bilingualism may be advantageous is because cognitive control processing changes from effortful to “more automatic” (Gold et al., 2013). The authors claim that this provides evidence for increased “neural efficiency” and a “cognitive control advantage” in bilinguals (Gold et al., 2013). This “cognitive control advantage” may enable bilinguals to be better equipped to respond to changing environments and even diminish the possibility of age-related cognitive decline (Gold et al., 2013).

If bilingualism may protect from age-related declines in cognitive control processes why don’t we all just pick up some Rosetta Stone books now? I began to think back to a few years ago when my grandmother was trying to teach me to speak and write in Punjabi. I really tried very hard to learn the alphabet but with slim to no success, to my grandmother’s despair. So, could this mean that it actually becomes more difficult to learn a language as we got older? Researchers at MIT used a quiz to measure the grammatical ability of 670,000 people of various nationalities and ages (K. Hatshorne et al., 2018). The results of the study suggested that children were best at grammar learning and that learning a language before the age of 10 is the best way to attain native level proficiency (K. Hatshorne et al., 2018). I would highly recommend taking this quiz they used!

Figure 4: Quiz used by MIT researchers to assess grammatical ability

However, it seems that this is still a developing field of research. Some are leaning towards focusing on research that suggests that age can be a hindering factor in learning language, while others think that it may be worthwhile to investigate if foreign language training can be used as cognitive therapy for age-related cognitive decline, even if started later during adulthood (Pfenninger et al., 2018).

While we may still be investigating the neurological impacts of multilingualism, I can assure you that knowing more than one language will not only impress your future boss but will also help you (and everyone traveling with you J ), if you decide to study/spend time abroad!

References
Fujii, M., Maesawa, S., Ishiai, S., Iwami, K., Futamura, M., Saito, K. (2016). Neural Basis of Language: An Overview of An Evolving Model. Neurologia medico-chirurgica, 56(7), 379–386. doi:10.2176/nmc.ra.2016-0014

Gold, B. T., Kim, C., Johnson, N. F., Kryscio, R. J., Smith, C. D. (2013). Lifelong
bilingualism maintains neural efficiency for cognitive control in aging. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 33(2), 387–396. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3837-12.2013

K. Hartshorne, J., & B. Tenenbaum, J., Pinker, S. (2018). A critical period for
second language acquisition: Evidence from 2/3 million English speakers. Cognition. 177. 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.04.007

Pfenninger, S. E., Polz, S. (2018). Foreign language learning in the third age: A pilot feasibility study on cognitive, socio-affective and linguistic drivers and benefits in relation to previous bilingualism of the learner. Journal of the European Second Language Association, 2(1), 1–13. DOI: http://doi.org/10.22599/jesla.36

Perani D, Farsad M, Ballarini T, Lubian F, Malpetti M, Fracchetti A, Magnani G, March A, Abutalebi J .(2017). The impact of bilingualism on brain reserve and metabolic connectivity in Alzheimer’s dementia. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 114:1690–1695.

Figure 1: Image of Alliance Francaise, New Delhi, India. Retrieved from https://lbb.in/delhi/alliance-francais-de-delhi/

Figure 2: Taken by me at Sacré Coeur in Paris

Figure 3: Parts of the brain that control speech. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Language-specific-areas-in-the-brain_fig1_317356553

Figure 4: Quiz used by MIT researchers to assess grammatical ability. Screenshot retrieved from http://archive.gameswithwords.org/WhichEnglish/