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It is often said that great actors lose themselves in their roles, and now a brain activity study shows that is more than just a turn of phrase. While portraying a character, actors experience decreased activity in brain regions that help form a sense of self.

鈥淵ou have one voice, one face, one body. The more you鈥檙e pretending to be someone else, the less of you there is. It鈥檚 a zero-sum game,鈥� says Steven Brown at McMaster University in Canada.

To see how brain activity changes during acting, Brown and his colleagues asked 15 trained actors to answer hypothetical questions both from their own perspective and while assuming the persona of the title characters from Shakespeare鈥檚 Romeo and Juliet. For example, they were asked if they would attend the funeral of someone they didn鈥檛 like or whether they would tell their parents if they fell in love.

The researchers also asked the actors to answer the questions while pretending to be聽a real person they know well. This third-person perspective helps us understand what brain regions activate when we think about the intentions of others, a key aspect of the phenomenon known as theory of mind.

The actors answered the questions while having their brains scanned聽by an MRI machine. Compared with聽responses from their own perspective, answering from a third-person point of view lowered brain activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain associated with regulating emotions, and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which is associated with maintaining one鈥檚 sense of self.

These deactivations were even stronger when they were acting as Shakespeare鈥檚 characters, which Brown says indicates that the actors were suppressing their self-processing. In the acting task, brain activity was also stronger in the precuneus, which is involved in attentional focus.

The actors have to split their attention between the character they are playing and their own identity. 鈥淭his is not simply the divided attention of multitasking procedures, but a fundamental split of resources devoted to a maintenance of one鈥檚 identity as a conscious self,鈥� says Brown.

MRI scanners don鈥檛 allow for large movements, but Brown and his colleagues wanted to explore the gestural part of acting: the notion that physical changes can put an actor in the mind of a character. To get at this, they had the actors, all of whom were from Canada, answer the questions from their own perspective while using a British accent.聽This resulted in similar, although less intense, brain activity to the acting trials.

鈥淭hey didn鈥檛 morph into a character, but we still saw some of the signatures of acting just by that small change,鈥� says Brown.