The day Netflix came in to my life ultimately became one of the best days of my life. And I know I’m not the only one who ditches their priorities to lay in bed and binge watch The Office for hours at a time. So when I realized how often this happens to me, I wondered why me and others binge watch TV shows.

One explanation can be due to neuroscience. A new phenomenon at the time founded by psychologist Edward B. Titchener, explained that we can recognize the feelings of others which is why we become glued to emotional based stories. He called this empathy, and also explained how we can also feel others’ psychological perspectives by calling it cognitive empathy. These explain why we develop a connection to the characters in our favorite shows.

Paul Zak, a neuroeconomist at Claremont Graduate University, examined empathy by showing his participants a story. The story consisted of a young boy with terminal cancer and showed how happy the young boy was, because he did not know his fate. It also showed the father’s side, who was sad to enjoy his son’s final months. From this correlational study, Zak examined that the participants showed empathy and distress after the video. Before and after the video, the participants had blood drawn to show the different levels of cortisol and oxytocin. One a stress hormone and he other a hormone associated with caring and connection, were both higher after watching the video, and showed a strong bond between empathetic feelings and oxytocin. The cortisol hormone heavily correlated with the feeling of distress.

After the video the participants had a chance to donate to charity, and the levels of of cortisol and oxytocin predicted how much the participants would share. Empathy is a feeling which humans act on, even when faced with fictional problems.

In a 2008 study conducted by psychologist Uri Hasson at Princeton, the interaction of TV and the brain was observed. Hasson showed his participants Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Bang! You’re Dead, and a ten minute video of a concert in New York. He examined their brains by fMRI, ad discovered the similarities of their reactions to the four different videos. The concert video showed a response in only 5%, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugyl and Curb Your Enthusiasm between 18%-45%, and Bang! You’re Dead at 65%.

Bang! You’re Dead was able to get a response from different regions in the brain unlike the other videos. This goes to show, a video with more “control”, which is showing the viewer what they should watch for, gets a bigger audience. Alfred Hitchcock is known for being able to put together thoughts, feelings, and predictions, which is what grabbed the attention of many people. This is just like in some shows, the certain qualities they have grab more people’s attentions which causes them to binge watch.

Netflix conducted a study, which showed that in a study of 1,500 people, 61% of the reported binge watching shows. They were also asked how they felt about it and three quarters said they felt positive about it. They also conducted a study where they went in to the homes of viewers and found that 76% binged watched as a way to relax, and 8 out of 10 preferred to watch multiple shows than just one.

From these studies when can see a correlation between binge watching and emotion. Through Zak’s and Hasson’s experiments, what is happening in the videos triggers different hormones and feelings causing the viewer to feel attached to what is happening.Through Netflix’s studies we can see that people also use binge watching as an escape from life which leads to positive feelings. The conclusion from this is emotions such as empathy could be the x variable which causes the y variable, binge watching, to occur.