This animation shows how the brain is activated during listening to a piece of Argentinian tango. It is based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, computational musical feature extraction and statistical modeling. The data are from a study published in Alluri V, Toiviainen P, Jääskeläinen IP, Glerean E, Sams M & Brattico E, Large-scale brain networks emerge from dynamic processing of musical timbre, key and rhythm, NeuroImage (2012), doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.11.019 (sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811911013000 [pdf]). The study was conducted at the the University of Jyväskylä, University of Helsinki, and Aalto University. The data and model are the same as in the video The Tango Brain (vimeo.com/peto/tangobrain). The animation was created with Matlab.

When individuals catch strong emotional reactions from the movie characters, their brains begin to 'tick together' in regions governing vision, visual attention and emotional processing. Nummenmaa, L., Glerean, E., Viinikainen, M., Jääskeläinen, I., Hari, R., & Sams, M. (2011). Emotional contagion may promote social interaction by sycnchronizing brain activity across individuals. Oral presentation at the 17th annual meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping, Quebec City, Canada.

A scene from the movie Tulitikkutehtaan tyttö (The Match Factory Girl) by Aki Kaurismäki accompanied by simultaneous fMRI measurement of a viewer's brain. This naturalistic approach to neuroscience shows the activation in the viewer's brain as a reaction to the movie scene. The data are from a study published in Lahnakoski et al., Stimulus-Related Independent Component and Voxel-Wise Analysis of Human Brain Activity during Free Viewing of a Feature Film, PLoS ONE (2012) (pdf).