ahmedabad if the face of helen of troy launched a thousand ships the minds of cinemagoers have floated legions of studies but filmmakers have received such muddled insights that metaphors can be justifiably mixed audiences brains remain filmmakers achilles heel however this is where iitgandhinagar iitgn makes a heroic entry with work that uses the scientific script to produce a breakthrough thriller the institute has devised a way to predict audience connect with 72 accuracyiitgn researchers analyzed brainwaves captured through electroencephalogram eeg from viewers to make sense of responses another study in the field of neurocinematics monitored reactions to the navarasas the nine common emotions evoked in an audience by an artistic work the study determined that raudra anger and hasya laughter had the greatest provocative power among the rasasunderstanding consumer preferences for movie trailers from eeg using machine learning was recently published on the arxiv repository the authors are pankaj pandey raunak swarnkar shobhit kakaria and krishna prasad miyapuram from the centre for cognitive brain sciences at iitgn they took into consideration posters and trailers of 12 hollywood movies the movies included american made battle of sexes brads status the lego ninjago movie bye bye man murder on the orient express black panther jungle book and dunkirk the choices were made to cast the net across genres respondents were asked to watch trailers and rate the movies based on that experience they were also told to indicate their willingness to spend money to watch a particular filmusing machine learning ml techniques we predicted the audience connect with 72 accuracy when viewers liked what they saw a larger part of their brains was engaged indicating interest said prof miyapuram while this is a limited study it can pave the way for an effective predictor of audience choices based on understanding consumer behaviourprof miyapuram said that the study considered five brainwaves delta theta alpha beta and gamma the analysis was based on highdensity eeg collected through a specially designed cap with electrodes to measure brain activitysuch scientific endeavours are a hit with the film industry subhash ghai a wellknown filmmaker had visited the team he told researchers that the boxoffice outcome is determined by factors such as storyline cast and budget as for the project that focused on neural responses to the navarasas the team factored in indian sensibilitiesas part of a different study dyutiman mukhopadhyay a postdoctoral researcher at iitgn showed viewers clips with the rasas from movies such as titanic modern times 3 idiots ghajini mr india braveheart and bhootthe results suggested that among the negative rasas anger captivated the audience the most whereas laughter was the star among the positive emotions raudra had the highest attention span fixation among all the rasas audience focused on eyes when negative rasas were displayed and on mouths when positive rasas played outfurther studies are focused on eye movement patterns and emotional association with audiovisual stimuli prof miyapuram said some of the data generated by the studies has been put into