100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People, 2nd Edition

68 Speakers’ Brains and Listeners’ Brains Sync up During Communication

When you listen to someone talking, your brain starts working in sync with the speaker. Greg Stephens (2010) and his team put participants in his research study in an fMRI machine and had them record or listen to recordings of other people talking. He found that as people listen to someone else talk, the brain patterns of both speaker and listener start to couple, or mirror each other. There’s a slight delay, which corresponds to the time it takes for the communication to occur. Several different brain areas were synced. He compared this with having people listen to someone talk in a language they did not understand. In that case the brains do not sync up.

Syncing Plus Anticipation ...