Cinema and Brain Synchronization: the rotten tomatoes equation

What separates a bad movie from a good one? What separates a good movie from the best?

There are, and always will be derivative opinions when it comes to cinema. A movie popular among audience members will be bashed by critics, while a film generally rated mediocre could gain its own cult following later down the line. Differing views and contrasting thoughts exist in their own equilibrium, revealing themselves in the form of Rotten Tomatoes scores, YouTube videos, or New York Times movie reviews.

But when we look deeper, this diverse range of reactions doesn’t necessarily apply while watching the movie.

Cinema, as a form of entertainment, is easy to thoughtlessly consume. An entire theatre can be filled with movie-goers watching the same film, but while they may come out of it with vastly different thoughts, their brain activity at a cellular level will remain the same for as long as they are watching the same movie.

A 2008 study led by Uri Hasson, a researcher at Princeton University, examined exactly this by having volunteers watch the 1966 film The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly while laying inside a functional MRI scanner. In an uncontrolled environment that provided both video and audio, participants were simply instructed to watch the movie — with no further…