Health and Medicine
PUBLISHED
If you want to get on the same wavelength as another person, just have a conversation about ice cream. Sounds pretty simple, but new research shows that connecting over a shared love of frozen desserts may help people to synchronize their brainwaves.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.“One strategy that people used was thinking about the same thing - and ice cream came up all the time,” said Suzane Dikker, who has spent the past decade researching how to engineer moments of synchrony. “If you're going to write about this at all, just write that we all need more ice cream in the world, and war will be over,” she jokingly told IFLScience.
Dikker’s experiments rely on the idea of "multi-brain neurofeedback," in which two or more people receive sensory cues whenever their brainwaves synchronize. Based on this, it seems people can actually learn how to keep their brain activity in lockstep with one another, thus extending these fleeting experiences of unity.
“The notion of a brainwave is very elusive, because you can't really see, feel, or touch a brainwave,” said Dikker, a research professor at New York University and Ghent University. “So we made these things visible or audible or sometimes even tangible. For example, by displaying a car [on a screen] that moves faster as synchrony increases.”
The researchers even worked with musicians – including the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir and Mike Gordon of Phish – to observe how their brainwaves aligned as they collaborated. Other participants included rappers Bad Bunny and Residente, who had their neural activity monitored when teaming up to produce the single Bellacoso.
Further experiments involved members of the public at museum exhibits and in schools, where they donned electroencephalography (EEG) electrode caps while taking part in these kinds of multi-brain neurofeedback tasks. As a result of these trials, Dikker and her colleagues were able to gain new insights into the kinds of things people can do to enhance their neural synchrony.
Making eye contact, for example, emerged as one of the simplest mechanisms by which this can be achieved, while listening to music together also seems to do the trick. “Music is a huge synchronizer because it's rhythmic,” said Dikker. “It makes your body move in the same way as another person’s, and it's an emotional connector.”
If all that fails, of course, you can always just chat about ice cream.
Yet the objective of the exercise goes far beyond fantasizing about sundaes. During their experiments, the researchers found that people tended to experience a greater sense of social connection when their wavelengths aligned, indicating that multi-brain neurofeedback may open up new avenues to “social synchrony."
“For example, it may be used as an aid in psychotherapy to identify and target often subtle interpersonal markers that may disrupt relationships; or in team training and collaborative contexts where shared attention and reciprocal engagement shape learning and decision-making,” write the researchers in their new study.
Encapsulating the scientific concept behind the project, Dikker said that “the bottom line to all of this is that we come into this world as rhythmic creatures, so our brainwaves are constantly looking for rhythmic structures around us to sample the world.”
We unconsciously seek to fall into rhythm with those around us, she said, which can be seen in the way people automatically walk in step when strolling down the street together. “Tagging on to the rhythms of each other has a really important social function,” said Dikker.
As does ice cream, of course.
The study has been published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Science.
