Who among us has not found ourselves in the awkward and frustrating position of trying to connect with someone conversationally — and failing, despite our best efforts? It’s in stark contrast to the pleasure we derive from a long, lively conversation that flows freely with someone we feel is on the same wavelength. If the latest neuroscience is to be believed, that sense of connection is all in your head — literally.
I spent a couple days in San Diego last weekend attending the annual conference for the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, taking in a few talks and happily hobnobbing with the social psych crowd (including on-my-wavelength PsySociety blogger Melanie Tannenbaum). On the way home, I stopped in La Jolla to chat with Princeton University cognitive neuroscientist Uri Hasson, who was in town as keynote speaker for a separate workshop.
Hasson’s specialty is exploring the dynamics of “interacting brains,” performing fMRI scans of human subjects (and the occasional monkey) as they watch movies or listen to a personal story. He made headlines in 2010 with his experiments demonstrating “speaker-listener neural coupling” — or, as various articles dubbed it, a kind of “mind meld” between speaker and listener that seems to indicate the achievement of true communication.
It’s not exactly like the classic Vulcan mind meld featured in the Star Trek franchise, whereby Spock would grope some poor schlub’s face and concentrate really hard so he could access their mind and echo their thoughts. There is no face-groping in Hasson’s work. But sometimes Spock could achieve a telepathic mini-meld without touching the subject, as in “The Devil in the Dark,” when he melds with a lumpy silicon-based alien life form called a horta.
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