This study tests previously untested extremes of the power of James Bond movies:
“Functional Connectivity of the Macaque Brain across Stimulus and Arousal States,” Sebastian Moeller, Nambi Nallasamy, Doris Y. Tsao, and Winrich A. Freiwald, Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 29, no. 18, May 6, 2009, pp. 5897-5909. (Thanks to investigator Neil Martin for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at California Institute of Technology, Harvard Medical School, and The Rockefeller University, report:
“In this study, we set out to systematically partition the macaque brain across different visual stimulus conditions and arousal states using ICA, and then compare the spatial structure of resulting ICs across the different states…. Visual stimuli were projected from an LCD projector (1280 × 1024 pixels, 60 Hz refresh rate), onto a screen positioned 49 cm in front of the monkey’s eyes…. Stimuli consisted of: clips from ‘James Bond, Tomorrow Never Dies‘”.
Below: a portion (not necessarily a portion used in the study) of the film: