Film narratives are intrinsically time-dependent designs. This article proposes a model of narrative nowness, based on Husserl’s concepts of retention and protention on one hand, and Francisco Varela’s neurophenomenological exploration of time consciousness on the other, relating this further to narrative experience and its neural epiphenomena. Only recently has brain research been equipped with the possibility of dealing with temporal frames relevant for time consciousness in the scope of whole narratives. The study of cinema using neuroscientific methods and insights is referred to as neurocinematics. We promote neurocinematics as a complementary method of traditional film research, rather than an approach of brain sciences in general. Neurocinematic methods may provide film studies with new tools for re-evaluating established filmmaking conventions and developing new ways to study, for instance, the film viewer’s experience and related aspects of time consciousness.
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Phenomenological Considerations on Time Consciousness under Neurocinematic Search Light
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14
Phenomenological Considerations on Time Consciousness
under Neurocinematic Search Light
Pia Tikka, Aalto University Finland
Mauri Kaipainen, Södertörn University




Abstract

    Film narratives are intrinsically time-dependent designs. This article proposes a
    model of narrative nowness, based on Husserl’s concepts of retention and pro-
    tention on one hand, and Francisco Varela’s neurophenomenological explora-
    tion of time consciousness on the other, relating this further to narrative ex-
    perience and its neural epiphenomena. Only recently has brain research been
    equipped with the possibility of dealing with temporal frames relevant for time
    consciousness in the scope of whole narratives. The study of cinema using neu-
    roscientific methods and insights is referred to as neurocinematics. We promote
    neurocinematics as a complementary method of traditional film research, rather
    than an approach of brain sciences in general. Neurocinematic methods may
    provide film studies with new tools for re-evaluating established filmmaking
    conventions and developing new ways to study, for instance, the film viewer’s
    experience and related aspects of time consciousness.


Introduction

   The early phenomenologists William James and Edmund Husserl regularly
applied scientific findings to support their phenomenological reflections. Par-
ticularly, psychology and physics provided metaphors and practical models for
their philosophical inquiries. In psychology, Hugo Münsterberg was among the
first to recognize the strong influence of film narratives on the audience. It was
therefore natural for the early film theorists, such as Sergei Eisenstein, to apply
the insights of their contemporary natural scientists, psychologists and brain sci-
entists to lay the foundations of the discipline, as we know it today.1 Against the
historical background, it appears unproductive to isolate phenomenologically-



1
  Pia Tikka, Enactive Cinema: Simulatorium Eisensteinense, University of Art and Design Publica-
tion Series, Helsinki 2008.

                                             Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIV, no. 22/23, Spring/Fall 2014
                                Pia Tikka and Mauri Kaipainen


oriented film studies from the sciences that reveal stunning insights to the epi-
phenomena of film experience.
   We will base our approach on Francisco Varela’s neurophenomenological
studies and the broader paradigm referred to as the embodied mind approach.2
In our article, the gradually accumulated scientific understanding of intersubjec-
tively shared human experiences is extrapolated to the study of cinema narra-
tives and the related viewer experiences. In the following article, we discuss the
state-of-art in neurocinematics that has obvious benefits to the understanding of
film experience, and propose a model of time consciousness that bridges phe-
nomenology of narrative experience with empirical brain studies.


State-of-art in neurocinematics

    The study of cinema using neuroscientific methods and insights is referred to
as neurocinematics. The term was coined by the neuroscientist Uri Hasson and
his team in an article targeted to the cognitive film research journal Projections.3
However, today neuroscientists in general have to a great extent abandoned the
term. For instance, Hasson has stated that his interest to use films focuses not on
studying films, but on the human brain functions; for instance, memory encod-
ing and retrieval.4 His team has recently focused on questions regarding different
scales of neural temporality, which Varela also discussed in his article Specious
Present in the 1990s.5 In relation to the topic of the present article, neuroscien-
tific studies into temporal windows in the brain provide neurocinematic studies
with highly valuable knowledge, in particular about how film viewers’ holistic
experience of filmic time might emerge from neural dynamics.
    Neurophysiology intertwines with the social and cultural in an inseparable
manner. In line with this argument by the embodied mind approach, neuro-
cinematic research assumes that the viewers experience external phenomena
in a relatively similar manner. The relativity claim does not reject idiosyncratic
private experiences as such. However, it assumes the similarity of that experi-
ence – due to the biological and cultural evolution of humankind under certain
particular environmental constraints – is far more extended than people in

2
  Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, Eleanor Rosch, Embodied mind: Cognitive science and hu-
man experience, MIT Press, Cambridge (MA) 1991; Francisco J. Varela, “Neurophenomenology.
A methodological remedy for the hard problem,” in Journal of Consciousness studies, no. 4, 1996,
pp. 330-349; Id., “The Specious Present: A Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness,” in
Jean Petitot, Francisco J. Varela, Bernard Pacoud, Jean-Michel Roy (eds.), Naturalizing Phe-
nomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, Stanford University
Press, Stanford 1999, pp. 266-329.
3
  Uri Hasson, Ohad Landesman, Barbara Knappmeyer, Ignacio Vallines, Nava Rubin, David J.
Heeger, “Neurocinematics: The Neuroscience of Film,” in Projections. The Journal for Movies and
Mind, no. 2, 2008, pp. 1-26.
4
  Uri Hasson, personal communication.
5
  Francisco J. Varela, “The Specious Present: A Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness,” cit.

92
                  Phenomenological Considerations on Time Consciousness


general are willing to admit. The art of filmmaking and storytelling relies on
this intersubjectivity. And so does the art of neurocinematics in its endeavour
to bridge the studies of film and the brain.
   Only recently has brain research been equipped with the possibility of dealing
with temporal frames relevant for time consciousness in the scope of whole nar-
ratives, such as full-length films, due to the rapid development of data collection
and analysis methods. The use of the free-viewing method, as it is referred to, is
increasing.6 This signals a shift from traditional, more artificial studies, where, for
instance, viewing dynamically changing images of faces has been taken as a suf-
ficient experimental condition for studying the neural underpinnings of a range
of human social behaviours.


Intersubjectivity

   Neuroimaging experiments have revealed that viewer’s brains “tick together”
when they are viewing the same film.7 The similarity of brain behaviour between
viewers is likely due to the way their attention is trapped, guided, and tricked
by the narrative design, which in turn builds on the shared foundations. Film-
making, after all, relies on the mastery of manipulating the viewer’s attention in
time. The seminal neuroscientific observation of Hasson and colleagues showed
significant intersubjective correlation between the brain responses of viewers of
a Hitchcock film, but this did not hold for those watching a random surveillance
video footage.8 A quite reasonable interpretation is that well-designed storytell-
ing engages viewers in predictable ways similar to most individuals, due to the
built-in capabilities of the cognition, while a random series of events does not.
   In film viewing situations we may assume the narrative cognition in play.9
Based on their previous experience the viewers expect the narrative flow to be
structured to guide their attention and anticipation. This may imply that unpre-
dictable narratives require more intensive cognitive labour in terms of continu-
ous updating of expectations than more strictly controlled narratives do. Indeed,
in one of our recent neurocinematic studies, a group of individuals watched an


6
  Uri Hasson, Yuval Nir, Ifat Levy, Galit Fuhrmann, Rafael Malach, “Intersubject synchronization
of cortical activity during natural vision,” in Science, no. 303, 2004, pp. 1634-1640; Andreas Bar-
tels, Semir Zeki, “The chronoarchitecture of the human brain – Natural viewing conditions reveal
a time-based anatomy of the brain,” in NeuroImage, no. 1, May 2004, pp. 419-433.
7
  Uri Hasson et al., “Intersubject synchronization of cortical activity during natural vision,” cit.;
Iiro P. Jääskeläinen, Katri Koskentalo, Marja H. Balk, Taina Autti, Jaakko Kauramäki, Cajus Pom-
ren, Mikko Sams, “Inter-subject synchronization of prefrontal cortex hemodynamic activity during
natural viewing,” in Open Neuroimaging Journal, no. 2, 2008, pp. 14-19.
8
  Uri Hasson et al., “Neurocinematics: The Neuroscience of Film,” cit.
9
  With the notion of narrative cognition we particularly refer to the sense-making processes that
relate to cinematic structures. See Pia Tikka, Cinema as externalization of consciousness, in Robert
Pepperell, Michael Punt (eds.), Screen Consciousness: Mind, Cinema and World, Rodopi, Amster-
dam-New York 2006, pp. 139-162.

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                                 Pia Tikka and Mauri Kaipainen


experimental silent short film, At Land by Maya Deren (1944). As explicitly
pointed out by Deren herself, the film has been structured by other cinematic
decisions, deliberately ignoring the story.10 When we compared the intersubjec-
tive brain behaviour of the viewers with that of another group of viewers, who
had watched a story-driven drama in similar conditions, we could detect dif-
ferences between the groups.11 Our preliminary interpretation assumes that At
Land elicits stronger functional connections at the anterior parts of the brain
that are associated with the management of higher cognitive tasks, such as deci-
sion making, evaluation of the consequences of the main characters actions, or
grasping the “bigger picture,” in contrast to the more consistent sensory-related
posterior functional connectivity observed with the story-driven films.12


Annotation of film content

   Annotation of content is the prerequisite of interpreting brain activity against
cinematic content.13 So far, it has been applied to mark up intersubjectively share-
able situations, for instance, faces of other people or landscapes,14 global or local
movement,15 and social vs. non-social actions.16 Several overlapping methods are
already in use, such as a) automated analysis methods: image, sound, and lan-
guage analysis; b) subjective analysis methods: questionnaires, online annotation
tools, and self-rating tools are used for collecting information of each viewer’s
subjective experiences; c) crowdsourcing methods: an online community includ-
ing a large group of people may be invited to annotate narrative content (e.g.,
Mechanical Turk); d) expert annotation methods: discourse analysis methods;
expert content analysis by dramaturgists, psychologists, social scientists.


10
   Maya Deren, An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film, Yonkers, The Alicat Book Shop Press,
New York 1946, re-print in Bill Nichols (ed.), Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde, Univer-
sity of California Press, London 2001, pp. 267-322.
11
   Janne Kauttonen, Yevhen Hlushchuk, Pia Tikka (unpublished data). Films are At Land by Maya
Deren, USA, 1944, Heartbeats by Saara Cantell, Finland, 2009, and The Match Factory Girl by Aki
Kaurismäki, Finland, 1990.
12
   Pia Tikka, Mauri Kaipainen, Screendance as enactment in Maya Deren’s At Land: Enactive,
embodied, and neurocinematic considerations, in Douglas Rosenberg (ed.), The Oxford Handbook
of Screendance Studies, Oxford University Press (in press).
13
   Jelena Rosic, Pia Tikka, “Annotation of film content for a neurocinematic analysis: Implications
for embodied approaches to filmmaking,” an oral presentation at SCSMI2013, Society for Cogni-
tive Studies of the Moving Image 2013 Conference, Berlin, 12 June 2013.
14
   Sanna Malinen, Yevhen Hlushchuk, Riitta Hari, “Towards natural stimulation in fMRI: issues of
data analysis,” in Neuroimage, no. 35, 2007, pp. 131-139.
15
   Andreas Bartels, Semir Zeki, Logothetis Nikos K., “Natural vision reveals regional specialization
to local motion and to contrast-invariant, global flow in the human brain”, in Cereb Cortex, no. 3,
2008, pp. 705-717.
16
   Juha Lahnakoski, Juha Salmi, Iiro P. Jääskeläinen, Jouko Lampinen, Enrico Glerean, Pia Tikka,
Mikko Sams, “Stimulus-Related Independent Component and Voxel-Wise Analysis of Human
Brain Activity during Free Viewing of a Feature Film,” in PLoS ONE 7, 2012, e35215.

94
                    Phenomenological Considerations on Time Consciousness


   Annotation in itself is a broad field of methodological development that falls
outside of the present topic. For the present discussion it suffices to assume that
every meaningful event in the film is marked up with annotations that can be
used to match the measured brain activity to it. However, the match of low-level
content annotation with brain responses may not be sufficient in the long run as
the focus of interest moves to the higher levels of cognitive functions.17 To put it
in another way, our point here is that annotation is not enough to describe the
viewer’s consciousness of the narrative time, and another layer of representing
the narrative is needed to relate it to the neurocinematic data.


Time and narration in neurocinematics

   The Russian film theorist Lev Kuleshov’s famous montage experiment showed
that a neutral face combined with images loaded with varying emotional con-
text (a bowl of soup, a child’s coffin, a woman) create different interpretations.
Indeed, we tend to infer other people’s situations based on the available con-
textual cues and information. In the unfolding of film narrative earlier images
predetermine the interpretation of those that follow. Later Eisenstein proposed
a more holistic idea by pointing out that sequentiality is not the main principle
that defines the interpretation but rather the holistic simultaneity of different
narrative elements in the viewer’s mind, defined in terms of memory and an-
ticipation. This conceptualization appears very similar to the Husserlian idea
of nowness. All previous events condition the experience of nowness and the
anticipation of the coming events along the narrative.
   So far, naturalistic neuroscientific studies have analysed the relation between
film content and brain data within isolated time frames. Yet, this method runs
short of relating contextual conditions and the anticipations that filmic events
trigger in time scales natural to film viewing, not to mention life itself. In our
view, studies that do not take into account the viewer’s temporal situatedness
with respect to continuous narrative just fall short of meeting the attribute “natu-
ralistic.” For example, when in The Match Factory Girl by Aki Kaurismäki (1990)
the main character Iris (Kati Outinen) rushes into the bathroom to vomit in the
middle of her work shift, a current method that focuses on locally synchronized
events would ignore the previous events that build the overall context. The in-
terpretation of the corresponding brain data would be based on the assump-
tion that the viewers are feeling disgusted because they are witnessing someone
vomiting. However, the more correct interpretation that takes into account the
context would be that the viewers feel shocked because they understand that Iris
is pregnant with the child of a man that does not love her. This example shows


17
  This critical issue has also been recognized by neuroscientists, e.g., Uri Hasson et al., “Intersub-
ject synchronization of cortical activity during natural vision,” cit.; Iiro P. Jääskeläinen et al., “Inter-
subject synchronization of prefrontal cortex hemodynamic activity during natural viewing,” cit.

                                                                                                         95
                                Pia Tikka and Mauri Kaipainen


why we regard it crucial for neurocinematic interpretations to go beyond the
currently applied methods of matching the film and the brain data, and move
toward experimental paradigms that address time consciousness in a dynamical
way with regard to the full scale of narrative contexts.
   In order to gain further understanding of narrative time consciousness, we de-
part from the assumption that temporal and contextual situatedness constitute
an intrinsic part of the human cognitive system and is likely to have been built
into the neural dynamics in the course of evolution. Neuroscience studies have
shown that cognitive segmentation of continuous narratives into meaningful se-
quences or shorter events appears to be a built-in cognitive mechanism related
to intersubjectively shared sense-making.18 In addition, the recent neuroscientific
findings related to temporal receptive windows in the brain may guide neurocin-
ematic mapping of the phenomenological, neural, and behavioural nowness into
narrative structures on different time scales. Consequently, a hierarchy of corti-
cal areas in terms of distinct temporal dynamics of neural population can be as-
sumed.19 To comprehend the idea of measured durations of the brain’s temporal
receptive windows we may consider them, for example, in terms of the spatial
receptive fields in the visual cortex. Cortical hierarchy related to varying scales of
temporal narrative coherence has been detected, for instance, in a study, where
people were engaged in reading the same story content organized as a) “back-
ward story,” b) “word scram,” c) “sentence scram,” d) “paragraph scram,” and
e) intact “forward story.”20 The more coherent the story, the more extended the
intersubjectively shared activation in the listener’s brain.
   In terms of narrative comprehension, the different temporally characterized
functions could be assigned to different anatomical locations in the brain, and
the temporal window of neural activity might even correlate with the level of
abstraction of related neural representations.21 Typically, for instance, the visual
brain areas are responsive to “lower” level visual features (e.g., detecting line
directions, contrasts) in a time scale of milliseconds. In turn, the “higher” level

18
   Jeffrey M. Zacks, Nicole K. Speer, Khena M. Swallow, Corey J. Maley, “The brain’s cutting-room
floor: segmentation of narrative cinema,” in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, no. 4, 2010, pp.
1-15; Jesse Q. Sargent, Jeffrey M. Zacks, David Z. Hambrick, Rose T. Zacks, Christopher A. Kurby,
Heather R. Bailey, Michelle L. Eisenberg, Taylor M. Beck, “Event segmentation ability uniquely
predicts event memory,” in Cognition, no. 129, 2013, pp. 241-255.
19
   Uri
   ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������
        Hasson, Eunice Yang, Ignacio Vallines, David J. Heeger, Nava Rubin, “Hierarchy of tem-
poral receptive windows in human cortex,” in The Journal of Neuroscience, no. 10, 5 March 2008,
pp. 2539-2550; Jukka-Pekka Kauppi, Iiro P. Jääskeläinen, Mikko Sams, Jussi Tohka, “Inter-Subject
Correlation of Brain Hemodynamic Responses During Watching a Movie: Localization in Space
and Frequency,” in Frontiers in Neuroinformatics, no. 4, 9 March 2010.
20
   Yulia Lerner, Christopher J. Honey, Lauren J. Silbert, Uri Hasson, “Topographic mapping of a
hierarchy of temporal receptive windows using a narrated story,” in Journal of Neuroscience, no.
31, 2011, pp. 2906-2915.
21
   Uri Hasson et al., “Hierarchy of temporal receptive windows in human cortex,” cit.; Iiro P.
Jääskeläinen, Jyrki Ahveninen, Mark L. Andermann, John W. Belliveau, Tommi Raij, and Mikko
Sams, “Short-term plasticity as a neural mechanism supporting memory and attentional func-
tions,” in Brain Res, no. 1422, 22 September 2011, pp. 66-81.

96
                  Phenomenological Considerations on Time Consciousness


cognitive areas of the frontal lobe associated with, let us say, management of
future tasks or evaluation of the moral consequences of film character’s actions,
may respond to information accumulated over longer temporal intervals up to
tens of seconds. The direct implication of these findings is that temporal situ-
atedness is to be conceived of in terms of multiple layers. In the following we
propose a preliminary conceptual model of narrative time inspired by Francisco
Varela’s neurophenomenological approach to time consciousness.


Conceptualizing time consciousness

   Varela’s neurophenomenological interpretation of Husserl’s model on tem-
porality assumes moments of nowness embedded in broader temporal contexts
in terms of retention and protention (fig. 1).22 Retention refers to the temporally
backwards-extended present, consisting of a long tail of past events that form
a hierarchical system of mutually embedded contextual framings of the expe-
rience of the present, i.e. the nowness. From the point of view of psychology
and neuropsychology, retention is entertained on multiple levels of gradually
decaying memory traces. Protention, in turn, refers to the anticipation of the
next moment implied by nowness.




Fig. 1 – The fourfold structure of nowness constituted by retentional flow and protentional land-
scaping. Time can be seen to flow horizontally from left to right (static constitution) while verti-
cally between the dynamical loops of retention and protention emerges the immanent affective
disposition. The image can be seen to describe an experiential moment within the filmic flow. The
image adapted from Varela’s fourfold structure of nowness in “The Specious Present,” p. 303.




22
   Francisco J. Varela, “The Specious Present: A Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness,”
cit.; Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, Indiana University
Press, Bloomington 1964. Husserl’s writings in German language Zur Phänomenologie des Inneren
Zeitbewusstseins originate from 1893- 1917.

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                                Pia Tikka and Mauri Kaipainen



   We suggest that a proper dynamic model of narrative nowness should al-
low mapping of retention (i.e. meaningful context conditions accumulated in
time), and protention (i.e. the anticipation of immediate future) against the ob-
served brain activity. Varela points out three aspects that should be considered
as being elementarily intertwined in the neurophenomenological study of time
consciousness: “(1) the neurobiological basis, (2) the formal descriptive tools
mostly derived from nonlinear dynamics, and (3) the nature of lived temporal
experience studied under reduction.”23
   In Husserlian terms, the experience of narrative nowness can be described as a
kind of temporal fringe,24 in terms of a spatial metaphor, an imaginary viewpoint
from the centre to the periphery. The model allows holistic comprehension of
nowness as that which simultaneously holds the just passing past with the still
reachable memory of the gradually distancing past (retention), as well as the an-
ticipation of the nearest future in terms of gradually approaching events (proten-
tion), all of these dynamically linked by means of feedback loops.
   The duration of nowness can be intuitively defined in terms of on-going ac-
tions. We relate the notion of protonarrative25 to the phenomenological idea of
nowness, as a reference to the briefest possible meaningful event. For example,
the moment when someone is rejected by another person exemplifies a socially
meaningful protonarrative with a duration of a few seconds. The typical duration
of a protonarrative might serve as a preliminary heuristics for the automated seg-
mentation of film content into events, which in turn are necessary pointers to the
neural phenomena of nowness. As observed in the brain activations, spectators
seem to automatically recognize changes in the situations, for example, when an
action or event ends and a new one begins.26
   Quite obviously, the order of introducing narrative elements constitutes the
fundamental aspect of narrative. What happened earlier will define the experi-
ence of nowness and by doing this, it will also condition the protention, the
anticipation of immediate future events. In the next section, we propose a dy-
namical model that describes the narrative flow in terms of continuous updates
of the retentive contexts.




23
   Francisco J. Varela, “The Specious Present: A Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness,”
cit., p. 305.
24
   Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, cit., pp. 27, 41; Francisco
J. Varela, “The Specious Present: A Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness,”, cit., p. 278.
25
   The notion of protonarrative was applied in neurocinematic studies by Pia Tikka in 2010; see
also Philip Lewin, “The Ethical Self in the Play of Affect and Voice,” Conference on After Post-
modernism, University of Chicago, 14-16 November 1997, http://www.focusing.org/apm_papers/
Lewin.html, last visit 6 April 2014.
26
   Jesse Q. Sargent et al., “Event segmentation ability uniquely predicts event memory,” cit.

98
                   Phenomenological Considerations on Time Consciousness



Narrative nowness model

   The narrative nowness model determines to what extent each narrative event
is considered meaningful for the experience of nowness for an individual viewer,
constituting what can be consequently called the narrative perspective, following
our conceptualization.27 The narrative perspective of an individual movie viewer
corresponds to their memory and attention varying from moment to moment.
The assumed diminishing attention or decaying memory traces of past events
can be described mathematically and algorithmically. Another factor is the one
of context-refreshing associations induced by the storytelling at each moment
of nowness, constituting a feedback loop that regulates the way the retentive
memory traces are allowed to influence the interpretation of nowness (fig. 2).




Fig. 2 – Schematic depiction of the evolution of the momentary nowness window and the weights on
narrative dimensions that determine the corresponding perspective. The a) sharp peaks curve corre-
spond to introduction of new dimensions through new narrative elements, b) the rising red curves to
protentive expectations triggered by other events, while c) slowly decaying curves stand for narrative di-
mensions that gradually lose their prominence due to shift out from active working memory or attention.



   We assume that once introduced, each meaningful event forms a narrative con-
text for the following ones. It can be formally described as a narrative coordinate
referring to a dimension of the narrative space, the value corresponding to its
prominence in the experience of the nowness. The dimensions altogether define
what can be termed a high-dimensional narrative ontospace, with reference to the


27
  Roberto Pugliese, Pia Tikka, Mauri Kaipainen, “Navigating story onto space: Perspective-relative
drive and combinatory montage of cinematic content,” in Raivo Kelomees, Chris Hales (eds.), Ex-
panding Practices in Audiovisual Narrative, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastel (in press).

                                                                                                       99
                                 Pia Tikka and Mauri Kaipainen


ontospace model of Kaipainen and colleagues.28 The narrative ontospace corre-
sponds to the whole system of potential experiences. An individual experience,
in turn, is a perspective on that space, modelled as a set of weights, one for each
narrative dimension. The coordinate value of a particular narrative dimension
can be approximated by some decaying function of the temporal distance from
the moment of when the memory was last refreshed.
   The experience of nowness, as described above, while being based on the
retentive perspective, is dynamically coupled to the protentive function, allow-
ing a tension of anticipating coming events. It is, however, beyond the model
to predict what the anticipated events are. It may suffice here to assume that
anticipations involve the entire cognitive-perceptual and experiential apparatus,
with its evolutionary hard-wired elements, such as emotions, logical inferences,
as well as learned and culturally assimilated associations.
   The suggested narrative nowness model potentially allows computational im-
plementations, which can be calibrated to match measurements of memory and
attention. Provided a level of validity with respect to these aspects of psychology,
the model should be able to generate predictions for brain responses to cinemat-
ic events embedded in their full narrative contexts. This opens up several new
avenues for the neurocinematic inquiry. It allows (1) evaluating effects of narra-
tive context-dependency on the brain activity in the continuous movie viewing
paradigm, (2) developing annotation methods to describe experience-determin-
ing narrative contexts in the scale of entire movies, and further, (3) combining
these into a system that allows correlating large neuroimaging data (quantitative)
and perspective-weighted annotations of content (qualitative), and (4) address-
ing issues of shared vs. individual narrative experience in terms of being able to
describe and further compare varying perspectives.


Conclusions

   We envision that the proposed nowness model, inspired by the phenomeno-
logical considerations, will contribute to the analysis of time- and context-de-
pendency of film narratives. The model may also help anchoring the interpreta-
tion of the temporally unfolding contextually rich film content to that of viewers’
brain data in a meaningful way. This would mean being more faithful to the
holistic ways our narrative cognition functions as we experience the complexity
of film characters’ situatedness in the fictional world. The model allows for new
ways for analysing and interpreting the neurocinematic data that have been col-
lected during viewing of films. Further, the concept of narrative perspective asso-
ciated to nowness accommodates even broader life contexts and other individual


28
   Mauri
   �����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������
          Kaipainen, Peter Normak, Katrin Niglas, Jaagup Kippar, Mart Laanpere, “Soft ontolo-
gies, spatial representations and multi-perspective explorability,” in Expert Systems, no. 5, 2008,
pp. 474-483.

100
                Phenomenological Considerations on Time Consciousness


determinants of experience, such as engagement in a film culture in such a way
that allows the identification of cross-references between movies. In this respect,
the proposed model should rather be regarded as the broad hypothesis that the
experience of nowness can be modelled and mapped to its neural epiphenom-
ena, implying a novel paradigm of film research.
   Some sceptics with an implicit dualist attitude may argue that by introducing
scientific methods into the film research the neurocinematic approach takes a
collision course with humanist values. We believe the opposite, namely that in-
sights to the physiological grounds of the embodied film experience will contrib-
ute to the holistic understanding of the art of film – right at the heart of humanity.


Acknowledgements

   We thank Dr. Janne Kauttonen for his valuable insights to the formulation of the
narrative nowness model. The research group aivoAALTO and Aalto Starting Grant
at the Aalto University, as well as the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies
provided the frameworks and resources that made this work possible.




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