Orange County, CA - March 22nd, 2019 - An actor is an individual who portrays a character during a performance. Actors typically perform in a traditional theatre or media such as television, film, or radio. When acting, there’s an obvious distinction between reading your lines and fully becoming the character. Embracing a role is much more than merely reciting lines from your memory; actors must completely feel as if they are the character.
Researchers observed that actors become the characters they portray almost identical to natives of Brazil during possession ceremonies. Curiosity lead three researchers from McMaster University in Canada to confirm their theory.
The group explains the research they administered with student volunteers acting out the roles of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and what they found, in the paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
The study brought in volunteers who have previously trained in acting. Each participant was asked to lay in an fMRI machine and speak in many different ways which included speaking as them self, speaking as a close friend, or in a British accent. Lastly, the volunteers were told to act out the “balcony scene” from Romeo and Juliet.
Researchers were able to recognize various patterns equivalent to the roles the actors were playing in the fMRI. There was a decrease in brain activity in the prefrontal cortex when the volunteers were acting as a close friend of theirs. Additionally, they discovered an even more sharp decline in brain activity when the actors were portraying their characters.
The researchers convey that this indicates that the actors were losing some of their sense of self as they acted out their parts. Interestingly, researchers also found an increase in brain activity in areas connected to paying attention.
