Does the secret to happy family bonds, lasting friendships, romantic bliss, and academic and work success lie in synchronizing our brain waves with those of those around us?
That’s the intriguing idea put forth by a wealth of research exploring how our brainwave activity can get into the same patterns (or sync) with the brainwaves of people we feel compatible with.
Brainwaves are electrical patterns that measure just one millionth of a volt. There are five commonly recognized types – 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 brains go about their daily functions.
For example, beta waves are thought to occur during most of our conscious waking states, while alpha waves occur when we are feeling relaxed and thoughtful. Delta waves are associated with deep sleep.
Brainwaves are electrical patterns that measure just one millionth of a volt. There are five commonly recognized types – alpha, beta, gamma, delta and theta – and they are believed to regulate how we think and act (file photo)
Scientists call the phenomenon of people synchronizing their brain waves with each other “neural synchrony,” and suggest that this could 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 by research in the journal Sexual Medicine Reviews.
The analysis of previous research data suggests that when a new couple’s brain waves begin to synchronize with each other, it changes the way they behave.
“They often mimic each other’s common facial and body movements,” said the scientists at Charles University in Prague and Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore — and this physical mimicry would show that people feel warmly comfortable around each other.
When some of these romantic relationships then falter, the couple’s brainwave patterns — and, consequently, their facial and body movements — often fall out of sync, the researchers said.
The report corroborates research published last year that questioned 48 couples closely about the quality of their union and then scanned their brains as they watched film clips together that showed 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 the married couples with those of strangers who were randomly paired to watch the same clips of film together.
When watching, the married pairs showed significantly higher levels of brainwave synchronization than the random pairs, the researchers reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
What’s more, the higher the levels of neural synchronization between spouses, the higher their reported happiness with their marriage.
The study concluded: ‘Unlike demographic and personality measures, which are unreliable predictors of marital satisfaction, neural synchronization of brain responses while watching marital-relevant movies predicted higher levels of marital satisfaction in couples.’
Should marriage counselors move and let the EEG brain scanners do their job for them?
Rather, this may depend on a chicken-and-egg question, whether couples are more likely to get together in the first place when their brains are already highly in sync, or whether happy relationships are getting people’s brains more and more in sync.
As one of the study’s authors, Vinod Menon, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, said, “We don’t know whether there are selection-based behaviors that arise from similar brain activity in a relationship, or whether couples change over time. evolve over time. to develop comparable brain scan representations.’
Does the secret to happy family bonds, lasting friendships, romantic bliss, and academic and work success lie in synchronizing our brain waves with those of those around us? (stock image)
However, other research suggests that we easily synchronize our brains with people we are friends with. We do it even if we just watch them go about normal daily activities, neuroscientists in Italy reported last month in the journal NeuroImage.
Scientists at the Neuroscience of Perception and Action Laboratory in Rome recruited 23 pairs of participants who knew each other and asked them to look at each other and behave spontaneously, without any specific task or instruction to guide their interaction.
The researchers used EEGs, eye tracking and video analysis to measure their eye contact, body movements and smiles. These were all recorded during several two-minute trials.
The researchers found that even without a structured task, the pairs’ brain waves spontaneously synchronized when the participants could see each other, regardless of whether they were close together or nine meters apart.
Similar to the romantic success study, the researchers noticed that the more people’s brains were in sync, the more they also mirrored each other’s physical actions, such as eye contact, body movement and smiling.
The researchers argue that social behavior and brain synchronization mutually influence each other.
They even argue that social behaviors can have a greater impact on brain synchronization than the other way around — so that when two people meet and mirror each other’s physical actions, such as making eye contact or smiling, this joint behavior can then cause their brains to “sync.”
The neuroscientists concluded, “Neural activity is contagious and can be spread between people through their behavioral signals.”
So positive mirroring of body language, such as copying someone’s physical posture (e.g. the way they sit or hold their arms), can be a great way to make friends and influence people – thereby synchronizing your brain waves.
Other research suggests that people can even synchronize brain waves without physically being in each other’s company.
In a study last year by cognitive scientists at the University of Helsinki in Finland, researchers randomly asked volunteers to play a game in which they drove a racing car together while sitting separately in different soundproof rooms and had their brains scanned using of EEGs.
They found that as the players worked together to drive the car, their alpha and beta brain waves became increasingly synchronized. And the more the players’ brains were in sync, the better they performed in the game, according to the study published in the journal Neuropsychologia.
Regardless of how we synchronize our brains, it seems we start doing it early in life — at least from nine months of age, according to researchers at Princeton Baby Lab in New Jersey.
Scientists at the Neuroscience of Perception and Action Laboratory in Rome recruited 23 pairs of participants who knew each other and asked them to look at each other and behave spontaneously, without any specific task or instruction 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 use oxygen from blood as energy — and thus which regions are most active. For example, it maps brain activity in real time.
In the experiment, adult researchers played with the babies, sang or read stories.
The results showed that certain areas of the brains of babies and adults showed neural synchrony when directly interacted. But this connection disappeared when the baby and the researcher looked away from each other.
Elise Piazza, an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences who led the study, which was published in 2019 in the journal Psychological Science, said: “Both adult and infant brains tracked joint eye contact and joint attention to toys. So when a baby and an adult play together, their brains influence each other in dynamic ways.’
Such synchronization could be critical to academic success as those babies enter their school years, according to an April study. This reported that those students who exhibit “brain-to-brain synchrony” with their classmates and teachers are more likely to learn effectively.
You could just call this “paying attention in class,” but the researchers behind the study said it’s much more than that.
The scientists found that they could accurately predict a student’s success or failure by assessing how “synchronized” they were with the rest of the class.
Students whose brain activity was more in sync with that of their peers and with the teacher had higher post-class test scores, the scientists reported in the journal Psychological Science.
They could even predict which test questions students would answer correctly based on the synchrony of their brain waves during corresponding moments in the lecture.
Suzanne Dikker, the professor of psychology at New York University who led the study, said: “Our work shows that students whose brain waves are more in sync with those of their peers and teacher are more likely to learn better.”
Brain synchronization science will not only interest enthusiasts, parents and teachers. Politicians may want to join in, thanks to a US study in February that found how people with shared ideologies tend to exhibit similar brainwave 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 similar political ideologies tend to respond in sync when watching movies about political events.
So perhaps in the future, instead of sending pollsters to interrogate us, political campaigners will ask us to wear medical headsets —– to discover if our minds will synchronize with their latest brain waves. . . or that our hearts will sink instead.