Disclaimer*: The articles shared under 'Your Voice' section are sent to us by contributors and we neither confirm nor deny the authenticity of any facts stated below. Parhlo will not be liable for any false, inaccurate, inappropriate or incomplete information presented on the website. Read our disclaimer.
Movies are often viewed as the perfect way to relax: You sit in a comfy seat, eat some popcorn and tune out for two hours. But there’s a lot more to cinema than simply entertainment. Movies affect your brain and in ways, you may not be able to detect. Some people are visual learners; other people are audial learners.
Books and movies are both learning vehicles that use visual and audial devices to communicate information, but movies are direct and intense, with books providing a more detached learning bubble. Due to the fog of emotional intensity that movies generate, fewer people analyze and dissect the visual and audial nuances of movies, which has implications for conceptual learning.
Can Movies Make People More Intelligent: Yes!
Source: TMZ.com
Psychologists say humans grasp and retain concepts better when they learn them in conjunction with strong emotion. So, if we first encounter a subject encapsulated in the emotional content of a movie, our intelligence might expand, because the movie serves as a channel to open our minds.
In That Way, Some People Might Learn More From Books
Source: Mashable
Books–like movies–have both audial and visual components, especially when books are written by good writers who carefully weave the tone and cadence, creating a rhythmic flow that allows better absorption of information and concepts.
Like filmmakers, some writers create visual landscapes, selecting words that force imagery to spring up in the mind, and via the emotional stimulus, the writing, itself, helps us learn new words, thereby increasing our vocabulary and conceptual knowledge. Intelligence increases this way; one thing that sets man apart is the ability to link concepts with words.
Source: evilontwolegs.com
Some say intelligence is an innate, biological ability that exists apart from what you study, but what good is raw intelligence without the fuel of vocabulary, visual concepts, mathematical and scientific concepts, etc.? We get swept up in the action in a movie, especially a color movie with the added saturation of emotional content. That’s why black-and-white films are sometimes regarded as more intellectual.
Most color films are more like real life, with all the undetached, emotional confusion. In real life, it can take years to learn some of the lessons on offer amidst all the action, because the actors in real life often provoke a lot of emotion that distracts from the learning process.It sometimes takes humans a long time detach from the emotional stew of the movie going on around us, analyzing the situations and coming up with intelligent responses, whereas books provide a detached, contemplative space to expand our minds through analysis of various types of stimuli.
Source: Sugarscape
A movie is a hybrid, artistic space: closer in feel to life, but still an artistic illusion. We learn from both mediums, but those who learn more from movies are probably (1) amateurs who study films with the same detachment as art critics who study art and (2) professionals who adopt an analytical mindset that enables them to detach from the immersive, emotional components of the film.
That is required to produce any type of artwork. For everyone else, films probably spark the learning process mostly via inspiration, with people turning to the more detached mental space of books to hone their in-depth knowledge. In this era, both mediums play a role in the chain of learning that increases intelligence.
