Neural Synchrony Explains How Brain Waves Sync Up: Milky Way News

EARTH, Laniakea Supercluster—When people get along or “click,” we can describe it as being “on the same wavelength.” It sounds poetic—but what if it also has a measurable brain signature?

A team of neuroscientists says there is growing evidence that social connection can be reflected in the ways people’s brains fall into sync during face-to-face interactions. They call the phenomenon “social synchrony,” and they are now exploring whether it can be deliberately strengthened.

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“My work is about how the human brain supports social interactions in real-world settings,” Suzanne Dikker, neuroscientist and research professor at New York University and Ghent University, told Milky Way News.

“To do that, I bring neuroscience out of the lab and into real-world environments like classrooms, or museums, or more recently also therapeutic sessions.”

Over the past decade, Dikker and an international group of colleagues have done this via portable electroencephalography (EEG) headsets that record brain activity. They’ve connected these headsets to thousands of people, measuring their brain waves as they interact. The goal is not to simply study individual brains, but to examine what happens when brains meet in naturalistic settings.

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The results suggest that people’s neural activity can become synchronized during social exchanges—and that greater synchrony can be associated with positive social experiences.

In one five-year-long study of museum and festival-goers, for example, participants reported feeling more socially close and empathetic, as well as coordinating their behavior more with each other, as brain activity synchronized. Another study, this time in a classroom, showed that students whose brain activity was more synchronized were more likely to report liking both their conversation partner and their class.

The researchers have also worked with high-profile artists to expand their investigations. In 2019, Dikker collaborated with musicians Bad Bunny and Residente while they created music, using EEG to visualize their brain activity in real time. The artists could see how synchronized their brain waves were and experiment with different ways of working together. Their neural interactions were captured during the creation of the song “Bellacoso.”

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“A lot of my work sits at the intersection of art, science, and education, using a kind of community neuroscience approach,” Dikker said. She added that she and colleagues have worked with artists of various backgrounds, and that doing so has inspired research questions. Performance artist Marina Abramović, for example, helped inspire research on eye contact and social connectedness.

Other artists that Dikker and colleagues have worked with include musicians like Phish bassist Mike Gordon and the late Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead.

“They tried to remember a song together, and that also synchronized their brains through this kind of mutual negotiation,” Dikker said.

Just as artists have experimented with their brain wave synchrony to make art, Dikker and colleagues are now wondering whether synchrony can be engineered to produce tangible, prosocial outcomes—in settings such as psychotherapy.

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Early experiments suggest the answer may be yes. By designing activities that encourage people to coordinate—through conversation, play, music or other shared experiences—they have found ways to potentially increase interpersonal synchrony. With a $4 million grant from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), Dikker and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, plan to investigate whether deliberately fostering synchrony can improve therapeutic outcomes.

“If we can actually leverage such synchronizing, either through inviting people to engage with each other in synchronous movement, and/or by showing people how in sync they are in real time and then inviting them to try out different strategies,” said Dikker, the research could have “downstream consequences” for learning and therapeutic outcomes.

In other words, being “on the same wavelength” may be more than a metaphor. But the real scientific challenge now is figuring out exactly when synchrony matters, why it happens, and whether increasing it can reliably make us better at connecting with one another.