In today's (UK)
Times newspaper, there is an interesting science article which is bizarrely linked to Clint. I’ve tried to find the article on the Times Online site but for some reason it’s nowhere to be found, so the best I can do is type it out for you. There’s a nice pic of Clint as the Man with No Name too. Perhaps if I scan it into the computer and e-mail it to Matt then he can post the article and/or picture. Anyway, for now, read on:
Clint holds the key to empathyClint Eastwood has helped scientists to answer one of the most enduring questions about the human brain: whether different people perceive the world in the same or different ways.
When people watch Eastwood’s classic 1966 spaghetti western
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, their brains respond with characteristic patterns of activity that prove everybody is seeing much the same thing, new research has shown.
The findings provide important evidence that all human brains process visual information in similar enough fashion for us to be reasonably certain that what we see of the world around us is also what everybody else can see.
Variations between individual brains mean that people may react very differently to particular visual stimuli, such as violence or emotional scenes in a film, but the stimuli themselves appear to be perceived the same way by everybody.
The issue of whether one person sees the same thing as another – that the colour blue, for example, means the same thing to everyone – has taxed scientists and philosophers for generations. To test the similarity of individuals’ brains in a more realistic context, researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science and Tel Aviv University in Israel, used MRI to scan the brains of volunteers as they watched 30 minutes of
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
“We reasoned that such rich and complex stimulation will be much closer to ecological vision relative to the highly constrained visual stimuli used in the laboratory,” said Uri Hasson, who led the team.
The results, details of which are published today in the journal
Science, revealed a remarkable level of correspondence between the viewers’ brains.
Spikes of activity in particular regions tended to match particular episodes in the film across all the volunteers. Emotional scenes, such as those including gunshots and explosions, produced some of the most markedly consistent brain responses.
“The results reveal a surprising tendency of individual brains to ‘tick collectively’ during natural vision,” he said.
Luiz Pessoa, of Brown University in Rhode Island, said: “There might be, after all, ample cortex for you and I to experience
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in a unique way. It also means that there is enough work to keep neuroscientists busy for quite a long time.”
(Ally's note: If I had been one of the volunteers, I would’ve insisted on watching
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly all the way through, not just for 30 minutes! Good on Uri Hasson for referring to the film as “such rich and complex stimulation” though
)
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This was back at the end of May, and I've only recently got a new computer. 
