Grimes’s Music Video “Shinigami Eyes”

Abstract

This article draws on recent findings in neuroscience to provide a close reading of Grimes’s music video “Shinigami Eyes.” It includes interviews with a neuroscientist who specializes in multisensory integration, a vision scientist, a color grader, and a media scholar. While multisensory integration is a burgeoning field, accessible texts and reviews are lacking. There haven’t been analyses that apply the findings from the field of multisensory integration to real media objects. Drawing on neuroscience studies, this article explores the concept of Bayesian predictions (a viewer’s experience of a present event weighted against previous experiences); the ways neuroscience explains color, size and placement, and emotion work; and processes such as the inverse effectiveness (when neurons boost both lower-res and higher-res signals, with the most perceptible often for sound), super-additive multisensory effects, the attentional blink, the ventriloquist effect, congruence and incongruity, memory, distractors, sound before image and vice versa, and other features. A conversation with the color grader for “Shinigami Eyes” helps fill things in. This article emerges from a belief that modules on neuroscience and industry studies can be incorporated as components of media study courses, and that neuroscience-informed analyses can facilitate interest and engagement with close readings.