People’s senses help people to interpret many objects by giving diverse information about what people are experiencing. To prove which senses, especially vision and auditory senses, impact people’s brains more, we checked how the brain reacts when it only receives visual stimulation and receives both visual and auditory stimulation. The simulations were watching silent movies and black and white movies. However, the absent factors of the movie were able to be filled by people’s imagination and past experiences. Therefore, it was not able to precisely compare which sense impacts more.  

Usually, human beings’ brains handle diverse sensory information such as visual and auditory information at once because brains naturally accept many external stimulations like noises and scents unintentionally. Therefore, human beings necessarily manage various information when they are exposed to many stimulations at once. When particular information comes in, the brain determines all of the information whether they are important or not through its own filtration because of the memory threshold. There is a fixed amount of information that an individual can process at a time, so if the information is received from multiple factors, it will take more time and effort to handle more information. Therefore, if various sensory information comes in at once through touch, smell, taste, sight, and hearing, each sensory information can affect the processing of other sensory information. Hearing, sight, and touch are equally one type of the five senses of a person respectively, but how sensitive people react to a particular sense depends on the type of senses. In addition, when using various senses together, the multiple senses combine to have a good effect, but sometimes one sense can interfere with one another. Therefore, the effect of each sensation on the brain varies depending on how many senses you use and what senses you use. The essay will compare silent movies and black-and-white movies to find out which situations are effective in delivering information, whether they are focused only on sight or receiving both visual and auditory information at the same time. 

Watching a silent movie, people understand information mainly with a vision because people do not need other senses to understand the entire content of the movie. A silent movie refers to a film without the character's voice lines. The reason why information can be delivered properly to the audience when focused on sight without sound information is that it is enough for the audience to interpret the content through actors’ nonverbal expressions.  According to Michail, the 7-38-55 rule applies when people talk. It states that only 7% of all communication takes place through verbal communication, while nonverbal components of daily communication, such as voice tone and body language, account for 38% and 55%, respectively(Michail). This rule shows that when people recognize information, their dependence on nonverbal cues such as facial expressions and body language exceeds 50%. In other words, the high dependence shows that people need sight more than hearing when understanding certain information. Some people may claim that there is also background music and sound effects in a silent movie, so people will obtain sensory information while they are watching the movie. However, the actors’ lines have much more influence on people’s understanding of the content of the movie than the background music. Since there are no lines of actors that directly affect the flow of the content, the brain does not have to interpret the language, which means people may ignore the sound.

In the case of black-and-white movies, it will let the audience use their auditory and visual sense together to interpret the story of the movie because each character in the movie has lines and expresses nonverbal. Since black-and-white movies do not have various colors and only consist of gray; white; and black colors, people may think that the part of the brain that distinguishes the colors is not used when resting when the audience is watching black-and-white movies. However, when the audience watches black-and-white movies, their brain goes through the exact same course as when they watch a normal movie. According to neuroscientists Michael Bannert and Andreas Bartels, when looking at a black-and-white object, the brain automatically recognizes it by its original color(“The Visual Brain Colors Black and White Images”). This suggests that when a person see a black and white colored object, the brain does not take the color as black and white itself but it imagines the appropriate color by using memory about when the person saw the similar object previously. Therefore, people may think that it is not efficient to compare and contrast silent movies with black and black-and-white movies. However, it is still reasonable because the absence of color works in a different way in the movie. 

Validity of comparing black-and-white films and silent movies

In the case of black-and-white movies, there is no color, so there is no need to think about the harmony of the color when shooting a movie. This will help the audience immerse themselves more in the character than when watching a regular movie, as directors can produce videos by focusing on the composition and the subject. Through this immersion, the audience could pay a lot of attention to the actors’ actions as well. Therefore, the situation of the audience watching a black-and-white movie will be similar to that of a silent movie audience who mostly focus on the actor's nonverbal expression because their situation is set to interpret peoples’ nonverbal expression more than usual. Therefore, It is reasonable to compare black and white films and silent films rather than ordinary films because it naturally allows the audience to understand the contents of the film in similar situations except for the lines, which are the differences between the two films.

Both silent movies and black-and-white movies convey information to the audience through visual storytelling and nonverbal cues respectively, but their different types of audio effects change impacts on the audience. In the case of a silent movie, there is background music that indicates the overall mood and situation, but it does not increase additional tension or impression by the characters’ voice tone or throb in their voices. Therefore, the audience who watches silent movies need to focus on nonverbal information such as facial expressions and gestures to interpret the movie more deeply. In other words, they should rely on visual information to understand the overall content of the movie. However, black-and-white movies are able to lead the audience’s immersiveness through the combination of actors’ lines, sound effects, and background music in proper situations. Like this, black-and-white movies input more information into the audience’s memory through multisensory information, which stimulates many senses. According to Osorio, more parts of the brain are stimulated when people use more senses (Osorio). It means that more sensory information is saved in our brains. Therefore, when various senses are used, there is a high probability that memories of the action will be recalled, which means that watching a movie through various senses will remain in the memory longer.

In most cases, the memory will last longer when people use many sensors than when they use singular sensory. However, there are some exceptions. For example, reading a book requires only a vision, but, usually, the information from the book lasts more in people’s memory than the information obtained by just watching TV shows which needs both auditory and visual senses. According to Wagman, “Our brains have to work to translate the black squiggles on the page into words and then interpret the meaning and intent of those words”(Wagman). However, watching TV does not require any of this process, which means it does not stimulate brain compared to reading a book.  If the amount of information that people obtain is directly proportional to the number of senses that they use while obtaining the information, people have to gain more data when they watch something. However, according to Barron, psychologists have discovered that when adults read texts such as news stories, they remember more of the content than if they listen to the same pieces(Barron). It shows the fact that the number of senses is not directly connected to the amount of data that people actually receive. Therefore, it is not possible to conclude by only comparing the silent movie and black-and-white movies. 

The processing of the brain does not just come from the five senses, but it is also associated with the use of stored memories. Therefore, the processing of insufficient sensations is filled with memories stored in the brain under the name of "imagination." Even if we don't eat what we've eaten before, we can imagine and feel some taste again, and even if we watch a black-and-white movie, the difference between black-and-white and general movies is the same in terms of brain processing patterns because our brain encodes information with the actual colors of the object.

 

Works Cited

Baron, Naomi S. “Why We Remember More by Reading – Especially Print – than from Audio or Video.” The Conversation, 3 May 2021, theconversation.com/why-we-remember-more-by-reading-especially-print-than-from-audio-or-video-159522. Accessed 17 Nov. 2023.

Osorio, Holmes. “The Importance of the 5 Senses in Learning and Studying.” Maryville University Online, 26 Sept. 2022, online.maryville.edu/blog/importance-of-5-senses-in-learning/. Accessed 17 Nov. 2023.

“The Visual Brain Colors Black and White Images.” ScienceDaily, 2013, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131031124817.htm. Accessed 17 Nov. 2023.