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.

Brain cells consist of neurons and