When listeners pay attention to stories, their heart rates rise and fall in sync | Hacker News Reader

When listeners pay attention to stories, their heart rates rise and fall in sync

blog.pnas.org

181 pointspseudolus78 comments

> This correlation of heart rates, described this month in Cell Reports, could one day lead to new tools for measuring attentiveness, both in the classroom and the clinic.

Shame such interesting science inspires such dystopian machinations.

"People synchronize their bodies when absorbed in attention." --> "How can schools use this to make sure students are paying attention?"

Please don't.

Another way to phrase it would be "How can schools know if they are engaging with their students?"

Or, "How can teachers better understand what engages students and what doesn't engage them?"

That said, a good storyteller or teacher knows if they are engaging their audience (or failing to) and can adjust for better engagement. Bad ones don't know this, or even if they do, don't necessarily know what to do about it.

The immediate concern is that, if a metric indicates a problem, who will be forced to change? The student or the teacher? If Mrs. Smith realizes little Timmy isn't paying attention, is she going to accept and consider the possibility she is boring, or just punish Timmy? For perspective, consider how often children are currently drugged when they are found not to be paying attention in school.

Privacy may play a useful role here in directing us toward the good futures rather than the bad. For example, maybe schools are allowed to use heart rate attention monitors, but the data must be aggregated and anonimized. It's okay for Mrs. Smith to learn that 74% of her X (where X is greater than 50) students pay attention when she speaks and this puts her at Y percentile of teachers across the country in her subject. It's not okay for her to know the attentiveness of individual students.

Of course, in reality I have zero hope that this would be used in a positive way.

>If Mrs. Smith realizes little Timmy isn't paying attention, is she going to accept and consider the possibility she is boring, or just punish Timmy? For perspective, consider how often children are currently drugged when they are found not to be paying attention in school.

As someone who was diagnosed with ADD in 1988, this point is very poignant. Society largely tends to ignore and downplay the fact that everyone's experience is subjectively different and that not everyone has the same "brain wiring".

Exactly my thought. Instead of saying "hey, isn't this a really interesting finding and maybe we could use it to help people get over anxiety" or something like that, they go the dystopian route.

But I do wonder if they go that direction because they're interested in corporate funding for their research and that could be a way to get it.

It doesn't have to be so dystopian.

It could be used as a way to detect when your audience loses attention and needs a break.

Synchronising happens all the time! Not only with people, even with animals, and even pendulum clocks on rollers.

We clap along together to the beat of songs, and the physical movement causes our heartbeat to change and therefore synchronise. Sharing that experience is a good thing!

When walking around the local supermarket, I noticed that everyone was walking in-step. Then I took off my headphones, and noticed that they were following the beat of the piped music in the background. It was much easier to navigate the store without conflict or bumping into people, because we had that shared clock signal.

Could background music, or even something more simple like a ticking clock, make people more synchronised with each other? I think it could be a good thing.

I'm reminded of Snow Crash:

Y.T.'s mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this memo...

Y.T.'s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It's better for younger workers to spend too long, to show that they're careful, not cocky. It's better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She's pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It's a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary.

(Text copied from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17067951 . Neat that googling for the quote brought me right back to HN.)

They turned something beautiful and poetic into a Black Mirror prompt.

As dystopias go, it seems pretty charitable to jump to education instead of to surveillance monopolists. “Ad attentiveness too low, please drink verification can”, etc.

Am following this topic from another thread on HN today about soundscapes and binaural beats, and what is the theoretical framework behind it, or is it just sympathetic magic?

I was in a meeting yesterday about the truth and reconciliation stuff going on in Canada right now, and the first hour of the meeting was given to people who were sharing their experiences of residential schools by telling stories about them. The storytellers were fantastic, and one of them had a mesmerising and hypnotic effect that I was trying to isolate as a technique. I could see others attempting it as well. I had seen a similar story telling technique used by top professional stage actors in the past. When you watch the documentary, "Wild Wild Country," which is about charismatic spiritual leadership, they use a similar verbal mesmerism technique that can give people "chills," which are also physiological response, just not a cardiogram effect.

Working in tech, one encounters improbable clusters of professors, behavioral economics readers, intelligence operatives, ad-tech designers, political campaign operatives, magicians, hypnotists, practitioners of so-called NLP, "pick up artists," con artists, and other people who practice and apply systematized methods of persuasion. My interest in it is mainly for experimenting with music, but my own practice of a simlar dynamic would be exercising craft as a writer.

Of what is this synchronization and mesmerism the effect?

Quantum Phase Coherence. Sustaining it requires a lot of energy though.

I remember studies that showed brainwaves also synchronize between people who are interacting, especially intimately, and close romantic partners who have been together for many years often maintain a synchronization even when apart.

Maybe related to that? In any case the human body and mind are wonderfully mysterious

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hyperscans-show-h...

I'm not an expert on this exact subject, but my PhD was in computational neuroscience, specifically spiking neural networks, and I became a bit interested in the area of binaural beats. On exposure to binaural beats, neural networks in the brain can to synchronize in patterns that can be observed in EEG recordings (eg, Theta or Beta oscillations). So, while the science is conflicting and not settled there is plenty of actual research into this area. See https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00426-018-1066-8 for a recent meta-analysis.

I once read that this effect with binaural beats only works with traditional electromagnetic headphones and doesn't appear when the kind of acoustic headphones used in MRI machines are used, but I can't for the life of me find a source on that. Any idea if this is true?

It seems to be a very general phenomenon, first noticed by Christiaan Huygens.

E.g. "32 Metronome Synchronization" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v5eBf2KwF8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiaan_Huygens

There also seems (to some people) to be some form of "energetic" aspect to mesmerism/charisma but this has been contested going right back to Mesmer and Ben Franklin (in the West.) It's been rediscovered (and "debunked") several times in the last couple of centuries, for example Baron Von Reichenbach's "Odic force" and Wilhelm Reich's "Orgone". I should not fail to mention "chi" or "qi" in this context.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_magnetism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odic_force

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgone

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi

Gurdjieff called it "being-Hanbledzoïn" and said:

> “Hanbledzoïn is nothing else than the ‘blood’ of the Kesdjan body of the being; just as the cosmic substances called in totality blood serve for nourishing and renewing the planetary body of the being, so also Hanbledzoïn serves in the same way for nourishing and perfecting the body Kesdjan.

https://gurdjieff.work/ae/terms/en50/0238.htm

To the scientific skeptic this is all nonsense, of course.

> The storytellers were fantastic, and one of them had a mesmerising and hypnotic effect that I was trying to isolate as a technique. I could see others attempting it as well.

Complete wild guess here, but I wonder if the indigenous speaking style might have developed from story telling during sweat lodge ceremonies?

> My interest in it is mainly for experimenting with music, but my own practice of a simlar dynamic would be exercising craft as a writer.

I've never been to one, but from anecdotal stories I've read, EDM concerts (especially when combined with psychedelics, which is pretty common) are often described as if they have a religious ritual element to them. Whatever it is, psychedelics + EDM music certainly does something very strange to the mind, and group chanting rituals can be found all over the place in different cultures throughout history.

As the list of ways to trigger and activate the chimp brain gets refined, how long before we end up with something like a Laser for society?

The echo chambers on social media and reinforcement/amplification they produce seems to be very similar to the mechanism to generate coherent light. Does analogy break somehow?

Instead of syncing waves or particles just button press and sync a bunch of humans brains.

I guess armies and religion and politics and sports have been doing that (unsuprisingly through stories) but to achieve it instantly seems very possible the way things are going.

I mean the Speed at which ppl on social media or news media or the russians (sorry russians! I just mean whoever is motivated enough) can get the herd to stampede in a partucular direction, seems to be increasing.

How long before its instant? After all, its just chemicals being activated at the end of the day.

> something like a Laser for society

What does that mean?

In a laser you are basically getting photons to behave exactly the same way. Trillions of them.

To do that two things are required, keep a bunch of atoms continually excited by heat, electricity, whatever. And secondly, an echo chamber (think a tube with mirrors where photons fly back and forth). This sets up chain reactions. Each photon that flies thro an excited atom produces another photon which mysteriously has the exact same speed, color, phase as the original. Then you get a cascade as they bump into other excited atoms.

The comment is saying, replace atoms with humans, photons with human action?, social media/news media/russians as source of excitation and amplification and you probably can get a whole bunch of humans in sync.

Should point out no one really knew what to do with lasers for a long time after they were discovered.

It's a stretched analogy, but humans do kind of exhibit the ability to behave either as individual "particles", but also in waves, kind of analogous to a large body of water when calm vs in storm conditions.

I mean, there's always the time it takes the signals to make it in or out. I think they estimate it at around 80ms? Seems like that'd be a hard cap (yes, our brains can compensate for that in some scenarios, but it doesn't always do it correctly, look at the phenomenon where you look at a ticking second hand and the very first tick seems like it lingers a bit longer than the following ones, because your brain literally lied to you about what it saw).

So basically: story telling works; the exciting parts of stories are exciting to more than one person at a time when told in public. %)

While interesting, not too surprising, right? Their heart rates will be low during the calm parts, high during the tense parts, etc.

> [...] could one day lead to new tools for measuring attentiveness, both in the classroom and the clinic.

The day they will finally get me.

Yeah, this really sounds sucky to use this in a classroom. Slacking is a basic human right!

“Oh no, everything is not optimized 100% for efficiency!” sounds a lot like the Borg from Star Trek.

I'm not seeing what about this isn't obvious. If you stimulate a crowd of people by firing a gun into the air they all react at the same time. If you stimulate a group of people with a stimulus it's possible to ignore like a story only the ones not ignoring it will react.

Oddball question: I wonder if that syncing happens with people who are not neurotypical -- examples, ADHD, Autism, etc.

Are the syncing happening because of following along the narrative structure and character emotions? What about use of music scores, visual cues, etc.?

To what extent of this syncing happens with personality types or emotional states? For example, do extroverts tend to sync more than introverts? If someone is relaxed and attentive vs. someone is anxious and distracted, how much would that change?

OK, so it is everyone speeding up or slowing down heart rates at similar parts of the story, not all the listeners synchronizing heartbeats with each other so all heartbeats are simultaneous (when I read the headline, I thought it was talking about a phenomena like synchronizing metronomes [1])

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T58lGKREubo

When people have a common shared experience they have similar responses, who would have thought!!!

I don’t know why, but whenever I check my heart rate with a stopwatch, my heart beats synchronize with the watch ticks almost immediately (my normal pulse is 60 bpm). You’d think the likelihood of that happening is fairly low, but it happens almost every time.

Have you tried it against something you can control the frequency of, such as a strobe light? If you slowly turn the frequency down or up will your heart follow?

Why bother doing cardio exercising when you can just turn up the strobe light button ?

I’ve always been bad at telling stories. Listeners would more likely fall asleep in sync than have their hearts racing.

HN have any tips, tricks, books or blogs to help with story telling skills?

I’m bad as well. But if I were to set out to improve, I’d just listen to more deliberate storytelling. Then practice, write, edit, tell, and tell again. The craft of stand up comedy has always interested me and you can find some nuggets by listening to popular comedians talk about how they develop a skit or entire performance.

Circle around a punchline until you're done with your story or the audience is bored

It doesn't matter if you were boring or not if you end on a laugh, people remember the laugh

You're also allowed to write and rehearse your stories in advance :)

A silly study? But think of the use cases! The Wristband monitors everyone's heat rate and knows the correct response to each media input. "It seems you have stopped paying attention to your targeted advertising. Shall I replay your ads now?"

Please drink a verification can.

This sounds like something straight out of Futurama

It’s a famous so-called “greentext”:

https://imgur.com/dgGvgKF

I honestly will not be surprised when this comment gets turned into a start-up that gets funded...

either this or the other obvious dystopian application, monitoring employees attention in meetings.

I would be so screwed. They might as well start applying the electric shocks.

So would I. My heart rate rarely goes above 60 when sitting.

You Kinky.

We are getting to the point where we can infer pulse rate from sufficiently good video [1]. Same for breathing. Eye tracking is well studied. So just combine all that into a single device, an AttentionScanner™ for your meeting room. This device could mark infractions to help in the yearly performance review, or help employees stay alert directly by delivering small electroshocks via their smart bracelet [2]. Contact our sales department now (/s)

1: https://spectrum.ieee.org/smartphone-camera-senses-patients-...

2: https://pavlok.com/

That's black mirror shit up there

Listen to joona linna series by Lars Kepler and see your wristband explode. Same for keeper of lost causes department Q.

Or lie detectors. Especially when employed to monitor entire rooms at once.

“Your response during the two-minutes hate did not show wide enough variation in response to scenes of our enemy Oceania and images of Big Brother. Please report for conditioning.”

Sure, it may not be at the government level except at certain agencies, however imagine when this sort of mentality is used to measure corporate culture. Your subconscious responses during your annual reviews and corporate pep rallies may take on a whole new dynamic.

How about biofeedback for developing (and training) connection between people? I'd give that a try for sure.

Fake headline. This is not the usual meaning of the word “synchronize”. As many other commenters here point out, this makes the story a non-story. Strictly speaking, the headline is true in that the heart rates “synchronize”, but not the heart beats, which I would think that most people would mis-read the headline as.

And even then, the actual rate itself is unlikely to synchronize, only the delta on the rate over time. You don't put a bunch of people in a room, tell them all a story, and they all suddenly have 65 bpm rates.

Shoot. Just as I was just constructing the perfect murder story.

Agreed. The headline is fascinating the content is appalling.

PNAS reporting the shocking news that peoples heart rates tend to increase during the exciting part of a story and that an increased rate leads to higher correlation between subjects.

Edit: Without naming any author in particular - does anyone else spot a pattern whereby certain researchers consistently hype their findings to the point of borderline dishonesty?

In academia, you're often evaluated on "impact". So you have an incentive to be impactful, not truthful, and while many (most?) try to be honest in the content, hyping the title is an easy way to increase your metric (impact) while not having a very bad conscience because "everyone does it" and "the truth is in the contents, actually"

Fake comment. The headline uses the word rates not beats. Not everything can be perfectly unambiguous all the time.

Well, still it’s not the rates that are synchronized but the rate rises and falls are.

"Their heart rates change in unison" seems like a perfectly fine interpretation of "their heart rates are synchronized" that matches the observations. It is in fact what I expected when I read the headline. Maybe the headline could have been even more explicit, but I don't think it's intentionally deceiving.

A headline which gives people the wrong impression is still misinformation. It makes the world less informed than before, as people rarely read articles after reading the headlines.

Edit: And it is super important to point out this misinformation in the top comment to an article, so that we can correct as many people as possible. So stating that this is misinformation isn't just some pedantic complaining, it helps correct the view of a lot of people and maybe will help make more people think a bit before writing headlines.

I find your two quoted lines as vastly different. The first is accurate and the second is not. Synchronized means to happen at the same time. For a rate to be synchronized, I expect the same rate value at the same time (each person at say 65bpm). If the rate change is in sync, I expect the same rate of change value for each person (everyone is slowing their heart rate at 2bpm per minute). In unison means at the same time (but not the same value).

One headline means we are excited at the same time, the other says we mysteriously communicate the state of our heart to our neighbors.

Edit; a concrete example. Let's synchronize watches, you move yours forward quickly and I'll move mine forward quickly. Even though we moved in unison, we are not synchronized and showing the same time together.

I assume the ‘mysterious communication’ would be the cadence of the reader, which could have been a remarkable feat. Can we influence heart beats externally (indirectly), say with sound, and nudge it into holding a rhythm? The story can increase/relax it, so perhaps individualized broadcasts could theoretically be used to synchronize the beats precisely (in the second sense)?

To put it more simply, one reading implies special heart—to-heart telepathy and the other implies normal physiological responses in a shared space.

It's the same difference as if two cars were told to "synchronise speeds" (rates) and instead they synchronised accelerations (rates of change).

Yeah the title had me very curious about how that would work

There's some synchronization effects in metronomes and in industrial equipment. If you have several things that can oscillate, perhaps not at precisely the same rate but close, and the motions reinforce each other when they do achieve the same rate, you can get surprising synchronization.

For an intuitive example, see this Veritasium video, starting at around 4:50: https://youtu.be/t-_VPRCtiUg?t=292.

This happens in crowds of people, for an example, the London Millenium pedestrian bridge wobble: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Bridge,_London#Reso....

I was initially curious how this could happen with a heart rate; I could imagine some shared feedback mechanism for walking, or breathing, but a shared feedback for heart rate was surprising. Perhaps if they were touching, and there was some electrical or pressure-sensitive pulse? Disappointing that it's merely the delta between exciting and dull parts of the stories.

I would not be surprised if under certain very specific conditions heart beats couldn't be made to synchronise.

For example doing a dance to music where muscles in the chest might 'nudge' heartbeat phases of otherwise very similar individuals into synchronisation.

It is after all pretty hard to make an oscillator which isn't affected by any environmental effects, and there is no reason to believe nature has managed it, especially when there is no real biological need to.

The actual phrase here is “synchronization of HR fluctuations”

Not sure we can fault them if it is a justified true headline but we expect that 'other people' can't read.

Per the Wason selection task this is a great experiment to run, because if it isn't true then that's strong evidence many more complex theories relating to sync are likely to be false.

I agree with OP's point: the word synchronize implies that two things begin to share some common value. In this case, the heart rates share similar behavior (not ~exact BPMs), but I think most folks wouldn't choose the words used to describe this.

A more apt title might say "the changes in their heart rates synchronize".

An alien visiting from another planet might not be aware that there's a correlation among humans in what they find exciting and that changes in heart rate correlate with excitement.

Ok you guys, I didn't think the title was so bad, but I've put "in sync" up there to accommodate you. Let's discuss the more interesting stuff now?

That’s perfectly adequate, yes. It also makes the story a completely obvious “Well, duh!”, as it should be.

I don't think that's quite fair.

Note that this doesn’t mean their hearts beat in sync, only that their heart rate tends to rise or fall in sync.

In fairness were it the meaning of synchronous that engineers are familiar with now that would be truly astounding.

I’m happy to accept the more liberal interpretation of the term as not all knowledge of merit need be readily appreciated by the technical eye.

s/synchronize/rise and fall in sync/

Maybe I'm being a bit of a jerk but.. yeah?

The suspenseful parts of the story raise your heart rate and the relaxed parts go t'other way

I'd be interested in knowing if this could be used for diagnosing mental disorder things such as sociopathy maybe

It's effectively measuring emotional response to fictional events, which sounds like a plausible way to diagnose a huge range of mental disorders. But if the subject wants to be diagnosed, why not just ask them how something made them feel? And if they don't want to be diagnosed (like you would expect for some sociopaths, pedophiles etc.) this won't help. If a full polygraph can't be proven to work against unwilling suspects, then one fourth of a polygraph won't work either.

> just ask them how something made them feel

Fair point. I was trying to throw the study a bone instead of declare it completely useless

I think it'll be good for developing a Voight-Kampff prototype.

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