"Have you ever met someone for the first time and felt as though they would be your best friend? This may be attributed to something deeper than just common interests; it may have to do with a similarity in how you perceive reality. New research from UCLA and Dartmouth shows that long before words are exchanged, the brain may already recognize who feels familiar. A group of graduate students received functional magnetic resonance imaging of their brains while they watched short films."
"During the brain activity scans, participants watched an assortment of videos: comedies, debates, and documentaries. Each film stirred a unique blend of thought and feeling. Some viewers might have laughed while others might have reflected. How each person's brain responded was measured to determine what is called " neural similarity." Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, they measured correlations in neural time-courses across 200 brain regions, quantifying how synchronized two brains were from moment to moment."
Functional MRI scans of graduate students watching varied videos showed that individuals whose neural responses were most similar were more likely to become friends months later. Neural similarity was measured across 200 brain regions and captured correlations in time-course activity during comedies, debates, and documentaries. Overlap appeared in regions tied to emotion, value and reward, attention, and social understanding. The alignment in how two minds respond to the same stimuli predicted social closeness and may also influence success in teamwork, mentorship, or therapeutic relationships.
Read at Psychology Today
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]