Scientists used Game of Thrones characters to study brain activity

Researchers used Game of Thrones characters to study the human brain, and found that some people respond more to stories than others.

A new study published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience studied brain function by asking self-avowed Game of Thrones fans to think about various characters from the show while hooked up to an fMRI machine, which indirectly measures brain activity by tracking small amounts of blood flow. What exactly is this study trying to discover, and how is Game of Thrones involved? We’ll tell you.

As detailed by Ohio State News, the point of the study was to better understand the ventral medial prefrontal cortex of the human brain, which shows increased activity when people think about themselves and, to a lesser extend, people they know. So the researchers — Timothy Broom and Dylan Wanger — put people in the fMRI, and showed them a series of names: sometimes their own, sometimes the names of their friends, and sometimes the names of nine Game of Thrones characters: Bronn, Catelyn Stark, Cersei Lannister, Davos Seaworth, Jaime Lannister, Jon Snow, Petyr Baelish, Sandor Clegane and Ygritte. Each name would be accompanied by an adjective like “sad,” “trustworthy” or “smart,” and the participants would simply have to say whether that adjective matches the person (or character) in question.

As expected, the ventral medial prefrontal cortex lit up most when people were thinking about themselves, less when they were thinking about their friends, and least when they were thinking about Game of Thrones characters. But before the participants were strapped in, the researchers tested for something called “trait identification.” People who scored high on that were most likely to agree with statements like, “I really get involved in the feelings of the characters in a novel.”

The brains of those people lit up when they were thinking about Game of Thrones in a way that was similar to how they lit up when they were thinking about themselves. That was even more true for characters they particularly identified with. Meanwhile, Game of Thrones characters didn’t inspire much brain activity in people who scored low of trait identification.

“People who are high in trait identification not only get absorbed into a story, they also are really absorbed into a particular character,” Broom said. “They report matching the thoughts of the character, they are thinking what the character is thinking, they are feeling what the character is feeling. They are inhabiting the role of that character.”

According to Wanger, these findings help explain how fiction can be so absorbing to certain people. “For some people, fiction is a chance to take on new identities, to see worlds through others’ eyes and return from those experiences changed.”

"What previous studies have found is that when people experience stories as if they were one of the characters, a connection is made with that character, and the character becomes intwined with the self. In our study, we see evidence of that in their brains."

It brings to mind a quote from A Song of Ice and Fire: “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies…The man who never reads lives only one.”

Anyway, learning that there’s biological evidence for people getting really involved in a story is no surprise. We write about Game of Thrones all the time here and I think my brain would break the fMRI if I was asked to think about Tyrion Lannister or whoever.

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h/t Boing Boing