![]() ![]() “Are you okay?” asked a muffled voice from the control room next door. It was as uncomfortable as I had been warned it would be. As instructed, I tried to keep as still as possible with my head in a cradle and my left thumb poised on an emergency call button. Those tantalizing prospects are why, last December, I put on a pair of hospital scrubs and lay in the tube of a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine at Harvard University. This new kind of brain research might also illuminate why we don't always “click” with someone or why social isolation is so harmful to physical and mental health. Given that synchronized experiences are often enjoyable, researchers suspect this phenomenon is beneficial: it helps us interact and may have facilitated the evolution of sociality. They are finding evidence that interbrain synchrony prepares people for interaction and beginning to understand it as a marker of relationships. Researchers are discovering synchrony in humans and other species, and they are mapping its choreography-its rhythm, timing and undulations-to better understand what benefits it may give us. Only by looking into the brains of all individuals involved in an interaction, says neuroscientist Weizhe Hong of the University of California, Los Angeles, can we start to “fully understand what is going on.” But the newest research suggests that synchrony is more than that-or can be. One straightforward explanation could be that coherence between brains is a result of shared experience or simply a sign that we are hearing or seeing the same thing as someone else. ![]() Couples exhibit higher degrees of brain synchrony than nonromantic pairs, as do close friends compared with more distant acquaintances.īut how does synchrony happen? Much about the phenomenon remains mysterious-even scientists occasionally use the word “magic” when talking about it. Neural waves in certain brain regions of people listening to a musical performance match those of the performer-the greater the synchrony, the greater the enjoyment. In classrooms where students are engaged with the teacher, for example, their patterns of brain processing begin to align with that teacher's-and greater alignment may mean better learning. Such work is beginning to reveal new levels of richness and complexity in sociability. The experience of “being on the same wavelength” as another person is real, and it is visible in the activity of the brain. Auditory and visual areas respond to shape, sound and movement in similar ways, whereas higher-order brain areas seem to behave similarly during more challenging tasks such as making meaning out of something seen or heard. Neurons in corresponding locations of the different brains fire at the same time, creating matching patterns, like dancers moving together. ![]() An early, consistent finding is that when people converse or share an experience, their brain waves synchronize. Increasingly, researchers are bringing that reality into how they study brains.Ĭollective neuroscience, as some practitioners call it, is a rapidly growing field of research. As social animals, however, those same scientists do much of their work together-brainstorming hypotheses, puzzling over problems and fine-tuning experimental designs. They observe how neurons fire as a person reads certain words, for example, or plays a video game. Neuroscientists usually investigate one brain at a time. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |