The neuroscience of Romeo and Juliet: an fMRI study of acting

The current study represents a first attempt at examining the neural basis of dramatic acting. While all people play multiple roles in daily life – for example “spouse” or “employee” – these roles are all facets of the “self” and thus the first-person (1P) perspective. Compared to such everyday role-playing, actors are required to portray other people and to adopt their gestures, emotions, and behaviors. Consequently, actors must think and behave not as themselves but as the characters they are pretending to be. In other words, they have to assume a “fictional first-person” (Fic1P) perspective. In this functional MRI study, we sought to identify brain regions preferentially activated when actors adopt a Fic1P perspective during dramatic role playing. In the scanner, university-trained actors responded to a series of hypothetical questions from either their own 1P perspective or from that of Romeo (male participants) or Juliet (female participants) from Shakespeare’s drama. Compared to r...