Does the secret to happy family ties, lasting friendships, romantic happiness, academic and job success lie in synchronizing our brain waves with those of the people around us?
That’s the intriguing idea raised by a wealth of research investigating how our brainwave activity can get into the same patterns (or sync) with the brainwaves of people we feel compatible with.
Brain waves are electrical patterns that measure only millionths of a volt. There are five widely recognized: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and theta, and they are believed to regulate how we think and act.
They can be detected by EEG (electroencephalogram, which analyzes electrical activity in the brain) readings as our brain goes about its day-to-day functions.
For example, beta waves are thought to occur during most of our waking conscious states, while alpha waves occur when we are feeling relaxed and thoughtful. Delta waves are associated with deep sleep.
Brain waves are electrical patterns that measure only millionths of a volt. There are five widely recognized alpha, beta, gamma, delta and theta, and these are believed to regulate how we think and act (file photo)
The scientists call the phenomenon of people synchronizing their brain waves with each other “neural synchrony,” and they suggest that this may explain why we “click” (or don’t) with others.
How neural synchrony can determine the success or failure of romantic relationships is highlighted this month in research in the journal Sexual Medicine Reviews.
Analysis of data from previous research suggests that when a new partner’s brain waves start to sync up, it alters the way they behave.
“They often mimic the common facial and body movements of others,” said the scientists from Charles University in Prague and Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, and this physical mimicry is thought to show that people feel warmly comfortable together.
When some of these romantic relationships subsequently fail, the couple’s brain wave patterns, and consequently their facial and body movements, often become out of sync, the researchers said.
The report reinforces research published last year that closely questioned 48 married couples about the quality of their union, then scanned their brains as they watched videos together that depicted relationship situations such as romance, children and disputes.
The researchers, from Stanford University in the US and the University of Electronic Science and Technology in China, compared the brain responses of married couples with those of strangers who had been randomly matched to watch the same video clips together. movie.
While watching, the married couples showed significantly higher levels of brain wave synchrony than the random couples, the researchers reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Additionally, the higher the levels of neural synchrony between spouses, the higher the reported happiness with their marriages.
The study concluded: “In contrast to demographic and personality measures, which are not reliable predictors of marital satisfaction, neural synchronization of brain responses to viewing marriage-relevant movies predicted higher levels of marital satisfaction in couples.” .
So should marriage guidance counselors move on and let EEG brain scanners do their work for them?
This may hinge more on a chicken-and-egg question, regarding whether couples are more likely to meet in the first place if their brains are already highly in sync, or if happy relationships increasingly sync the brains of partners. people.
As one of the study authors, Vinod Menon, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, said: “We don’t know if there are selection-based behaviors that arise from similar brain activity in a relationship, or if couples evolve over time”. to develop similar brain scan representations.
Does the secret to happy family ties, lasting friendships, romantic happiness, academic and job success lie in synchronizing our brain waves with those of the people around us? (archive image)
Yet other research suggests that we easily sync our brains with people we’re friends with. We even do it when we see them doing ordinary everyday activities, neuroscientists in Italy reported last month in the journal NeuroImage.
Scientists at the Laboratory for the Neuroscience of Perception and Action in Rome recruited 23 pairs of participants who were familiar with each other and asked them to look at each other and behave spontaneously, without any specific tasks or instructions to guide their interaction.
The researchers used EEG, along with eye tracking and video analysis, to measure eye contact, body movements, and smiles. All of this was recorded in several two-minute tests.
The researchers found that even without a structured task, the pairs’ brainwaves spontaneously synchronized when the participants could see each other, regardless of whether they were very close or thirty feet apart.
As with the romantic success study, the researchers noted that the more people’s brains were in sync, the more they mirrored each other’s physical actions, such as eye contact, body movement, and smiling.
The researchers argue that social behavior and brain synchrony influence each other.
In fact, they claim that social behavior may have a greater impact on brain synchrony than the other way around, such that when two people meet and mirror each other’s physical actions, such as making eye contact or smiling, these joint behaviors can trigger their behaviors. brains to ‘synchronize’.
The neuroscientists concluded: “Neural activity is contagious and can spread between people through their behavioral signals.”
Therefore, positive body language mirroring such as copying someone’s physical posture (for example, the way they sit or hold their arms) can be a great way to make friends and influence people, and therefore thus synchronizing your brain waves.
Other research suggests that people can even synchronize brain waves without being physically in each other’s company.
In a study conducted last year by cognitive scientists at the University of Helsinki in Finland, researchers asked randomly paired volunteers to play a game in which they controlled a racing car together, while sitting separately in different soundproof rooms and their brains were scanned using EEG.
They found that as the players cooperated to drive the car, their alpha and beta brain waves became more and more in sync. And the more the gamers’ brains were synchronized, the better they tended to perform at the game, according to the study published in the journal Neuropsychologia.
Regardless of how we synchronize our brains, it appears that we start to do so early in life, at least as early as nine months, according to researchers at the Princeton Baby Lab in New Jersey.
Scientists at the Laboratory for the Neuroscience of Perception and Action in Rome recruited 23 pairs of participants who were familiar with each other and asked them to look at each other and behave spontaneously, without any specific tasks or instructions to guide their interaction (file photo )
They used a scanning system on the babies called functional near-infrared spectroscopy, which tracks which parts of the brain are using oxygen from the blood for energy, and therefore which regions are most active. Therefore, it maps brain activity in real time.
The experiment involved adult researchers playing with the babies, singing or reading stories.
The results showed that when directly interacting, certain regions of the baby’s and adult’s brains showed neural synchrony. But this connection disappeared if the baby and the researcher looked at each other’s backs.
Elise Piazza, assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences who led the study, which was published in the journal Psychological Science in 2019, said: “Both the adult and infant brains tracked joint eye contact and joint attention to objects. toys”. So when a baby and an adult play together, their brains influence each other in dynamic ways.
Such timing may be crucial to academic success when those babies enter school, according to a study conducted in April. This reported that those students who exhibit ‘brain-to-brain synchrony’ with their classmates and teachers are more likely to learn effectively.
One could simply call this ‘paying attention in class’, but the researchers behind the study said it is much more than that.
The scientists found that they could accurately predict a student’s success or failure by assessing how “in sync” they were with the rest of the class.
Students whose brain activity was more in sync with that of their peers and the teacher scored higher on post-class tests, the scientists reported in the journal Psychological Science.
They were even able to predict which test questions students would answer correctly based on the synchrony of their brain waves during the corresponding moments in the lesson.
Suzanne Dikker, a professor of psychology at New York University who led the study, said: “Our work reveals that students whose brain waves are more in sync with their peers and teachers are likely to learn better.”
The science of brain synchronization will not only interest lovers, parents and teachers. Politicians may want to get in on it, thanks to a US study in February that found how people with shared ideologies tend to display similar brain wave patterns.
Neuroscientists at Brown University in Rhode Island, who studied 22 conservatives and 22 liberals, reported in the journal Science Advances that the brains of people with the same political ideologies tend to react in sync when watching movies of political events.
So maybe, in the future, instead of sending opinion pollsters to question us, political activists will ask us to wear medical headsets to find out if our minds will sync up with their latest brain waves. . . or if, instead, our hearts will sink.
