If you’ve ever worked with someone and felt like the two of you were sharing a single hive mind, finishing each other’s sentences, anticipating decisions, possibly achieving telepathic levels of perfection that annoy coworkers who have yet to find such a compatible work partner, it turns out that sensation isn’t just the stuff of a coach’s inspirational locker room speech.
According to new research from Western Sydney University and published in PLOS Biology, our brains actually, literally sync up with one another when we collaborate.
Cognitive neuroscientist Denise Moerel and her team were curious about what people’s brain activity looks like when they work together to accomplish a task. More specifically, they wanted to figure out if the similarity in their brain activity is happening just because they’re trying to solve the same problem, or if there’s something deeper going on, fueled by the act of collaboration itself.
The researchers paired participants into 24 teams and asked each to sort a collection of black-and-white patterned shapes. Before the real test began, teammates could talk their way through a shared set of rules, like which patterns mattered, which shapes counted, and where to draw the lines, etc.
Then came the actual experiment, where the pair was situated back-to-back. They were told to remain silent and could not peek at the others’ work. It was two people staring at identical screens, sorting through shapes according to the rules that they had established together.
As they did all that, EEG caps covered in diodes and probes and such monitored their brain activity, measuring how closely their neural signals matched. The researchers also created what they called “pseudo-pairs,” pairings of test participants who never worked together but whose strategies aligned, therefore making them a perfect pair to compare to each other just because. Maybe the rules matter more than the human-to-human connection?
At first, everyone’s brains looked independent. Just two hundred milliseconds into it, though, the thought patterns started to either diverge or sync up. Real partners started to show neatly aligned brain activity, with patterns that grew tighter and more consistent over time. Pseudo-pairs, on the other hand, never matched up in the same way despite following similar rules.
The researchers say that this implies brain synchronicity isn’t as much about the task itself as it is about the relationship that was actively forged between the teammates in their quest to complete the task.
Collaborating with another human, according to the study’s findings, can reshape your neural responses as you work through a task together, literally putting you both on the same wavelength — in this case, on the same brainwave length.
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