There’s an exciting new field that’s opened up called neurocinematics with groundbreaking work done out of Princeton and Cornell that studies how the brain responds to movies.

There have been some interesting findings that are already guiding filmmakers and commercial directors to make clips that are more engaging. For example, films that have grossed highly tend to have shots with length that mirrors our own natural attention span — this is called the pink noise — perhaps this is the first grammatical structure for describing videos?

You can read more about the study, released March of this year.

I’m surprised the concept of “video grammar” is so hotly contested. Even though science may not have moved far along enough to fully articulate how our brains processes moving images in the same way that it understands how our brains process textual stories, it’s quickly catching up.

Princeton did a fascinating study watching the brain reacts via fMRI to a trailer — you can see it here. 

What they learned is setting the foundation for a greater understanding of what engages the human mind audio-visually, and that could lay the foundation for an eventual handbook on how to create the best trailers, commercials, or even YouTube videos, in the same way that there are books today like “Dummie’s Guide to Doing a Start-Up” (which I wished I had gotten when I started Circos Brand Karma!)

In any case, I think the debate illustrates another fundamental point that came up during WIT: we should look outside the travel industry for inspirations on what’s to come.

This doesn’t mean that no innovations or creativity will come out of the travel industry, but there’s a lot of great stuff happening outside of the travel industry that our customers are experiencing.

We must wear their shoes to understand, not ours. The same person deciding where to go for his vacation saw “Inception” on the way home, and probably remembers the latest Harry Potter trailer. When he looks at your hotel video – do you think he’s comparing against other hotel videos.– or what last made an impression on his mind?

There’s no denying that great movies are works of art — but every art has a language to describe itself. I think we’re on the cusp of discovering how movies move us… and with that will come a language that has a set of concepts and guidelines to help future filmmakers, amateurs and professionals, make more engaging movies.

Featured image credit (Reel of film): Ockra/iStock