Do we see the world as our friends do?
Recently we showed that the brains of friends respond in remarkably similar ways. Click on the New York Times article to learn more.
Recently we showed that the brains of friends respond in remarkably similar ways. This made us wonder what makes our brains more similar to some people rather than others? Do we find people who see the world the way we do or do we become more similar the more we spend time together or is it a bit of both? What makes some conversations magical and effortless and others feel like an uphill slog? What makes people “click?” And why do we make so much eye-contact while we’re interacting? Here are a couple of answers but these have led to many more questions we are exploring!
Why do we make eye-contact in conversation? It turns out that eye contact has a special relationship with our ability to share attention with another person. When we are sharing attention, our pupils dilate in synchrony. When we are peak “in sync,” we make eye contact. This suggests that eye contact helps communicate that we are of one mind. But that synchrony then crashes as eye-contact persists. It seems that eye contact may also disrupt synchrony when it gets too high. We think this allows us to un-couple our minds every now and then in order to add something new to the conversation. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/making-eye-contact-signals-a-new-turn-in-a-conversation/
What does it mean to “click” with someone? Sometimes you meet someone and feel instantly in sync. It is hard to predict when it will happen, and, in fact, such connection is so rare and mysterious that at times it can seem illusory. Recently, we found that there is an objective measure of when two people click—a kind of “tell” in conversation: the gaps between their conversational turns shrink. But there’s no easy way to just edit out dead air. Shrinking the gaps requires prediction — knowing where someone is coming from so you can better anticipate where they are going https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/01/26/when-do-we-click-with-someone-this-test-tells-us/
How does the brain understand friendship? Friendship or intimacy is often described in terms of distance: “we got close,” “he seems distant.” We wanted to know whether these metaphors are a linguistic accident or whether they reveal a common root. That is, does our brain map out friendship, like physical space? We found that the same neural pattern evoked by seeing something physically near is also activated when seeing a dear friend. In contrast far away objects evoked a different pattern similar to viewing an acquaintance. This effect extended to concepts of time: "a few seconds from now" evoked a pattern similar to that for near objects and dear friends, while "twenty years from now" evoked a pattern similar to that for far-away objects and acquaintances. Thus, the brain appears to map the social world as it does space and time.
ONGOING RESEARCH:
The Neural basis of social networks
Navigating the social world not only relies upon discriminating friends from acquaintances, but on knowing how other people in our networks connect to each other (e.g., Who are the well-connected "social hubs"? Who connects diverse groups of people ("social bridges"?). We found that the brain really cares about where people sit in our larger social network -- so much so that it activates this information automatically when we see someone we know.
how to win friends and influence people
How do people influence each other? And what individuals are more likely to have an outsized influence on getting other people to align to their way of thinking? Beau Sievers is exploring these questions in a study that uses neuroimaging to measure how brains align due to conversation and who in a group has the most "pull" -- aligning others' brains to their own.
measuring mental COUPLING in real time
Adam Boncz, J.D., Knotts, Beau Sievers and Chris Welker are using hyperscanning (two people scanned at the same time, during interaction) to measure collective brain patterns -- patterns that emerge across brains when minds connect.