82. Speakers’ Brains and Listeners’ Brains Sync Up During Communication

When you listen to someone talking, your brain starts working in sync with the speaker. Greg Stephens (2010) put participants in his research study in an fMRI machine and had them listen to recordings of people talking. He found that as people listen to someone talk, the brain patterns of both speaker and listener start to couple, or mirror each other. There’s a slight delay, which corresponds to the time it takes for the communication to occur. Several different brain areas were synced. He compared this with having people listen to someone talk in a language they did not understand. In that case, the brains do not sync up.

Syncing Plus Anticipation Equals Understanding

In Stephens’s study, the more the brains were synced up, the more the listener understood the ideas and message from the speaker. And by watching what parts of the brain were lighting up, Stephens could see that the parts of the brain that have to do with prediction and anticipation were active. The more active they were, the more successful the communication was.

Social Parts Light Up too

Stephens noted that the parts of the brain that have to do with social interaction were also synced, including areas known to be involved in processing social information crucial for successful communication, such as the capacity to discern the beliefs, desires, and goals of others.