Group Collaboration Can Change Brain Activity

A new study has found that when people work together on a task, key regions of their brains synchronize, indicating that people can match each other's neural activity when in groups. In the study, 39 pairs of volunteers were asked to design the interior of a virtual room together through a touchscreen while their brain activity was monitored through a functional near-infrared spectroscopy technique. Participants were also watched for signs of eye contact. Researchers found that when people worked together on the task, "neuron populations within one brain were activated simultaneously with similar neuron populations in the other brain", as if the two brains functioned together as a single system. This is called between-brain synchronisation (BBS)The researchers also found that BBS was strongest when one person raised their gaze to look at the other, suggesting an important role for social interactions. The study showed that humans are wired to be social creatures, but there is still a lot that is not understood about how our brains shift when we are in company. As scanning and computing technology improves, researchers are expected to shed light on these unknowns. The authors of the study believe that the investigation's method is an improvement over previous experiments in 'second-person neuroscience', which simply put two people to work on the same motor task, but they will need to find ways of measuring more complex social interactions besides eye contact in the future. ​

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