Method actors were trained to take on role of Romeo or Juliet and then respond to questions

“Acting is the least mysterious of all crafts,” Marlon Brando once said. But for scientists, working out what is going on in an actor’s head has always been something of a puzzle.

Now, researchers have said thespians show different patterns of brain activity depending on whether they are in character or not.

Dr Steven Brown, the first author of the research from McMaster University in Canada, said: “It looks like when you are acting, you are suppressing yourself; almost like the character is possessing you.”

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Writing in the journal Royal Society Open Science, Brown and colleagues report how 15 method actors, mainly theatre students, were trained to take on a Shakespeare role – either Romeo or Juliet – in a theatre workshop, and were asked various questions, to which they responded in character. They were then invited into the laboratory, where their brains were scanned in a series of experiments.

Once inside the MRI scanner, the actors were asked to think about their response to a number of fresh conundrums that flashed up on screen, and which might well have occurred to the star-crossed lovers, such as: would they gatecrash a party? And would they tell their parents that they had fallen in love?

Each actor was asked to respond to different questions, based on four different premises assigned in a random order. In one, they were asked for their own perspective; in another, they were asked to say how they thought a particular close friend would react, while in a third, they were asked to respond as though they were either Romeo or Juliet.

The other premise involved the actors – who all had Canadian accents – responding from their own point of view, but with an English accent.

The results revealed the brain activity differed depending on the scenario being tested.

When the team looked at the patterns seen when the actor thought about how their friend might respond and compared them with those triggered by their own personal response, they saw a drop in brain activity in particular areas of the prefrontal cortex. These changes were similar to those seen in previous experiments investigating “theory of mind” – in other words, the ability to infer how other people might be thinking or feeling.

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When the actors were in character, the team found a similar change – suggesting that when acting, individuals use some third-person knowledge, or inferences, about their character.

However, the team said they also found additional reduction in activity in two regions of the prefrontal cortex linked to the sense of self, compared with when the actors were responding as themselves.

“The deactivation associated with a reduction, a suppression, of knowledge of your own traits I think conforms with what acting may involve,” said Brown. A similar drop in activation occurred when the actors changed accent, but replied from their own point of view – something Brown suggested supports the idea that gestures can be a useful way of getting into a role.

Only when replying as Romeo or Juliet did the actors also display an increase in activity in an area called the precuneus, which is linked to consciousness and aspects of attention among other things, compared with when they were responding as themselves.

“Actors have to split their consciousness, they sort of have to monitor themselves and be in the character at the same time,” said Brown, by means of explanation.

However, Prof Philip Davis, the director of the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society at the University of Liverpool, was unimpressed by the research, saying acting is about far more than improvisation in character or “pretending” to be someone – it involves embodying the text and language.

Indeed, Davis said, far from suppressing the self, actors draw on it. “This [research] suggests you cut off self, and you do something else – you deactivate self,” he said. “But actually, [actors] also use parts of self that they otherwise wouldn’t use.”