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Narratives Have a Persisting Influence on the Tempo of the Brain

Poster Session D - Monday, March 9, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom
Also presenting in Data Blitz Session 1 - Saturday, March 7, 2026, 10:30 am – 12:00 pm PST, Salon ABC.

Samira Tavassoli¹ (), Evelyn Allen¹, Joshua Seewald¹, Janice Chen¹; ¹Johns Hopkins University

The media we consume can shape our thoughts and patterns of brain activity. As people observe scene shifts during naturalistic audiovisual input, their cortical activity patterns shift, too (Geerligs et al., 2022; Tseng & Poppenk, 2020; Baldassano et al., 2017). But to what extent does the influence of media on brain dynamics persist beyond the end of the stimulus? In our study, we investigated how the pace of a narrative can affect the pace of cortical pattern shifts even after it concludes. While undergoing fMRI scanning, participants (n = 19) listened to seven fictional stories, each of which was followed by a 1-minute (awake) rest period. We then quantified participants’ cortical pattern shifts and shift rates (the amount of change in multivariate patterns per minute) in each parcel during the listening and rest periods. We found that during the listening period, semantic shifts in each story (assessed via human judgments) temporally aligned with cortical pattern shifts in the default mode network (perm-p ≤ 0.01 for all stories). Moreover, cortical shift rates during listening were significantly positively correlated with cortical shift rates during the subsequent rest period for parcels in the default mode (perm-p < 0.02), auditory (perm-p < 0.02), limbic (perm-p < 0.005) and ventral attention networks (perm-p < 0.03), but not the visual, somatomotor, or temporoparietal networks (all perm-ps > 0.05). These results suggest that media can leave a lasting imprint on the intrinsic tempo of the brain, potentially shaping how we process future information.

Topic Area: THINKING: Other