Brain activity changes when working with others

New research shows that when two peo­ple work on the same task, strange and won­der­ful things hap­pen. It’s about syn­chro­niz­ing key areas of the two brains.

In this study, 39 vol­un­teers were asked to design the inte­ri­or of a vir­tu­al room togeth­er using a touch­screen, until they were mutu­al­ly sat­is­fied. Par­tic­i­pants’ brain activ­i­ty was mon­i­tored using func­tion­al near-infrared spec­troscopy, as well as for signs of eye contact.

The research team devel­oped spe­cial pro­cess­ing and mod­el­ing tech­niques that can rec­og­nize social inter­ac­tions (eye con­tact) and map them to spe­cif­ic times and areas of brain activ­i­ty to exam­ine par­tic­i­pants’ respons­es. bottom.

Yasuyo Mina­gawa, a psy­chol­o­gist at Keio Uni­ver­si­ty, said, “When par­tic­i­pants coop­er­at­ed to com­plete a task, pop­u­la­tions of neu­rons in one brain were acti­vat­ed at the same time as sim­i­lar pop­u­la­tions in the oth­er brain. It seemed as if two brains were work­ing as one sys­tem, cre­ative­ly solv­ing problems.”

In this study, par­tic­i­pants were giv­en the oppor­tu­ni­ty to exam­ine both indi­vid­ual brain activ­i­ty (brain syn­chrony, WBS) and group brain activ­i­ty (inter­brain syn­chrony, BBS) by hav­ing par­tic­i­pants com­plete a task alone or in pairs. I was.

This col­lab­o­ra­tion gen­er­at­ed ‘robust’ BBS in spe­cif­ic regions of the supe­ri­or and mid­dle tem­po­ral regions of the brain and the pre­frontal cor­tex of the right hemi­sphere. How­ev­er, in our test sce­nario, the BBS was not as strong.

Fur­ther­more, the BBS was strongest when one per­son looked up while look­ing at the oth­er, sug­gest­ing that it plays an impor­tant role in social inter­ac­tion. On the oth­er hand, BBS was stronger in the same brain regions when vol­un­teers worked alone.

These phe­nom­e­na are con­sis­tent with the ‘Wi-Mode’ con­cept, in which inter­act­ing agents share a col­lec­tive mind and accel­er­ate their inter­ac­tion by accel­er­at­ing access to each oth­er’s cog­ni­tion,” says Minagawa. .

The research tech­nique improves on pre­vi­ous “sec­ond-per­son neu­ro­science” exper­i­ments, which were lim­it­ed to hav­ing two peo­ple engage in the same motor task, but sci­en­tists will now be able to use eye con­tact and more. We will have to find a way to mea­sure com­plex social interactions.

But the authors of this new study think it’s pos­si­ble. There is already evi­dence that some kind of brain syn­chro­niza­tion occurs when two peo­ple talk to each other.

We know that humans are designed to be social crea­tures, but we still have a long way to go in under­stand­ing how our brains change when we’re in the com­pa­ny of our peers. How­ev­er, advances in scan­ning and com­put­ing tech­nol­o­gy may shed light on this unknown problem.

“In the future, we may be able to apply this method to more detailed social behav­iors such as facial expres­sions and ver­bal com­mu­ni­ca­tion,” says Minagawa.

Our ana­lyt­i­cal method will pro­vide hints and direc­tions for future research in inter­ac­tive social neu­ro­science research.”