U of L researcher using movies to get a picture of brain and behaviour

By Alexandra Noad - Lethbridge Herald Local Journalism Initiative Reporter on January 28, 2025.

University of Lethbridge photo - Chelsea Ekstrand is using movies to see how the brain processes the world and how that can impact behaviour.

A researcher at the University of Lethbridge neuroscience department is using movies along with magnetic response imaging (MRI) to see how the brain processes the world and how that can impact the behaviours of the person.

Chelsea Ekstrand, assistant professor at the University of Lethbridge is performing the study using three different short movies which elevate different emotions in the brain one for anxiety, one for happiness and a boring instructional video as a baseline.

She says they are currently seeing how people react similarly or differently to the videos though an MRI machine at the university.

“We continually measure how their brains are responding to each of the movies over time,” says Ekstrand. “We can take the brain activation and we can compare it to other’s to see if people’s brains seem to be responding in the sort of way to the film.”

Ekstrand says she became interested in researching how people respond to movies when she realized that researchers often use things that don’t translate to the real world.

“I became really interested in how we can use stimuli or use things in our experiments that are more like how we are actually processing things in the real world and one of those things we can use are those movies.”

Through her studies, she says she has been able to see that happy people tend to ignore negative aspects of their environment, whereas negative people ignore positive aspects.

Ekstrand is hoping to one day expand her study to be able to detect whether or not therapy might be working for someone.

“What would be cool is if we could use something like this to see how treatments are working,” she says. “For example, if someone is in therapy could we look at their patterns of brain activity and how similar they are to other people to see if therapy is working or treatments are working?”

While there still is work to be done, this could be a step towards a brighter future, especially when it comes to mental health.