Séminaire de Lucas Parra

Vendredi 16 janvier 2026, à 11h, INT, Salle Henri Gastaut

Lucas Parra (City College of New York) invité par Davide Reato

Narratives resonate in the internal brain-body dynamic

Abstract: Movies or spoken narratives elicit strong responses in the brain. These responses are similar across subjects, effectively synchronizing brain activity between individuals. The synchronization is widespread across the brain and modulated by attention, suggesting that narratives effectively engage our cognition. Recent findings show that listening to narratives also synchronizes physiological signals. This includes synchronization of heart rate and pupil size, suggesting that stories also drive the autonomic system. Quite likely, cognition and arousal dynamically interact. I will present a modeling framework that captures this dynamic interaction as well as the drive from the external stimulus, integrating two classic but disjoint analysis formalisms used in neuroscience (“encoding” and “connectivity” models). The main finding is that the internal dynamic dominates brain response to the stimulus, while the internal dynamic is largely unaltered between resting and listening to narratives. Remarkably, the same is true for the brain-body interactions. In short, the internal brain-body dynamic does not change when we listen to stories, but rather, the narratives appear to resonate within us.