How You Affect Other People’s Brain Waves | Inter-Brain Connections
Vložit
- čas přidán 15. 03. 2020
- Scientists know that things like people’s heart rates, breathing, and even footfalls tend to line up when they’re doing things together, but we're learning that even the electrical activity in your brain can sync up too!
Hosted by: Brit Garner
----------
Support SciShow by becoming a patron on Patreon: / scishow
SciShow has a spinoff podcast! It's called SciShow Tangents. Check it out at www.scishowtangents.org
----------
Huge thanks go to the following Patreon supporters for helping us keep SciShow free for everyone forever:
Kevin Bealer, KatieMarie Magnone, D.A. Noe, Charles Southerland, Eric Jensen, Christopher R Boucher, Alex Hackman, Matt Curls, Adam Brainard, Scott Satovsky Jr, Sam Buck, Avi Yashchin, Ron Kakar, Chris Peters, Kevin Carpentier, Patrick D. Ashmore, Piya Shedden, Sam Lutfi, charles george, Greg
----------
Looking for SciShow elsewhere on the internet?
Facebook: / scishow
Twitter: / scishow
Tumblr: / scishow
Instagram: / thescishow
----------
Sources:
www.researchgate.net/publicat...
journals.plos.org/plosone/art...
www.frontiersin.org/articles/...
link.springer.com/article/10....
www.researchgate.net/publicat...
www.psych.nyu.edu/vanbavel/lab...
journals.plos.org/plosone/art...
pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_2...
One nitpicky thing: Breathing together while singing in a choir is entirely intentional. The director tells us the specific places we are supposed to breathe, and we have discussions about where to breathe so that we don't breathe at the same time in a long phrase (stagger breathing). Everything else is great. I'm just pedantic!
Yes and, the brain waves sync up too!
Fun fact
"Try walking so your footsteps AREN'T in sync". It happens all the time when one person is taller than the other, and the taller person isn't trying to match the shorter person's stride. I regularly have to take 3 steps to someone else's 2 because I'm short. When two people are purposely walking at the same pace, they're going to find a pace that both of their strides are matched with so they can walk without one person having to exert more effort than the other.
"Heart rate and breathing tends to line up when people are... singing in a choir together." Because everyone (who is singing the same part) is inhaling and exhaling at the same time, and using the same amount of physical exertion. The linked source even compares the groups who sing different parts, and says those in unison are more closely matched, which would make sense, as stated above.
For the team card game, the article does not compare the two teams against each other. It just says that there is the possibility that knowing the EEG in one area of the brain of one person on the team MIGHT be used to predict the EEG of the same area of the other person.
so basically it's an emergent property , that when a group of people interact there have to be a sync pattern somewhere
daphnie816 yeah it wouldn’t work for me, either. I have a limp (I accidentally went cliff diving instead of climbing down a waterfall!).
I definitely see your points and I thought the same thing too with the choir breathing, but to me, the interesting part was that physically separated brains had noticeable correlations. I've always wondered if different brains work in similar ways, or if the individual aspects of one's self actually make your brain behave in a different way, like, with different patterns of brain activity. These studies show that similar actions correspond to similar brain patterns. Two people completing the same puzzle will have similar looking brain scans. I wonder how much this is true in the memories of people. Do I store the color red, or the smell of fresh baked cookies in similar places as someone else? That would be truly interesting. I doubt, for example, that the electrical activity of one's brain is actually affecting the electrical activity of the others, and I wish they clarified this point further in this video. It's pretty click-baity.
@@kindlin It was a bit of a shoddy episode :/ I too found it very frustrating that SciShow never even mentioned what theoretical mechanism the researchers gave for how the brains sync up. Do they think it's due to electromagnetic fields influencing each other's brains? A complex form of subconscious empathy intentionally mimicking each other's brains from visual cues? Or is it just emotionally unimportant functional similarity from brains performing the same task at the same time (and it strengthens with increased attention to the task)? It's very annoying that she didn't fen mention any of these possibilities or which is the leading theory.
And to me it's very suspicious that almost all of the activities studied were rhythmic tasks (singing, playing music, even kissing is rhythmic in a way). I can't help wondering if the brainwaves are syncing to the rhythm, rather than to the other people.
Could this be why after pauses during discussions, people usually start talking again at the same time?
I noticed that a lot. as if there is a electromagnetic trigger signal for addressing your mouth which somehow can be picked up by the person closeby.
@@rixterz11 That, or maybe it's just random and we assign significance to the rare event of speaking at the same time, because of our cognitive biases.
I noticed that talking to my friend on Discord....So yeah i guess any kind of engagement will sync your brain waves to your partner.
It would be interesting to compare how this brainwave syncing manifests when persons are collaborating remotely (like in a team video game).
Yes that would be interesting
I don't think distance stops it from happening.
@@virglibrsaglove agreed, consciousness has no physical (or temporal) confinements.
It would be so interesting to see how dogs’ brains interact with people. Maybe that’s why we love them so much.
What if they use telekinesis to influence us I know my dog tells me things all the time just with looks or I’ll sense he needs something randomly and he will need to go out or w/e
@@squidly6179 If your dog tells you things with looks, then it's not telekinesis. Telekinesis involves no sort of non-verbal communication.
Maybe you just know your dog pretty well.
Very interesting :) I think this has a lot to do with twins who appear 'psychic' - they're so intune with each other's micro expressions & when chronic proximity-based brainwaves sync, it looks a lot like magic. Love these topics!!
I look forward to seeing what research can find in neuro-atypical people.
I can already see the spirit science people picking this up
I mean they totally already have, now they just feel vindicated.
Science in quotations.
@@MakkusuOtaku Hey, hey, hey, just because we get things wrong like *everyone else* doesn't mean our ideology is a total crockery
@@coliimusic All I mean is if you don't follow the scientific method then it isn't science.
I prefer to think of it as philosophy. The admiration of knowledge. There is a lot of information that suggests we may have a sixth sense, and while I don't broadcast it as fact, I do believe it's real. No need to bash people for their beliefs. This could be a healthy conversation between two sides that don't necessarily agree but could learn from each other.
Basically, get on my wavelength, bro. 😉😉
When you're experiencing roughly the same stimuli as another person, I think it would be natural to expect the brain waves to be fairly synchronous.
Which is why the first study was interesting. Four people all playing cards (same stimulus) but only same teams were in sync.
This needs to be explored further with some sort of experiment that ensures two teams are recieving the exact same stimulus. Like some kind of game that's rigged to stalemate.
Isn't this this hindsight phenomenon again? The waves could be quite off, because personality or anything else matter much more.
it gets more fun when you consider quantum entanglement potentials.
I'd love to see if wolves have a similar situation while hunting. I've heard some people say it's almost as though wolves communicate while hunting in some unspoken way. Neat video!
Well, they can’t speak, so it’s definitely unspoken
@@Trailtracker to clarify "speaking" is referring to howling, whining, growling, or barking.
Im just being a smartass haha
This is why when one person panic-buys toilet paper, everyone around them does too
Why don't they panic buy toilet hoses or bidets?
Lol
@@Brahmdagh 😂👍🏽
🤣
oh god, i soo love this one.. as this relates to probably the single biggest mystery i have (and continue to) experience in my life... one whose answer has continued to elude me for years -
so i am a genuine music lover.. fair to say , at times,, it's all i believe in..
..anyway,, there is this strange but very real phenomena i experience with rock solid consistency that seems to belie 'rational' or empirical reasoning... or so i thought!! -
i have found that when listening to music with another person present, our individual levels of perception/appreciation of the music clearly interact and thus either heighten or diminish my experience..
so clear and concrete and reliably occurrent is this phenomena to me that i can immediately tell just by how the music 'hits' me, the level of the other person's ability to to 'appreciate' the music is...
... until now i have struggled with this mystery,,, as it had never occurred to me to test it's validity via eeg...
new study, anyone?!?!
As a lover of weird psychology stuff, I appreciate the Synchronicity of this video appearing on my Birthday.
is this why when I'm with my friends we all become dumbasses even though we're pretty smart separately
I don't think this makes sense , where does the dumbassness come from if all of you are smart individually
P.S this reminds me of what Dan Pena once said " Show me your friend and I'll show you your future "
More like herd mentality taking over aka lowest common denominator...
@@bdr1414TV I think it's because they don't sync up very well.
People are stupid, but the individual is smart.
bdr 1414 Emergence
This why music collabs are better when done in person
This can be nasty as well - I have a slow heart rate, and when I lie with my head in someone's lap my heart rate lifts towards the rate of the other person. It means that lying next to my SO can easily become unexpectedly stressful as my heart rate lifts and I subconsciously react to that "heart rate elevated for no reason, panic". Meanwhile my SO is going "ah, so relaxing, heart rate slow, feels nice".
I would be curious about the difference between face to face vs. say a team playing first person online , that is coordinating but with less bandwidth of communication . Also, for a fun study how much do human and dog brains sync in say catch/fetch vs. bow hunting. Same goal ,visual communication, and coordination , but one more primitive ,that would be interesting.
i like how the background image has a border around the periphery that keeps the eye bouncing back to the center.
To me, this is one of the most interesting fields of study. Over time, this could prove out some forms of telepathy.
Wonderful episode. This is a research that actually steps in the area of unknown and clears it of all the woo
I am so appreciative that this video was made. I have been wracking my brain on how to search for articles related to a paper I'm writing in uni, and this topic is pretty much what I needed to clarify my points in my paper.
I did the first draft a month ago, and the full paper is due tomorrow. Super useful for the fine tuning I have left. Also, obviously an interesting topic! I forgot that I saw it previously, until today and realized this video might help me.
1:09 I sure wish we could have these types of studies at the moment. I look forward to more EEG research soon, though.
I wonder how this relates to my empathy things. I learned to manage my heartrate and breathing for calming down horses, but it works on people too. Sometimes if I concentrate on building an experience properly, I can give people similar phantom sensations to what I experience on a daily basis with my sensory integration issues, which is apparently a form of hypnosis technique apparently?
I'm ASD, so I wonder if it's a case of me piggybacking unevenly off someone else's timing, or forcing their brain to adopt something closer to mine.... Or something else entirely
COOL!!! 😊😊😊 It all makes "sense".
This is what we’re missing so much in quarantine
0:21 - singing sounds fair, the whole thing is just controlled breathing
Ha HA! My tinfoil hat doesn't look so stupid now, does it?!?! Nobody's gonna tap into MY brainwaves! * runs back into the crawlspace *
Love it! Hahhhaaa 😂😂😂 Keep the hat on! 😂
I encourage any viewers who find this topic particularly interesting to look into Social Baseline Theory and the research of Dr. Jim Coan at the University of Virginia. Many of his studies examine the importance of this very phenomenon in the process of self-regulating affect.
when playing guitar with my buddies it's usually stephan who's responsible for the joint action
fascinating ! so fun and enlightening to know that my brain waves are probably sinking with others in band class :)
That thumbnail ROCKS!
I would love to see a video about why so many people see the number 11 all the time lol. Also your hair looks really good 😁
That is really interesting. Working in science education I wonder whether one can see a synching between teachers and students and whether the degree of synch correlates to the learning, or at least to the perception of the student of the quality of the, e.g., explanation.
I've walked, (and done other things), with people who didn't try at all to sinc with me. It's always awful with people like that. But with people who do sinc with me, cooperative activities can be amazing.
Thank You!
Posting on Facebook!
Hmm, this has me wondering about what you'd find if you took measurements of people working together/oppositionally to accomplish some online task. Would give you control over how much information about the other people participants have, and could help point you towards different ways synchronization occurs (or doesn't occur).
Cool subject! I do wish you explored a bit in the beginning what exactly it means for brainwave patterns to match. What features of the brain wave?
ok this is just stunning.
I'm still curious if thats only cos the activities requires that "rythm" and therefore they converge, or it's influence by the other brain...
So it’s real when we’ve been jokingly saying, “get off my brain waves!” Or “omg we are are the same brain wAveEe!” Lol
Goddamnit, now even science rubs on my face that I think way too much when I'm going at it with someone, that I should be feeling the connections, and following my instincts. I know, okay.
But seriously, great video, synergy is something fantastic.
5:11 hack your brain to hack others', aka, be the change you want to see in the world.
Genuinely the most bizarre thing I've learned since I started learning psychology on CZcams
Great video presenter
Finally a new Brit video 😊
love Brit!
I can’t help wondering then; what would happen if they got a group of random people to do things together eg. walking, kissing, singing, maybe even just looking at each other, etc.?
I would totally volunteer for this study lol
I also remember a TED Talk (I think), where they talked about this phenomenon happening in people talking and other people listening to them.
I would've liked if they mentioned if this vesically means that their thoughts are more similar during thus syncing, which I would presume by the evidence my shallow knowledge has about this
Have they considered doing this when two people talk over the phone or in a video chat to see how the physical presence affects brain wave sync?
When my brother and I played Pictionary as a team, no-one could beat us. There were times when he or I would, literally, draw just one line and the other would blurt out the answer.
I think you're making it more dramatic than it should be... when people are having similar experiences, whether it be staring at each other or hearing the same thing, the same spots in their brains tend to show increased activity and similar patterns emerge. You make it sound like the brainwaves are some mysterious stream of data unique to each person, hence that wow factor when they sync up.
Well, I think that it would be interesting to hear HOW well they sync up. How this is presented makes me believe that the syncronization goes beong what would be "normal" levels in that situation. I mean that if the person was doing the same activity alone, the brainwave would look different than doing the same activity together. Hence the whole video.
This explains how group exercising works.
I actually really have a hard time coordinating with other people. I often have to put in a conserted effort to walk the same way as other people with me, watching their steps and trying to synchronize our steps. I also had to learn how to empathize with others, how to yawn when other people yawn, etc. And no, I don't have ASD, or any other diagnosed disorders, and have been to psychiatrists to see what was wrong with me since I was 8.
Oh, I think about this as a theory since I learned about electromagnets, that our brains should produce some interference with each other (and also with some electronic devices) as it's a "wired" close circuit of some sort. I do wonder if it has a distance limit, if virtual stimulus could make up for them, if it can change the people's natural frequency overtime... I'd love to be able to test it for the rest of my life, haha.
I knew about the heart rate and breathing sync but not the brain waves. Amazing. We are amazing. And we just do stupid with that amazing. Some of us do amazing too. But mostly, it's stupid.
By what mechanism is it posited that this occurs?
That's interesting. I wonder how this effects the development of certain parts of the brain as we grow. Do those with ADHD develope differently, maybe because they have a harder time maintaining this focused synchronization?
I know i have a difficult time synchronizing my steps with other people I walk.
I would love to see an entire orchestra hooked up and see how they're brains align
I wonder if cross species brain waves may also apparently sync. I have often wondered about the especially close bonds some fortunate people have with, for instance, a dog. I wonder if similar patterns or discernable matches happen more in close ‘bonded’ dog - person dyads than between not very closely bonded dyads....
So when like, thousands of religious people at once hum a specific tone, it syncs up the brain waves of all the people praying! I'm always amazed when religious behavior can actually be explained by science, like meditation.
I would say my humming when I was in band allowed me hum, but my vocal chords for being so much lower, I could only hit low notes, but I could hit a fifth below. Synced close enough
We're not talking bona fide telepathy, but this is still very ESP-like
What do you mean by “synchronize”? If responses to stimuli happen at the same time, that's not surprising. If longer-term rhythms happen at the same time that is more interesting, and in that case I would want to know what network/rhythm is synchronized
This video gave me a little bit of a "Science fell in love, so I tried to prove it" vibe xD
"pro tip: skip the mental math".
I like this tip!
(sends you my vibes)
Let me organize why there is pros and cons about the theory. The theory works as long as waves are regular. That is why footstpes can be either in sync or not. But if you start swinging many metronomerous at all different time, you will find all of them are is being swung in sync. In case of heartrate or brainwave, they would work as long as they are regular, which mean being healty. Based on the theory and quantum physics, many interesting things are found. Please visit my channel if you are interested.
maybe the teams used blinking to communicate (generating a huge artifact)
so imagine hunderds of people praying in sync!?
This process is called neural entrainment. My whole research is based on it. I am pretty confident my supervisor sometimes thought I was crazy!! Now it's common knowledge! *brain intense erection* *more erection* *Braingasm!!* Congrats SciShow!
I'd be interested in experiments on if people that live together can tell when other members are in the house or not without looking or listening to confirm, to see if we can actually feel people's energies if we're used to them...
There was a really neat study done a while back (I think I saw a thing about it at least five years ago? So maybe mid-Oughts to mid-teens somewhere?) about whether or not people really *could* tell if someone was looking at them, and to try and tell what the mechanism might be.
So what they did was they set someone up in an empty room, with a camera pointed at them. The camera was constantly on.
In another room, there was a monitor playing the camera's feed. And someone in the second room would either be looking at the first person on the monitor, or not.
The idea was to completely isolate the two to prevent the person being watched from getting subconscious cues like small rustles, faster breathing, etc from the observer.
Well, much to no one's surprise, there was no indication of a feeling of *not* being watched. However, the person reporting the feeling of being watched was correct close to 50% of the time, which is much, much higher than simple guessing would statistically generate.
The researchers postulated that a sense of being observed would be beneficial to a prey species, like we hominids usually are and have been, whereas of course there's no evolutionary pressure to evolve a sense of *not* being observed. But they were at a loss to explain it.
I've always thought some kind of quantum entanglement might be involved (incorporating that whole thing of how observing quantum states can affect said states); but this seems to explain it rather better? Or perhaps quantum entanglements is how brain waves are able to align in the first place?
Of course, given that brain waves are electrical, and given the close relationship between electrical waves and radio waves, there's a possibility that there's some kind of radio connection going on. However, given that radio waves basically travel at light speed, any experiment that involves seeing if there's any kind of measurable delay in alignment or the sense of being watched when distance increases is pretty much going to have to wait for a manned Mars mission. Even the Moon is probably too close to be useful for this, assuming we even had anyone there...
Anyways, fascinating stuff, and I'm about to fall asleep so I'm probably about to go full woowoo ha. Sorry! But that study was super interesting, and now I'd love to see it reproduced but while measuring both people's brain waves!
@@KryssLaBryn I feel like I'm bragging when I say I can feel people's energies, but my life experience tells me I must be sensitive to something. There were multiple events growing up where I got a weird vibe from people & would separate myself from them socially. My parents would give me a hard time & make me be nice & spend time with them, or tell me I was just being snobby, only for them to show their true colors at some point & I would just be like, "SEE?!" It was really stressful as a child to be around large groups of people for extended periods of time like school because there was always bad energy. I ended up getting an ulcer from stress in high school. When I moved out into apartment life it was even more nerve racking because I didn't have those home base family energies to go back to at the end of the day. I ended up getting injured & developed fibromyalgia & had to move back home about 4 years ago, and now when my parents aren't here I can feel my stress levels go up until they're back in the house. I don't even have to talk to or see them since I'm mostly bed ridden now, but as long as I can feel them in the house I'm less anxious. I've always wondered if that's connected to brainwaves & the like & if it could be measured...
when people's brain waves were in sync during the kiss they were more connected and reported higher level of satisfaction compared to when they were solving a math test in their heads
another way to look at it is that people are more connected when they live in the present moment instead of overthinking about the future or past
Not surprising at all: similar activities and similar sensory stimuli *tend* to elicit similar neural stimuli/brain waves.
hindsight bias ^
@@andresv.8880 Not only is it an example of hindsight bias, it's also likely incorrect. It's not just the stimulus that's the same but also the thought processes. That is the point of kissing the hand, math problems, etc - in the cases of kissing but with math processes, the sync is much lower despite the sensory input being the same.
So the way that people are thinking and how "into" it they are clearly does more than just reflect a similar reaction to the same stimulus.
@@Johnnyoity Or that such processes (the math problems) are more complex and divergent in how they are processed. Regarding playing music--they studied musicians after all. Don't forget that all of this is about tendencies, not that they are always strictly matching, as the video neglected to highlight. Maybe activities that require intentional thought (such as performed by the prefrontal cortex) are different from more intuitive, subconscious processes--the latter of which tends to promote matching brain waves.
"Correlation doesn't imply causation." ?
Consider that this has been found in fMRI scans where subjects look at images. It's not always the same, but it tends to produce similar areas of activation, especially when averaged.
Maybe this would help explain Global Consciousness Project.
eeg hyperscanning (card game) but tweaking oxytocin levels please please please
3:30 hahahahaha
that you're an intelligent person, everybody knows. Just wanted to say your hair looks really nice this way (sorry for the unsolicited feedback). Have a great week
Just went through a horrible breakup and wasn't able to see my celebrity crush due to the cancellations going on... I feel so out of touch, unconnected, and lonely 😭
hey SciShow! Somebody brought up a good point in the comments. What even are brain waves?!
Explainarize that in a video please
3:27 *Sheldon and Amy have entered the chat*
Terrible show
@@jerry3790 Eh, I've seen worse.
Do we have any idea as to what mechanism the brain might be using to align brainwaves? Is there anything about human behavior that brainwaves leave a mark on?
The 'Singing to the Baby' experiment might point towards Micro-expressions, Micro-gestures combined with the Mimicry effect.
Personally, Im holding out for the awakening of psychic powers.
Rise my brothers! XD
Now, would this syncing happen in a delayed manner? Like, if I watch a SciShow episode, do my brainwawes sync with the ones of the host, even though it was recorded? That could be interesting to check... Like, if it doesn't, maybe it could explain why having an online course seems to be less effective to some people. And maybe we could invent a "brainwaves syncer" through transcanial magnetic stimulation. (Or maybe we shouldn't ... could be too effective for indoctrination)
"What invisible strings connect us all"
Irrelevant but i love her hair 💛
Hah nice. Basically what Intuitives know for a while now. ^^
Telepathy is just long distance brain wave synchronization.
*Last time I was this early, I could still buy toiletpaper.*
Dark but hilarious. Be safe & well!
@@sentientfetus3894 Whaaaa????
@@AmberAmber Read between the lines
Ha, ha, ha! There's only one time you attempt to solve math problems when you are with a partner ;-)
It's almost as if we are social animals!
Last time I was this early I could still eat bat soup
Imagine the band pass filters brain uses to increase noise rejection where cell tower, smartphone, wifi, power line noise, Bluetooth, NFC, and what not keep on blasting space with a fuckload of signals🤣🤣
You know when you meet someone and just immediately like them for no reason? Maybe their brainwaves are very similar to yours. :)
Collective consciousness
In the card game, if the partners could see each others hands, it would just make sense, they would coordinate to reach the same goal.
If you liked this episode about brain waves, you might like our episode about brain waves.
I wonder what role mirror neurons play in this.
Is this why intelligence seems to decrease the more people are grouped together?
OMG, people sync up their steps subconsciously? I've always just done it on purpose. I'm a dancer though, lol.
Right? I'll synch up my breathing, too, if we're lying together. But if we're walking and I don't do it deliberately, it doesn't happen.
probably explains a lot of mob behaviors and armies too
Kissing each other while solving math problems is my idea of the perfect date
Hope you are doing lots of kissing 😁
(It might be hard to find a partner who enjoys the same, but when you find the one who syncs...❤)
🧠
super interesting, but also depressing