Embodied Neurocinematics: A view from Experimental aesthetics

Neurocinematics is a contemporary interdisciplinary research field that combines cognitive neuroscience and film studies. Since the late 1940s, there have been numerous interdisciplinary attempts related to film, particularly with the Filmology Movement. In an effort to enhance the ecological validity of neuroimaging experiments, neurophysiologists and visual neuroscientists have attempted to introduce highly naturalistic moving images (movies) as experimental stimuli, gradually developing into a naturalistic paradigm known as classical Neurocinematics. The discovery of mirror neurons and subsequent research has challenged the traditional "sandwich" model of cognition, revealing the close connections between action, perception, and cognition, and leading to a new model of perception and cognition known as "embodied simulation." Inspired by the embodied simulation theory, contemporary empirical aesthetics research has shifted its focus to the bodily roots of experience. This approach aims to understand the constitutive elements of aesthetic experience and the origins of various aesthetic concepts by studying the physiological correlations between the brain-body and artistic expression, and it is referred to as Experimental Aesthetics. This methodological shift has sparked an “embodied revolution” within the field of neurocinematics, represented by Vittorio Gallese, supported by evidence from areas such as camera movement, continuity editing, and haptic-visual expressivity. I view Gallese's series of propositions and experimental research as an embodied approach for neurocinematics, which I term “Embodied Neurocinematics.” It incorporates Husserl's distinction of the body's essence, combining the dimensions of film experience with the potential sub-personal mechanisms of brain and neural expression. By conducting scientific research on the brain-body (Körper), it aims to reveal the domain of phenomenal experience captured by the lived body (Leib). Thus, like cognitive neuroscience, Embodied Neurocinematics also faces a “phenomenologization” situation, rethinking the act of viewing from a perspective that combines the results of cognitive neuroscience and neurophysiological experiments with phenomenological interpretations of human experience. This pursuit of compatibility requires treating the different domains of neurocinematic phenomena (the cinematic things or events, related subjective accounts, and their neural correlates) as co-constitutive in specific analyses to achieve a reciprocal constraint between different-person perspectives.