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Shades of Mr. Spock -- our brain cells really do "mind meld" during intense communication, suggest psychologists.
In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal study, a team led by Princeton's Greg Stephens looks at functional magnetic resonance imaging brain scans of people involved in unrehearsed, real-life stories. "To make the study as ecologically valid as possible, we instructed the speaker to speak as if telling the story to a friend," says the study.
Following the brain scans of the conversations, the researchers asked the listeners to fill out a questionnaire detailing their comprehension of the story. Remarkably, the scans show similar areas of the brains of speakers and listeners firing, with a slight lag for the listener, during more effective conversations. Further, some listener's brain cells fired up in some brain regions ahead of the speakers, indicating they were predicting where the story was headed, says the study: