14 DAY TRIAL // In a new scientific investigation, researchers demonstrate that smokers who see actors light up their cigarettes on the screen during movies are very tempted to do so themselves. The discovery was made by using a brain-imaging technique on regular smokers who watched movies depicting the habit.
According to the research team that conducted the investigation, seeing others light up a cigarette activates portions of a smoker's brain that are usually involved in governing movements associated with the habit.
The activation pattern looks just as if the people seeing the movie were on the verge of lighting up themselves. This is known because past studies have investigated the motor pathways smokers have and nonsmokers don't in great detail.
Those studies have shown that the neural pathway governing the motions associated with taking out a cigarette, putting it between the lips, and lighting it up is very well established in smokers. The bad news for those trying to quit is that a number of cues can elicit activity in this pathway.
It would now appear that seeing other people smoke on TV is one of them. Researchers have known that smokers find it hard to refrain from “practicing” their habit when they see others smoke “in the flesh,” but the same was not known to be true for movies and TV shows too.
The new work was conduced by researcher Todd Heatherton and graduate student Dylan Wagner, who are both based at Dartmouth College, LiveScience reports. They used an observations technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging machine (fMRI) to do that.
What fMRI does is it identifies neural activation patterns in the brain. On the scans it produces, areas that are activated light up from their surroundings. As neuroscientists have a basic understanding of what each cortical region does, they can infer the effect that a certain activation pattern has.
During the experiments, the first 30 minutes of the movie “Matchstick Men,” starring Nicolas Cage, were played back for 17 smokers and 17 nonsmokers. This movie was selected because it did not contain other cues to negative behavior, such as drinking, violence, and random intercourse.
Non of the participants knew the experiment was about smoking, and all of them were hooked up to the fMRI machine while they watched the movie sequence.
When compared to non-smokers, smokers had elevated brain activities in areas such as the orbitofrontal corex, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex, which usually process rewards.
A secondary activation pattern was noticed in the anterior cingulated cortex, which past studies demonstrated was involved with cigarette craving.
“What is particularly novel about these findings is that viewing movie smoking activated regions involved in understanding and planning actions,” Heatherton explains.
“The main thing we have noticed is that in movies that appeal to teens, many of the popular characters smoke. They have characteristics that appeal to teens, such as being cool and attractive,” he adds.
“This finding builds upon the growing body of evidence that addiction may be reinforced not just by drugs themselves, but by images and other experiences associated with those drugs,” Huettel concludes.