Same Wavelength (Synergy)
Synergy definition — The interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.
Once we have manifested the person we want to share our love with, we must remember we are two individuals sharing one path, so we should remain true to ourselves and not sacrifice our intentions to accommodate our partner. This foundation of synergy must combine our goals and energy to increase our potential and allow us to reach new heights collectively.
Wavelengths
Have you ever wondered, can you ever be on the same wavelength as someone else? What I mean by that is being on the “same wavelength” is an informal way of saying that two people experience a very deep connection with each other. For example, you tell your friend about how you and your date just “clicked” while out for coffee. This also means that you think you’re on the same wavelength. These are only two of many expressions within the modern, everyday language that describe the feeling of having a deep bond or connection with another person. Other examples include “good vibrations” and “mind-meld” with neuroscience coining the term “brain coupling” for the phenomenon itself. And, brain coupling appears to be real, measurable, and research validated.
And, as much as this has become a widely accepted phrase, is there any proof behind it? Can you ever be on that wavelength with someone else? According to brain scans, various studies, and neuroscience, there is.
According to various research, MRI scans show that the brainwaves belonging to the two students matched when they watched a range of short video clips. It is known that good friends have similar, if not matching, neural patterns.
The scans of both the listener and speaker showed their neural activity synchronizing, and so the stronger their connection means that their coupling was closer.
Lead author, Carolyn Parkinson, a postdoctoral fellow in psychological and brain sciences who was at Dartmouth during the study, but is now at UCLA, said: “Neural responses to dynamic, naturalistic stimuli, like videos, can give us a window into people’s unconstrained, spontaneous thought processes as they unfold. Our results suggest that friends process the world around them in exceptionally similar ways.”
The study examined friendships and close social ties between pairs of graduate students (around 280 of them, in fact), an extremely large number. During the trial, 42 students began to watch a range of videos and clips while still being studied in terms of brain activity. Their neural activity was recorded with an fMRI scanner (functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner).
The conclusion of this research demonstrates that the similarity of neural responses in the brain is the strongest when two close friends interact with each other; this could be seen in the emotional response, directing attention and reasoning regions of the brain. Furthermore, it could be predicted from the MRI scan whether or not the two subjects were friends, as well as the social distance between the two, and how close their bond was.
Associate Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Senior Author, Thalia Wheatley, said: “We are a social species and live our lives connected to everybody else. If we want to understand how the human brain works, then we need to understand how brains work in combination — how minds shape each other.”
But this isn’t the only study to confirm this; there have been many studies that have come across similar findings. For example, on April 27th, a study on synchrony from brain-to-brain was published in Current Biology, looked at interaction within a classroom in a school, and the neuroscience behind the interaction in the room. So, the study found that any ‘shared’ attention, which is caused by things such as eye contact and exchanges face-to-face, will generate similar brain wave patterns.
Psychologist Suzanne Dikker at New York University led the study and stated that groups that are engaged are in sync on a brain-to-brain basis.
Uri Hasson, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, brings the real-life into his lab to study, a technique different from the usual studies and experiments within neuroscience. At the same time, his subjects engage within deep discussions and complicated activities such as watching movies or witness one person talk about their disastrous prom nights, Uri peers into their brains with fMRI machines to see how the speaker and listener’s brain activities compare to each other.
The fMRI machine measures any changes within the flow of blood in the brain, as the two people chat. While there have been different regions from within the brain linked to the two activities (speaking and listening), the “ongoing interaction between the two systems during everyday communication remains largely unknown,” states Greg Stephens and Uri Hasson in the July 27 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
For example, when a speaker tells the listener of a time where they had a very bad prom date, Uri found that the brain scan images were very similar for both subjects. This was even though the two people were doing two completely different things — of course, one was speaking, and the other one was listening to what that person had to say.
Besides, the scans also correlated to show that the stronger the connection, the more they (to use this phrase again) “clicked,” which resulted in their brain scans mirroring each other.
Although we don’t know that much about it, i.e., how it works, and whether the face-to-face interactions will collect the same results as phone calls or video conferences, the research is sufficient to confirm the positive correlation between the two people.
The findings tell us what, but don’t explain the “why” behind why two people “click,” which is a result of that connection, not its cause. Noting that these are known as general findings, they still support what psychologists dub the “theory of interactive linguistic alignment” - — another way of saying it is that the act of talking brings people together and closer because then they have something in common.
Uri explains further: “If I say, ‘Do you want a coffee?’ you say, ‘Yes please, two sugars.’ You don’t say, ‘Yes, please put two sugars in the cup of coffee that is between us.’ You’re sharing the same lexical items, grammatical constructs, and contextual framework. And this is happening not just abstractly, but literally in the brain.”
As we still don’t know much about how it works, more studies will have to be carried out.
