About David

Why This Work Was Created

After years of acting training, directing, and coaching actors, David began noticing a recurring problem:

Many talented actors were still struggling with confusion and inconsistency during preparation.

Actors were often told to:

“be present”
“raise the stakes”
“trust the moment”

without being given a clear process for how to consistently create authentic behavior.

This led David to begin exploring a different question:

What if actor preparation could be approached through contemporary understandings of behavior, memory, attention, and emotional experience?

That question eventually became The Actor’s Algorithm.

Professional Background

David Ihrig is the Artistic Director of the Irvine Theater Company and the founder of The School of Modern Acting. His work combines actor training, directing, and interdisciplinary exploration into how contemporary understandings of cognition and human behavior may inform the craft of acting.

David has worked with actors across:

film
television
stage
self-tape preparation
university workshops
independent productions
actor training programs

His work has also included collaborations and conversations and speaking engagements involving neuroscience, memory, emotion, and performance.

Exploring the Science of Acting

The development of The Actor’s Algorithm has included years of exploration involving acting, cognition, attention, memory, and emotional experience.

This work has included:

university workshops
collaborations with researchers
public discussions about acting and neuroscience
classroom experimentation
productions developed using the process

The goal has never been to reduce acting to science.

The goal has been to provide actors with a clearer and more repeatable preparation process grounded in contemporary understandings of human behavior.

Following are some of the people who have been instrumental in the development of these ideas, and links to past brain-based events.

Michael Yassa

Michael Yassa is the Director of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at University of California, Irvine. He is also the Director of UCI Brain, an academic initiative he spearheaded that includes a theme entitled, The Artistic Brain. He is prolific researcher, continually cited in the media, continually published in scientific publications. In 2017, while designing The Science of Acting class for The Claire Trevor School of the Arts, I approached him to guest lecture. Not only did he personally volunteer, he reached out to his peers and provided the participation of some incredible researchers. To date, we have worked together on: The Science of Acting, Why our brains love story, Immersion for Artists, and he co-taught a lecture for playwrights, The Brain Science of Writing that resulted in the first neuroscientifically designed one act play.

He is one of the most supportive and generous individuals I have ever met. And I am lucky to call him friend.

James McGaugh

I consider him the father of Learning and Memory. He created the very first Department of Neuroscience in the world. Google him and you will get 298,000 results. Cited as the fifth most influential living neuroscientist, this man is a whale in contemporary neuroscience. I feel fortunate that he returns my emails, invites me into his office, and makes time to answer my basic questions. He is patient and generous and fortunately for us, he began his college career as a drama major. Feel free to check out his incredible insights into a brain-based approach to acting in James Mcgaugh's initial guest lecture in the Science of Acting class, or the Artistic Brain outreach presentation, Four Memories Every Character Needs.

Paul Zak

Paul Zak is the Founding Director for the Center for Neuroeconomic Studies (how the brain makes decisions) at Claremont Graduate School. He is a well-known author, speaker and scientist. His research has taken him from the Pentagon to Fortune 50 boardrooms to the rain forest of Papua New Guinea. I reached out to Paul in 2019 while researching methods to quantify behavior for a proposal to build The Actor's Lab. Paul has designed a method to measure Immersion, which is a combination of emotional resonance and neurological attention. After briefly describing the methods we use in our brain-based approach to acting, Paul, who is wonderfully enthusiastic about innovation granted me use of his incredible technology in order to gather data for several projects. We first used Immersion's technology in an independent study. The results of Immersion for Artists were presented at the kick off event for The Artistic Brain. Paul also sponsored a study to compare neurological responses to reading the script and viewing the video performance of Soles, which is the one-act play created for the Why our brains love story series. Recently Immersion's technology was used to gather data comparing different acting approaches with the students of Cal Poly Pomona's Advanced Acting course in the Winter of 2020. Because Immersion's technology works remotely, we were able to provide the students with an outstanding at-home learning experience during the pandemic.