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So, it’s basically a trick. Our brains didn’t evolve to watch movies. Movies evolved to take advantage of the brains we have. One of the striking things about understanding movies is that you come into the theater with the brain that you evolved over three-and-a-half billion years to understand the real world and, for the most part, your brain just treats what it's seeing o.n the screen as if it were real.

If you start listening to filmmakers talk about what they’re doing or reading editing manuals, you quickly realize that there’s a hundred years of lore that’s captured in current filmmaking practice about perception and memory and emotion. Much of film’s power to immerse us in the action on screen is based on basic human traits that have evolved over eons of social interaction and shared experience, including what is described as the “mirror rule” and the “success rule.”

The mirror rule describes the powerful — yet often subconscious — compulsion to do the same thing that those around us are doing. It explains why our body language tends to mirror those around us, why we’re prone to laugh or cry, to smile or grimace as we watch someone else do the same, regardless of whether these actions are occurring in real life or on a movie screen.

The success rule tells us to “do what has worked” in the past. In real life, we’ve learned to duck when flying objects approach us, to prepare to fight or flee when faced with danger, and we bring these same habits with us when we experience a film. It’s the success rule that explains why moviegoers might find themselves ducking a bit in their seats when the Jabberwock’s head falls in Tim Burton’s film version of “Alice in Wonderland.”

You’ve got to do something a little extra to override those natural responses, and keep from responding in a way that would be appropriate if you’re outside a theater, but is inappropriate when you’re watching something that can’t reach out and touch you.

Film-making commandeers these and other human traits to make the film viewing experience so emotional, why it has such a surprising power to make us laugh or cry and how our brains struggle to draw the line between what is real and what we experience as real on the silver screen.

There are a lot of things that films can do that take the natural parameters that we experience in our everyday life and crank them up to 11, and that has the opportunity to make films that are more powerful, more engaging, more responsive than what we’ve seen before.