On presence, performance, and what neuroscience is beginning to notice

For as long as I can remember, acting has felt less like effort and more like a particular state of attention. A way of being that arrives naturally when I’m fully engaged. Long before I had language for it, I knew the feeling, a moment when the noise of the self recedes and something else takes the lead. It doesn’t feel like dissociation, and it doesn’t feel like pretending. It feels contained rather than diminished. You’re still there, but you’re no longer the loudest voice in the room.

For years, this experience was simply intuitive. Something I trusted because it worked. Only recently has neuroscience begun to describe what many actors have always known in their bodies.

A 2019 fMRI study published by the Royal Society examined what happens in the brain when trained actors respond as themselves versus when they respond as a character, specifically Romeo or Juliet. The results are subtle but meaningful. When actors answered in character, activity decreased across several regions of the brain associated with self-referential processing. In other words, the neural networks involved in maintaining the everyday sense of “me” became quieter.

Reading this study felt less like learning something new and more like recognition. A scientific articulation of a state I’ve entered my entire life, often without trying to. What the research offers is not permission to act, but language… language for explaining a process that has always been felt rather than explained.

This isn’t about losing control, identity, or awareness.

It’s about presence.

Acting as a shift, not a disguise

The study asked actors to answer questions from two perspectives, their own first-person point of view, and a fictional first-person perspective as a Shakespearean character. When responding as themselves, the brain showed familiar patterns associated with self-reflection, evaluation, and autobiographical thought. When responding as the character, much of that activity diminished.

What’s striking is not that the brain “turned on” some special acting mechanism. It’s that it let go of something.

Actors often talk about “getting out of the way.” This research gives that phrase a quiet credibility. Acting, at least in trained performers, appears to involve a temporary reduction in habitual self-monitoring. Less commentary. Less self-checking. Less narrative about who you are and how you’re doing.

That reduction creates space.

In my own experience, this has always been the doorway. When I stop managing myself, something more precise takes over. Listening becomes physical. Responses arrive without forcing. The work sharpens, not because I’m trying harder, but because I’m interfering less.

Presence is not intensity

There’s a persistent misconception that presence means being emotionally loud or visibly expressive. In practice, presence is often far quieter. It’s attentiveness without strain. Responsiveness without anticipation. Being fully available without being busy.

From a nervous-system perspective, this makes sense. When the brain isn’t preoccupied with maintaining the self… how I’m being perceived, whether I’m doing this right, what comes next… it can orient more fully toward the environment, the other actor, and the given circumstances.

The neuroscience doesn’t suggest that actors “become” someone else. It suggests something more refined. The self becomes less dominant. The character doesn’t replace the actor. The actor simply stops narrating themselves so loudly.

That distinction matters.

Fictional first-person perspective

The researchers describe this mode as a “fictional first-person perspective.” It’s still first-person, but it isn’t autobiographical. You’re answering from inside a constructed world, with its own logic, relationships, and stakes.

Actors train for this without always naming it. When the work is grounded, the body understands what’s required before the intellect rushes in to explain it. Over time, craft doesn’t replace instinct. It refines it. The research hints at why overthinking can disrupt performance. It reactivates the very networks that presence tends to quiet.

This also clarifies why presence feels different from dissociation. Dissociation fragments awareness. Presence consolidates it. One pulls you away. The other pulls you in.

Staying intact while stepping aside

There’s an understandable fear, especially for sensitive or conscientious actors, that “getting out of the way” means disappearing or abandoning oneself. The neuroscience doesn’t support that fear. The brain doesn’t shut down. It reallocates.

Self-referential processing decreases, but executive function, attention, and responsiveness remain intact. The actor isn’t gone. They’re simply not centering themselves.

Presence is not self-erasure. It’s self-decentering.

For me, the gift has always been natural. The work, over time, has been learning how to enter that state deliberately, sustain it under pressure, and return from it intact. Training hasn’t replaced instinct. It has given me stewardship over it.

Why this matters beyond the lab

What’s compelling about this research isn’t that it turns acting into a brain scan. It’s that it offers language for something actors have long trusted without needing proof.

Good acting doesn’t feel like effort layered on top of effort. It feels like clarity. The work sharpens as the self quiets. Listening deepens. Choices simplify. The moment becomes enough.

The study doesn’t prescribe a method, and it shouldn’t. But it affirms that presence is not mystical or accidental. It’s a real, observable shift in how attention and identity are organized.

And perhaps most reassuringly, it suggests that the calm many actors seek isn’t about controlling emotion or suppressing instinct. It’s about reducing interference.

I’m grateful that neuroscience is beginning to name what so many artists have lived. Not because it validates the work, but because it gives us a shared vocabulary… one that honors both intuition and understanding.

Turning down the volume on the self allows the work to come through.

Reference

Brown, C., Cockett, J., & Yuan, Y. (2019). The neuroscience of Romeo and Juliet: An fMRI study of acting. Royal Society Open Science, 6(3), 181908.