{"id":365448,"date":"2010-02-26T08:00:34","date_gmt":"2010-02-26T13:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/childrenshospitalblog.org\/?p=5081"},"modified":"2010-02-26T08:00:34","modified_gmt":"2010-02-26T13:00:34","slug":"what-goes-on-in-the-brain-during-a-3d-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/365448","title":{"rendered":"What goes on in the brain during a 3D movie?"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

\"MichaelMedia expert Michael Rich, MD, MPH, director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Children\u2019s Hospital Boston, answers your questions about media use. Last week, he discussed if parents are legally responsible when their teens engage in sexting<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s this week\u2019s question:<\/p>\n

Q:<\/span> I took my sons to see Avatar over vacation, and while I sat there with giant 3D glasses on, I wondered if scientists know anything about whether 3D affects how children process the experience of a movie?<\/strong>
\nThrilled by 3D<\/em> in Wilmington, MA<\/span><\/p>\n

A:<\/span> Dear Thrilled by 3D,<\/p>\n

This question gets at the heart of what\u2019s interesting and exciting about three-dimensional (3D) movies. They absolutely affect your children\u2019s experience of movie, much as they affect yours. Why? Because the more heavily the brain is involved with sensory motor processing<\/a>, the less energy it has for other tasks.<\/p>\n

To understand why that\u2019s true, look at something a certain distance from yourself with just one eye, and then the other; it will appear to move. That\u2019s because you are constantly synthesizing the two different two-dimensional (2D) images from your two eyes into a single 3D image<\/a>. The way a 3D movie works is that two separate 2D images are projected onscreen at the same time.\u00a0 The glasses you wear block out one image or the other so that each eye sees only what was designed for it to see, which helps your brain combine them into one 3D image.<\/p>\n

So what does your brain do when you\u2019re sitting in a theatre, looking at a giant screen, wearing 3D glasses, swimming in surround sound, and processing the 24 images that flip by per second<\/em>?\u00a0 Your brain dutifully processes those stimuli\u2014and does little else. In fact, your pre-frontal cortex, which is involved in impulse control, future thinking, and moral choices, is basically inactivated in this process. That\u2019s part of why you \u201cget lost\u201d in the movie.<\/p>\n

These facts can make for an immersive movie experience, which can be quite enjoyable\u2014and also quite overwhelming. For children, the extra processing that their brains have to do may make them more vulnerable to the content. In other words, if something in the movie would have scared them in 2D, it will likely be even scarier in 3D. But children\u2019s fear<\/a> is an issue to consider with any movie, so read up on the movie\u2019s content<\/a> before you go, whether it\u2019s 2D or 3D.<\/p>\n

Something else worth mentioning is that many people experience nausea during a 3D movie<\/a>. That\u2019s because the signals that your brain is receiving from your eyes say that you are moving<\/em> in relation to your immediate surroundings, but your inner ear (in charge of balance) is saying that you\u2019re not moving<\/em>. If the nausea is not so bad that you\u2019d avoid 3D movies all together, one way to reduce these feelings during a 3D movie is to close your eyes or look away from the screen.\u00a0 This will remove the competing stimuli and help reorient you in actual space.<\/p>\n

Enjoy your media and use them wisely,
\nThe Mediatrician\u00ae<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Do you have a question about your child\u2019s media use? Ask it today<\/a>!<\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Media expert Michael Rich, MD, MPH, director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Children\u2019s Hospital Boston, answers your questions about media use. Last week, he discussed if parents are legally responsible when their teens engage in sexting. Here\u2019s this week\u2019s question: Q: I took my sons to see Avatar over vacation, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":481,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-365448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/481"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=365448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365448\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=365448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=365448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=365448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}