We often feel that we are "on the same wavelength" with one another, but can science identify and engineer this phenomenon? Studies by a team of neuroscience researchers suggest that it's possible—a connectivity that is both beneficial and that can be enhanced for therapeutic and other purposes.
The scientists collaborated with schools, museums, and performance artists—including Bad Bunny and Residente , Marina Abramovic , and Mike Gordon and Bob Weir —to design and conduct projects measuring and visualizing how the brainwaves of thousands of museum visitors, festivalgoers, and high school students became "in sync" with each other during live face-to-face communication.
Collectively, their research, which has encompassed friends, family members, and strangers, has shown that brainwaves match up in certain exchanges, and that when they do, this synchrony can be used to guide and improve social interactions—in other words, a way to engineer social connectedness.
"Our years of experiments show that we can consistently measure the seemingly elusive notion of 'being on the same wavelength' with someone else—a synchrony that is linked to healthy social relationships," says Suzanne Dikker, a research professor at New York University and Ghent University. "Taking the next step, we've also been able to design interventions that boost social synchrony."
The work, which appears in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, also included Yafeng Pan, a professor at Zhejiang University, Xiaojun Cheng, a professor at Shenzhen University, and Guillaume Dumas, a professor at the University of Montreal.
The authors say their work offers the possibility of finding new pathways to utilize synchrony in order to improve social connectedness.
Over the course of a decade, the researchers conducted studies and projects in which thousands of participants' brain activity was recorded using portable electroencephalogram (EEG) technology—a non-invasive headset. For instance, Dikker collaborated with Bad Bunny and Residente in 2019 to map the artists' brain activity while they created music and show them in real time how in sync their brainwaves were, so they could test different "syncing strategies." The EEG data illuminated their brain synchronies during the creation of the single "Bellacoso."
Overall, these findings pointed to a phenomenon they call "social synchrony"—the alignment of the rhythms of our brains, bodies, and language with people around us during social communication. For instance, the study of high school students found utility in brain synchronization—when students' brainwaves were synchronized with each other, the more likely they were to report liking the other person as well as the class itself.
"Social synchrony plays an important role in healthy social relationships and in learning," observes Dikker. "For example, lonely individuals show more idiosyncratic brain activity, and there is growing evidence suggesting that face-to-face activities that involve interpersonal synchrony, such as playing games or engaging in everyday banter, is important to maintaining social cohesion in communities."
Dikker and her colleagues, Greg Appelbaum and Eric Garland at the University of California, San Diego, will now examine how to leverage brainwave synchronization under a $4-million grant from the Department of Health and Human Services' Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). The researchers will test how to deploy this phenomenon in clinical settings by seeking ways to leverage the synchrony found in earlier experiments to improve therapeutic outcomes.
