How the brains of social animals synchronise and expand one another

Collective neuroscience offers a different way of seeing neuropsychiatric conditions such as depression and schizophrenia, for example – not as instances of individual ‘dysfunctions’ in the brain, but as phenomena that emerge from multiple dynamic physiological and social processes. How does one get to the bottom of human cognition if we are intrin... See more

Cognition, in this view, is a dynamical process that happens not only within and between brains, but across a variety of biological, behavioural and social levels of organisation.

Take a sports team. Statistics about each player can tell you a lot about whether they’re going to make good additions to the team or not, but whether the group ‘vibes’ together, whether they have synchronicity, whether they work together in a group, can’t be quantified by the number of their scores or assists. Yet this collective ‘X factor’ can be... See more

collective neuroscience involves reckoning with the science of complex systems, where causation is not linear but looping, and social and neuronal structures mesh in unpredictable ways.

In addition, the study found that the whole group synchronises its brain states when engaged in communication. Their neurons spiked and oscillated in similar ways, bringing their brains quite literally onto the same ‘wavelength’. And if the bats were ‘friendly’, having spent significant time together, their brains synchronised even more strongly – ... See more

This work has widened into other contexts. Uri Hasson, a researcher at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, has shown that a good storyteller can induce synchronisation between her and her listener’s brains (if there’s shared common ground, experiences and beliefs); and, in a classroom setting, how well a student’s brain waves sync up with their p... See more

In a pivotal study from 2010, Guillaume Dumas, assistant professor of computational psychiatry at the University of Montreal, showed that the brains of human participants mirrored each other on a neurological level when engaging in activities together, such as making funny, meaningless gestures with their hands while watching each other.

even a study looking at the dynamic between two individuals lacks certain aspects of the diversity of interactions that emerge naturally in organic, more complex social groups – including attention allocation, creating subgroups, and recruiting allies, says Julia Sliwa.

the brain likely evolved to deal with the informational complexity of navigating and coordinating social relationships. If that’s true, she said, cognitive neuroscience that ignores sociality is probably pointless.