Episode 31: The physical effects of media storytelling

This week we experiment with format, but also with how we think about media, with our guest Shrikanth  S. Narayanan, Engineering professor at a University of Southern California. Shri works in an interdisciplinary lab that looks at “data science before it was cool,” showing the benefits of interdisciplinarity when studying media and storytelling.  He thinks about “signals” from media as data points to see how we react to different stimuli from film and media, which includes physical reactions emerging from particular emotional stimuli.  These data points include sweating, and increased heart rate. How can we think, or study, our reactions to storytelling? How do the music, the dialogue, the visual and other stimuli shape our responses to media?