The neuroscience of theatre

There are two different strands to our research, both of which came out of collaborations with Jamie A Ward (a Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths where he is acting Head of the Department for Computing), Paola Pinti and Ilias Tachtsidis (UCL Biomedical Engineering) and Kelly Hunter (director of Flute Theatre).

In the 'neuroscience' strand, we studied professional actors in rehearsal and used fNIRS wearable brain imaging (functional near-infrared spectroscopy) to capture their brain activity patterns while they performed Shakespeare. We wanted to see if the actors suppress their sense of self (measured in terms of brain activity in the prefrontal cortex when hearing their own name) and found that they do.

We published this in 2022 – see Greaves et al., Exploring theatre neuroscience: using wearable fNIRS to measure the sense of self and interpersonal coordination in professional actors, in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. At the same time as the data collection, we also created a performance at the Bloomsbury Theatre. The actor's brain activity was measured with fNIRS and projected live above the stage during the Shakespeare performance – we are pretty sure this is the first time this has ever been done. We are following up with more studies of actors to try to understand how theatre training changes the brain and why.

Separately, in the 'child development' strand of the research, we've been studying Flute Theatre's work with autistic children, where they create interactive theatre performances that allow the children to take part. It isn't possible to put the fNIRS on these children, but instead, we use wearable sensors that are similar to a FitBit to track how the children and actors move and interact during the performances. 

This very simple technology gives us a lot of information about how the children interact, and we have one published paper and one preprint so far. We have also used the same system to evaluate how audiences engage with watching theatre performances and find that the synchrony between audience members is related to their emotional response to the performance.

Our next steps are to follow up on the fNIRS studies with lab-based research into the social brain in actors. We hope to understand the neural and cognitive processes involved in the incredibly complex social skill of acting – actors can create a convincing portrayal of another person using their own body as a tool, but we don't yet know much about the cognition of this skill. And our second aim is to continue our studies with wearable sensors in a wider range of children and adults in different contexts. We want to find new ways to measure real-world social interactions and use this to understand what is different in autism.

Further reading

Greaves et al., Exploring theatre neuroscience: using wearable fNIRS to measure the sense of self and interpersonal coordination in professional actors, in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

Sun, Greaves, Orgs, Hamilton, Day & Ward (2023). Using wearable sensors to measure interpersonal synchrony in actors and audience members during a live theatre performance Proc ACM IMWUT

Ward, Richardson, Orgs, Hunter & Hamilton (2018). Sensing interpersonal synchrony between actors and autistic children using wrist-worn accelerometers International Symposium on Wearable Computers.