Neural Processing of Narratives: From Individual Processing to Viral Propagation

Abstract

Narratives, in the form of, e.g., written stories, mouth-to-mouth accounts, audiobooks, fiction movies, and media-feeds, powerfully shape the perception of reality and widely influence human decision-making. In this review, we describe findings from recent neuroimaging studies unraveling how narratives influence the human brain, thus shaping perception, cognition, emotions, and decision-making. It appears that narrative sensemaking relies on default-mode network (DMN) structures of the brain, especially precuneus. Activity in precuneus further seems to differ for fictitious vs. real narratives. Notably, high inter-subject correlation (ISC) of brain activity during narrative processing seems to predict the efficacy of a narrative. Factors that enhance the ISC of brain activity during narratives include higher levels of attention, emotional arousal, and negative emotional valence. Higher levels of attentional suspense seem to co-vary with activity in the temporoparietal junction, emotional arousal with activity in dorsal attention network, and negative emotional valence with activity in DMN. Lingering after-effects of emotional narratives have been further described in DMN, amygdala, and sensory cortical areas. Finally, inter-individual differences in personality, and cultural-background related analytical and holistic thinking styles, shape ISC of brain activity during narrative perception. Together, these findings offer promising leads for future studies elucidating the effects of narratives on the human brain, and how such effects might predict the efficacy of narratives in modulating decision-making.

“Expert persuasion” can decrease willingness to pay for sugar-containing food

“…Hence, in the current study, the narrator was introduced to the experimental participants as a dietary specialist, to make the healthy eating call maximally persuasive. Moreover, personality traits have been found to shape processing of narratives in the brain ( 22 , 38 , 39 ), as well as to moderate the behavioral effect of narratives on decision- making ( 40 ). Food choices are also influenced by individual differences in personality, and so does the susceptibility to nudges ( 41 – 43 ).…”

“…The effect of narratives on decision-making is well documented both at the behavioral (21) and at the neural level [for a review see (22)]. However, there is a limited number of studies investigating the effect of narratives on food evaluation, and most of them are limited either to children populations or to subjects' evaluation of a single product (23)(24)(25)(26)(27).…”

Movies and narratives as naturalistic stimuli in neuroimaging

“…There are other excellent reviews, some of them very recent, on the present topic. These previous reviews focused on methodology that makes it possible to study brain activity in virtual environments ( Spiers and Maguire, 2007 ; Maguire, 2012 ), on the use of naturalistic stimuli in the contexts of visual and memory system, social cognition, and clinical studies ( Sonkusare et al, 2019 ), on the use of naturalistic stimuli in developmental studies ( Vanderwal et al, 2019 ), and the neural mechanisms underlying virality of narratives ( Jaaskelainen et al, 2020 ). Thus, each of the previous reviews has a vantage point different and complementary from the present review where we examine how movies and narratives have been recently utilized to advance scientific understanding in the areas of human memory, attention, language, emotions, and social cognition.…”

A Sound Prediction: EEG-Based Neural Synchrony Predicts Online Music Streams

“…Especially, since listening to music is usually an emotional experience. Further research on emotions, perspective taking and neural ISC is provided by Jääskeläinen et al (2020a , b) . Classification of emotions across participants can be improved by adding inter-subject correlations to the feature space as shown by Chan et al (2020) and Haxby et al (2011) and thus may be an interesting elaboration of the current research.…”