The minds of social species are strikingly resonant
Neuroscientists usually investigate one brain at a time. They observe how neurons fire as a person reads certain words, for example, or plays a video game. As social animals, however, those same scientists do much of their work together—brainstorming hypotheses, puzzling over problems and fine-tuning experimental designs. Increasingly, researchers are bringing that reality into how they study brains.
Researchers are discovering synchrony in humans and other species, and they are mapping its choreography—its rhythm, timing and undulations—to better understand what benefits it may give us. They are finding evidence that interbrain synchrony prepares people for interaction and beginning to understand it as a marker of relationships.
Eventually the counter on the monitor above me flashed: 4 ... 3 ... 2 ... 1 ... time was up. New instructions appeared. Now we each had to build our own story in 30-second increments. Between our own increments, we were to listen to the other person's evolving tale. When that was done, we both had to retell all three stories: our joint creation and the ones we invented separately.
At least that is the idea. To see whether they can pinpoint that “something special,” the researchers will compare the activity in my and Sid's brains, and the brains of all the other pairs in the study, second by second, voxel by voxel over the course of our storytelling session, looking for signs of coherence. They will also consider the questionnaires and reports about the experience we and other participants filled out after we emerged from the machines .
New studies similar to Wheatley's aim to go beyond the early findings and ask, for example, whether storytelling pairs who build better stories show more tightly coupled brain activity than those whose efforts fall a little flat.
The bats live downstairs, in what Yartsev, who is both a neuroscientist and an engineer, affectionately calls the “bat cave.” He houses around 300 fruit bats in two colonies, one for males, the other females. The walls of the colony rooms are black, and in each there are mesh panels attached to the ceiling and netting spread throughout the room. Upside-down fruit kebabs of cantaloupe and apple hang from the ceiling, as do blue plastic structures for the bats to play in.
Studying free-flying bats as Yartsev does is an exercise in technical precision. Because the bats spend so much time huddled together and fly so quickly, it can be hard to identify them or figure out which bat vocalized. To track location, behavior and brain activity, the scientists outfitted the flight room with 16 cameras and multiple antennas hidden in small white boxes.
Yartsev and Zhang concluded that there is something special about social interaction. Synchrony may be a sign of shared cognitive processing, which is the chemical and electrical signaling in the brain that allows individuals to comprehend their environment, communicate and learn. The mouse study suggested another level of meaning for synchrony: it predicts the outcomes of future interactions. Like bats, mice enjoy the company of other mice and sleep huddled together, but they are a hierarchical species, with some animals more dominant than others. To take advantage of that, Hong and Kingsbury used a standard experiment called a tube test that is much like watching two football teams try to reach each other's end zones.
Beyond Synchrony The goal of the latest human studies, such as the one Wheatley invited me to join, is not just to explore synchrony more deeply but to go beyond it. Wheatley, who with four other Dartmouth scientists is establishing the college's Consortium for Interacting Minds, believes that asking when we are in sync with someone else is “a pretty limited way to think about two minds coming together.
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