Princeton University neuroscientist Uri Hasson was involved in many of those studies, and has used fMRI studies to show that when someone tells a story, the brain responses of both the storyteller and listener become coupled. The new findings are part of a field of research that dates back about a decade and began with f unctional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies showing that people's brains respond similarly when watching a film. “So your likelihood of keeping that person in your periphery, and kind of paying attention them, is higher if you've already interacted with each other before class.” “How much they liked each other only seemed to matter if they had actually interacted with one another,” she says. In the study, student pairs who reported feeling closer to one another also tended to experience more brain synchronicity during class-but only when they had spent time face-to-face just before the class began. The researchers also found that a one-on-one interaction prior to class could alter the way people reacted during the group's shared experience. “If you're a person who likes to be in groups in general, then you're going to be more in sync with the people around you.” This was true even when such people weren't interacting with the group at all but were simply watching the teacher lecture or watching a video, she adds. “I'm personally intrigued by the finding that personality effects synchrony with the people around you as well,” says Dikker. Students categorized themselves on the group affinity scale by indicating whether they agreed with statements like “social groups really shape who we are as individuals.” Whether individuals considered themselves to be group people also seems to have played a role. Moreover, the more in sync they were, the more likely they were to have given the course and its teacher high marks.Ĭlassroom experiences weren't the only factor that predicted how much students' brains were likely to sync up, however.
During the times when students' brain waves were more in sync with one another, they were also more engaged with the class. For instance: how focused they were on any given day, how much they enjoyed their teacher, how much they liked each individual student around them, and their satisfaction levels with different group activities they performed in class.Īfter analyzing a semester's worth of brain activity data and comparing it to the self-reported student data, a pattern emerged. To bolster the brainwave data, Dikker and her colleagues had the students complete pre and post-class questionnaires on a number of factors she suspected might be linked to different brain activities. So the picture that seems to emerge is that it's not just that we pay attention to the world around us it's also what our social personalities are, and who we're with.” The results were published this week in the journal Current Biology. “But whatever determines how attentive you are can stem from various sources from personality to state of mind. “The central hub seems to be attention,” says Dikker. The more engaged those students were with their teacher and classmates, it turned out, the more their brainwave patterns were in sync with one another. Each week, 12 high school seniors and their teacher attended class wearing the headsets, for a total of 11 classes overall.
Thebrain not syncing portable#
That remarkable feat was made possible thanks to portable electroencephalogram (EEG) headsets, which researchers used to monitor students' brain activity during an entire semester of biology classes at a New York high school. “Now we've gone out there and confirmed that this is true in a real world setting,” she says. “If you pay more attention, you're more in sync,” explains Suzanne Dikker, a cognitive neuroscientist at both New York University and Utrecht University in the Netherlands and a co-author on the new study. A growing body of brain-scanning research is beginning to reveal how human brains display synchronicity-likely a key factor that makes many of our cooperative behaviors possible, from performance art to team sport. Thanks to studies performed in laboratory settings, we had an inkling that this might be the case. Using new portable headsets that monitor brain activity, researchers have found that the brainwaves of people who are engaged in the same class really do “sync up.” Now, neurological science gives that phrase some new backing. Your brains, you say, are on the same wavelength.
Thebrain not syncing movie#
When you go to a movie or a concert with your friend, oftentimes it seems that you shared a similar experience.
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