Brain Waves Synchronize When People Interact
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
In the light of this research I wonder if what they are talking about is synchronicity. Perhaps meditation enhances the brains ability to synchronize quickly, leading to that feeling?
An example of modern spirituality subscribing to that idea is Martinus:
Summary of a section of Book of Life:
> The brain and nervous system as an antenna system for "electric" waves. "Electric" waves as the basis for the individual's experience of life. The brain and nervous system as the individual's gateway into the spiritual world. Special centres or complexes in the brain and nervous system for the various spiritual functions. Disharmony in the brain and nervous system as identical with "insanity", "mental deficiency" and "paralysis"
Synchronicity could be just that. Two systems responding to inputs in similar/identical ways, because they evolved to do so or were made to do so. Both functions of the overarching nature of cause and effect.
It gets more interesting when you let those two computers talk to each other and each becomes an input for the other. Interference and synchronization abounds.
Curious if we can see cross species effects, like a person and their dog.
Source?
Not really "evolution" for humans but we wouldn't have things like Chihuahuas or Pugs without humans breeding dogs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human%E2%80%93canine_bond
With dogs most of the obvious coevolution has just been cultural.
For example, both people and dogs will scan faces in a similar way by looking at the mouth and eyes in the same pattern.
> What they are seeing goes well beyond previous research on so-called mirror neurons, which represent both the self and another. (When I watch you throw a ball, it activates a set of mirror neurons in my brain that would also be activated if I were doing the same thing myself.) In contrast, the self and other cells Hong and Kingsbury discovered encode only the behavior of one individual or the other. All three kinds of cells—mirror, self and other—were present and aligning in the mouse brains.
Did they try it with eyes shut? After dousing in axe body spray?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-waves-synch...
```NEUROSCIENCE Brain Waves Synchronize when People Interact The minds of social species are strikingly resonant
By Lydia Denworth on July 1, 2023 Scientific American July 2023 Issue ```
not sure what your reply is even supposed to mean or convey, frankly speaking.
> through our senses
I think it's pretty obvious what I meant?
person A person A person B person B
brain waves -> body -> senses -> brain waves
<- senses <- body <-We all spend a fair bit of time discussing things without certainty. Immediately shooting those bits and pieces down only looks to end the discussion.
I see this attitude as a type of violence against alternative views, ideas and the imagination itself.
Moreover, if brain synchronization is a reality, it might suggest the possibility of memory linkage across spatial distances. This notion aligns with the principle that neurons which fire together wire together. Consequently, if individuals' brains are synchronizing, their neurons may be forming connections, or wiring together, across distinct locations.
Bats possess the remarkable ability to echolocate using high-frequency waves, similar to sonar. Just as humans do, bats ascertain the direction of a sound wave by comparing the time intervals at which the sound reaches each ear.
The crux of the matter is that, much like humans, bats can demonstrate exceptional sensitivity. One intriguing experiment I would consider involves determining the distance at which an isolated bat can remain from its colony while maintaining synchronized brain waves. Given that bats can echolocate, their auditory sensitivity is incredibly high. If their synchronization is based on vocalizations, and the synchronized activity of scores or even hundreds of bats amplifies the signal to which they're attuning, what is the maximum distance a bat can be from the synchronizing colony and still participate in this collective rhythm? Could it be 10 feet? Or perhaps 100 feet? Or even 1000 feet? This would be fascinating to explore.
Like how antennae are shaped to capture certain geometries of electrical field flux, and how the transmitters of those signals are shaped to produce those geometries.
In this case it seems fairly benign to assume that thoughts, which probably flow in a high-redundancy, fault-tolerant way through the brain, can be decoded and incorporated to be processed in a high-redundancy, seemingly structure preserving way. If you hear a tree fall in a forest, that’s ‘cause your perception made it make a sound, subjectively speaking, etc..
When a person orders a pieces of meat in a restaurant and tells the waiter the temperature, rare or medium, they are not specifying a subjective state of the meat at serving time, they are specifying the max internal temperature of a piece of meat during the cooking process. For the rare piece of meat, the max internal temperature is between 125 and 130 F for beef or lamb. For the medium piece of meat, the max internal temperature is between 140 and 150 F for beef or lamb. There is a relationship between the color and texture of the meat and the max internal temperature. [0]
One way to tell if the meat is at a certain temperature is to cut it open and look at the color. In this case visual perception can determine and make an association to the max internal temperature of a piece of meat. This is discouraged like sticking a thermometer into the piece of meat as the contracted proteins in the hot meat will push out liquid. Ideally, after the piece of meat reaches the max internal temperature it should rest at a warm temperature so that proteins have a chance to relax. In order to prevent puncturing the meat to determine the max internal temperature, chefs will use a light thumb or finger press making the association between tactile pressure and the internal max temperature. Moreover, there have been several chefs who can simultaneously roast several pieces of meat in an oven and determine the max internal temperature by sound of the roasting juices sizzle on the roasting pan.
This isn't extra sensory or any such thing. It is deterministic. It is simply the human mind is capable with practice to associate color with a temperature, tactical touch with a temperature, and the cadence of roasting juices hitting a pan with a temperature.
All I'm saying is that the motivating force for a chef to learn these associations between color, pressure, and sound is to not piss off the patron with an incorrect cooked piece of meat. The power relationship is important to the learning process.
An extreme example of this might be the abusive Narcissist/Borderline couple dynamic. There's a handful of psychological literature from established researchers that speculate in these kinds of abusive couples, the victim and abuser entirely synchronize with each other using entraining. For example, the Narcissist uses repetitive, triggering speech patterns to brainwash the victim so the victim acts only the way the Narcissist thinks she'll act. On the other side, the Borderline might cause entraining by begging her partner to regulate her labile emotions. [1]
This entraining is also speculated to cause dissociation and amnesia, allowing the Narcissist to wipe clean and replace his victim's memory. [1]
Might have been an adaption in the distant past, but in my eyes most people in leadership are neurotics, and they don't like to regulate other peoples' emotions to any extent like the Cluster B's
[1] https://vaknin-talks.com/transcripts/Narcissist_Entrains_Cod...
"Likely"? It's possible, but do you have any evidence for this? There could easily be other explanations and to determine something as likely needs more than a feeling of it making sense.
In earlier times, people thought it's "likely" that if you have a disease then it would help by getting rid of a lot of blood. That made sense, blood carries lots of things, and making fresh blood surely must help recovering. Turns out, nope, people die quicker from blood letting.
Would love to see a study around this aspect.
It's literally already happening. This isn't an enlightened state, this is what happens when two brains respend to the same stimuli.
> If the brain were simple enough for us to understand it, we would be too simple to understand it.
Not a given.
Evolution appears (as one might logically expect) to act in localized incremental ways. The result is that our body+brain is more of a modular design than a monolithic intractably complex one. We seem to be well on the way to understanding how these cortical functions of perception and cognition are working and what types of representations are being used, so once we refine our understanding of the other major moving parts such as thalamus (and thalamo-cortical loop) and hippocampus, it seems we'll be well on the way to understanding the overall architecture.
B1) C. Elegans has evolved to understand its environment.
B2) We don't understand our environment.
Sure, we don't understand (can't predict) everything about our environment, but the level of complexity we can understand - Saturn V rocket for example - is pretty astounding. If you look at the brain as a bunch of interacting subsystems, then the level of complexity really doesn't appear that great. I think historically people have overestimated the theoretical complexity of the brain for a variety of reasons.
> Neural waves in certain brain regions of people listening to a musical performance match those of the performer—the greater the synchrony, the greater the enjoyment.
This specific case doesn't seem unexpected either. Unless the same experiment is conducted with an artificial performer (with sufficiently believable human-like properties), and no such sychoronization (with data from the time of recording) occurs.
The article didn't seem to cover any of that. Hopefully it is somewhere in the original research.
So could one person perhaps perceive a virtual discussion to be synchronized when it in fact is not?
What happens when one of the participants is a Language Model. Is it noticeable that there was a language model in the discussion? Do human brain waves changes in non-human ways or language models are just too similar to humans?
It would be good that having the technology we started to study what talking with artificial intelligences do to human brains and if they are altered in any noticeable way.
Why should they be different, again?