Hi, this is Ray.

I want to start with an admission about how badly I used to underestimate film as a learning medium. For most of my adult life, I treated watching movies as pure entertainment… the thing I did when I was too tired to do anything productive, the reward for having done real work, the guilty pleasure I sometimes felt embarrassed about when a friend asked what I'd done that weekend and my honest answer was "watched three movies." I read serious books. I studied. I took courses. I did the "learning things" in ways I could point to on a résumé. Movies were what I did between the learning.

This framing turned out to be almost entirely wrong. Roger Ebert once called movies "a machine that generates empathy," and while I'd heard the quote and nodded politely at it, I hadn't taken it seriously as an actual claim about cognition. When I finally started reading the research on what happens in our brains during film viewing (especially serious, thoughtful, well-made films), the picture that emerged genuinely changed how I think about the medium. Films aren't a substitute for books or formal learning. They're doing something distinctive that other media can't quite replicate. And for adults who dismiss watching as unproductive, they're leaving on the table one of the more accessible and enjoyable forms of cognitive development available.

The research has gotten stronger and more specific over the past decade. Films measurably build empathy, teach cultural fluency, develop theory of mind, expand your understanding of contexts you'll never live in personally, and produce cognitive states that support learning across other domains. Not in some vague inspirational sense. In measurable, replicable ways that show up in controlled studies. Today's newsletter is about that. What the research actually shows about films as a learning medium, why they work differently from books, and how to actually watch films in ways that maximize what you learn from them. Let's get into it.

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Let me start with the finding that surprised me most. In 2024, researchers at Stanford published a study using the film Just Mercy to test what psychologists call "narrative transportation"… the phenomenon of losing yourself in a story to the point where your attitudes actually shift. According to coverage of the research, watching Just Mercy increased participants' empathy for the recently incarcerated and decreased their enthusiasm for the death penalty, and it's a notion that many who work in the entertainment industry assume to be true but that no one has measured in such a scientifically rigorous way until now. Read that carefully. A single film, watched once, produced measurable shifts in participants' empathy and policy preferences. Not just self-reported feelings. Behaviorally-measured attitudes toward specific groups of people.

The mechanism is worth understanding. The researchers measured empathy by having participants watch real videos of formerly incarcerated men sharing their experiences and asking them to guess what those men were feeling. Then they compared these guesses to what the men had actually reported. According to the researchers, after watching Just Mercy, participants were more empathic toward those who were formerly incarcerated than those in the control condition. Their attitudes toward criminal justice reform were also affected. The film didn't just make them feel emotions during the viewing. It changed how accurately they could read the emotions of real people in the days after.

A separate randomized controlled trial with medical students tested whether watching a film could improve empathy for patients. According to the researchers, all of the three interventions had an immediate improving effect on empathy scores compared to control group. Watching selected movies has a significant but transient effect on empathy of students. The film-based intervention produced measurable improvements in empathy scores. The effect was temporary when film was used alone, but became durable when film was combined with formal training. The film wasn't a substitute for education… it was an amplifier that made subsequent training more effective.

The mechanism the researchers identified is worth understanding. As they explained, this emotional involvement and identification with movie characters might be the underlying mechanism through which empathy is enhanced. Because it prepares an opportunity for the participants to share the experience of the movie character and get familiar with his problems to some extent. This involvement helps the participants to improve their "understanding" of the patient's experience. When you lose yourself in a character's experience (the good kind of losing yourself, the one that comes from a well-made film), you're rehearsing the cognitive work of understanding perspectives that aren't your own. The rehearsal builds the underlying capability. That capability then transfers to other situations, including real-life empathy for real people.

Books are wonderful, and I've written extensively in this newsletter about their cognitive benefits. But films can do certain things books can't quite match. Understanding these differences helps you use each medium for what it's good at.

Nonverbal social information. Films show you what people look like when they're feeling things. The subtle facial expressions. The body language. The way someone holds themselves when they're afraid but pretending not to be. According to research on television and social cognition, audiovisual stories such as films and TV series might be especially suited for learning how to decode subtle nonverbal social information because of their multisensory nature. Books tell you what characters feel. Films show you what feeling looks like, and this visual information trains your social perception in ways that verbal description can't quite match.

Historical and cultural contexts you can't visit. Films can transport you to time periods and places you'll never experience directly. What Kyoto looks like in the 1800s. What the trenches of World War One actually felt like. What Renaissance Italy sounded like. This isn't information… it's atmospheric immersion in contexts that shape how you understand the historical events you might read about elsewhere. My understanding of medieval history got substantially better after watching a few well-made period films alongside my reading. The books gave me facts. The films gave me a sense of the world those facts described.

Perspectives on lives radically different from yours. A film about a specific person's experience of a specific circumstance gives you access to that experience in ways that statistics can't. This is one of the reasons films addressing social issues can shift attitudes so effectively… they translate abstract concerns into concrete human lives. You don't just know that something is a problem. You've spent two hours living inside the experience of it.

The pacing of real life. Books can compress or expand time as needed for narrative. Films tend to move at rates closer to real experience. Long shots that hold. Silences. Time for a face to change. This pacing teaches you something about how real emotional and social situations unfold that faster narrative forms can't quite capture.

Multimodal encoding. Films engage vision, hearing, and (through emotional response) a kind of embodied response simultaneously. This multimodal engagement produces different memory encoding than single-modality experiences. Scenes from well-made films often stay with people for decades in ways that comparable book passages don't. Neither is better. They're different. But films' multimodal nature is genuinely doing distinctive cognitive work.

Let me get specific about what films can actually teach you, because the vague "films teach you things" isn't very useful.

Emotional intelligence. As covered above, films train your capacity to read emotions and understand perspectives. The person who watches serious films regularly and thoughtfully develops nuanced emotional understanding that translates to better real-life relationships. This is the specific benefit that shows up most consistently in the research.

Cultural knowledge. Films from other countries and traditions give you access to cultural contexts that would take years to learn otherwise. Not academic knowledge… embodied familiarity. Watching Japanese cinema teaches you something about Japanese aesthetics and social codes that no textbook quite captures. Watching Iranian films teaches you something about Iranian daily life that news coverage doesn't. The cumulative effect across many films from many cultures is genuine cross-cultural fluency.

Historical periods and events. Well-researched historical films (with appropriate skepticism about accuracy) can bring historical periods alive in ways that make textbook history stick. Watch a really good film about a period you're studying and the material will encode differently. Combined with actual scholarship, films become a serious learning tool for history.

Ethical reasoning. Films that put characters in complex moral situations, done well, train your ability to reason through ethical complexity. Not because they tell you what's right (the best ones don't) but because they immerse you in situations where the right answer isn't obvious and let you feel your way through the choices. This is exactly the kind of thinking that pure ethical philosophy often can't produce.

Craft and aesthetics. For anyone doing creative work in any medium, film literacy is directly useful. How stories are structured. How tension is built. How characters are developed. How images convey meaning. These principles transfer across creative domains. A writer, designer, or artist who watches films thoughtfully is training capabilities they use in their own medium.

Human behavior. Films are, at their best, extended observations of human behavior in various circumstances. Watching a lot of good films is essentially watching a lot of case studies of how humans work. Over time, this builds understanding of behavior that pure introspection or limited personal experience can't provide.

Okay, the practical part. If you want to actually extract learning from film-watching rather than just consuming, here's what makes the difference.

Pick films worth watching. Not everything on Netflix is equal. Some films are trying to do something worth engaging with. Others are pure entertainment product. The learning benefits come from the former, not the latter. Curate your viewing. Follow directors whose work you find substantive. Read film criticism. Watch films that are genuinely trying to say something.

Engage actively. Don't scroll during the film. Don't split your attention. The narrative transportation the research describes only happens when you actually give the film your attention. This is like the difference between using an Iron Man suit correctly versus using it while distracted… the technology only works if you're actually piloting it.

Watch things outside your comfort zone. The films that will teach you most are often the ones you'd never have chosen on your own. Foreign films. Films from perspectives radically different from yours. Documentaries about subjects you know nothing about. Films from decades before you were born. Deliberate stretching produces the growth. Comfortable viewing produces entertainment.

Watch with intention. Before starting a film, notice what you're hoping to get from it. Sometimes it's just relaxation, and that's fine… not every film needs to be a learning session. But sometimes you're picking a film specifically because you want to learn something, and setting that intention affects how you watch.

Reflect afterward. Ten minutes of thinking about a film after you finish watching it dramatically increases what you retain. What was the director trying to say? What did the film show you that you hadn't seen before? How did specific choices (music, lighting, framing) affect the meaning? This reflection turns passive viewing into active learning.

Talk about films with people who take them seriously. Discussion deepens what you got from a film. Find friends who actually think about what they watch. Join a film discussion group. Read good film criticism that engages with the films you've seen. The social dimension multiplies the learning.

Watch films multiple times when they warrant it. A great film rewards repeat viewing. Things you didn't notice the first time become visible. Layers you missed emerge. The films that stay with you for years usually aren't films you watched once… they're films you returned to and found new depths in.

Pair films with related reading. For historical periods, cultural contexts, or subjects you're studying, pairing films with books produces stronger learning than either alone. The film gives you the felt sense. The book gives you the analytical depth. Together they cover territory that either medium alone can't fully reach.

Some honest caveats about what actually produces the learning benefits.

Passive binge-watching probably doesn't count. The research on films and empathy involves attentive engagement with specific films. Marathoning shows while scrolling your phone is a different activity. Not necessarily bad, but not doing the cognitive work that produces the documented benefits.

Not every film is worth engaging with deeply. Some films are entertainment product designed to occupy your attention without teaching anything. There's nothing wrong with watching them. Just don't expect the cognitive benefits to come from every hour of screen time.

Fictional accuracy varies enormously. Historical films get things wrong constantly. Films about specific professions often dramatize incorrectly. Take what films offer as atmospheric immersion and emotional access, not as reliable information. Pair with real research when accuracy matters.

The empathy benefits appear transient without follow-up. As one study found, film-based empathy interventions produced short-term effects that faded without accompanying training. If you want durable benefits, pair your film watching with reflection, discussion, or related learning that reinforces what the film opened up.

Here's what I want you to take from all this. The cultural framing of film-watching as unproductive entertainment (something you do instead of learning) is wrong in a specific way. Films are genuinely doing cognitive work when watched thoughtfully. They're building empathy, cultural fluency, ethical reasoning, and understanding of human behavior in ways that other media can't quite replicate. Dismissing them as "just entertainment" is leaving significant cognitive development on the table.

If you've been feeling guilty about time spent watching films, please reconsider. Not all of that time is equal (some was probably passive consumption that didn't do much for you. But the films you watched attentively, the ones you thought about afterward, the ones that stayed with you and shaped how you see the world) those were doing real learning work. The guilt isn't warranted for that category of viewing.

At the same time, the specific claim I'm making matters. The benefits come from thoughtful, active viewing of substantive films. Not from anything on any screen. The distinction between watching a Studio Ghibli film with full attention and thinking about it for days afterward, versus scrolling social media for two hours, is real. Both count as "watching things." Only one produces the learning I'm describing.

You have access, right now, to some of the most powerful learning tools ever created. Great films from around the world are more accessible than they've ever been. Curated collections. Streaming services. Academic film libraries. The barrier to encountering excellent films is essentially zero. The remaining variable is whether you engage with them as the learning tools they can be, or treat them as background noise.

In The Matrix, Neo doesn't just watch fights… he studies them, absorbs them, integrates them into his own capacity. Watching films can work similarly if you approach them with attention. The screen isn't just entertainment. It's a training environment for capabilities you'll use in the actual world.

Keep learning (and keep watching thoughtfully),

Ray