The Multisensory Film Experience by Luis Rocha Antunes

Author:Luis Rocha Antunes [Rocha Antunes, Luis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783206308
Publisher: National Book Network International
Published: 2016-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

Perceptual Connections Between Sight, Hearing and Nociception

Nociception is the result of the activation of a network of neural areas that crosscut different senses and cognitive modalities within a complex and wide system of sensory integration that escapes conventional sense-to-sense correspondence, as shown by the observation of numerous areas of the cerebral cortex that fire together to mediate pain perception (Cechetto and Topolovec, 2002: 674). This fact that nociception is so clearly reliant on a neural network instead of a single brain region has resulted in the concept of nociception as a pain matrix. To show that it is possible to have a nociceptive film experience from an audiovisual medium such as film, we need to re-examine three levels: the neural connections between sight, hearing and nociception; the behavioural impact of nociception on our experience of an audiovisual medium; and, finally, any nociception-related sensations that are reported to occur in relation to sight and hearing.

These three levels substantiate my claim that although spectators do not have haptic contact with the nociceptive stimuli of a film’s world, they may nevertheless have nociceptive experiences as a result of seeing and hearing those events in a manner that escape mere sympathy for the pain of others. Fortunately, in this case, nociception contrasts with thermoception and the vestibular sense, in that there are studies that explore the neural correlates of perceiving others’ pain; these studies are experimental and specifically address the nature of nociception outside of haptic contact with noxious stimuli and present well-documented evidence for the activation of our nociception when perceiving the pain of others. These studies demonstrate how watching others’ pain elicits a neural response that substantially overlaps with the pain matrix of our own perceptions of pain elicited by actual noxious stimuli in our bodies.

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