Cautions: Small sample
Portable EEG recorded a class of 12 students through a semester: the more their brain activity was in sync, the more engaged the class was, and synchrony also tracked the group’s social dynamics.
Brains in a circle
Does brain activity fall into step across a circle in the moments participants feel met, beyond what shared speech and attention explain?
Portable EEG can now record everyone in a room at once. In a circle, it could show whether moments of meeting have a signature in the brain, and how much of that is simply shared attention.
Builds on seven works
Why it matters
Circling claims to change what happens between people as they speak, and EEG is one of the few measures fast enough to follow it. Recording everyone in a circle at once would show whether the moments participants call meeting have a signature in the brain, and whether it belongs to a pair, to the group or to the attention they share. Enactive theory holds that meaning can be made by the interaction itself, not by either person alone (De Jaegher & Di Paolo (2007)).
What exists
Dikker et al. (2017) recorded portable EEG from a whole class through a semester: the more students’ brain activity was in sync, the more engaged the class was, probably through shared attention, the authors suggest. In Kinreich et al. (2017), couples’ brain activity fell into step during a free conversation and strangers’ did not, most of all during social gaze and shared positive feeling. Brain imaging has separated feeling understood from feeling misunderstood in single people (Morelli et al. (2014)). No one has recorded EEG in a circle.
Lutz et al. (2002) shows how participants’ own accounts can guide the reading of EEG: trials sorted by how ready people said they felt showed different patterns of synchrony. The interviews of Petitmengin (2006) could do the same for moments in a circle.
A possible design
Record mobile EEG and video from everyone in small circles. Afterwards, ask each participant to mark moments of meeting and of distance on the video, and interview a few of them about single moments with micro-phenomenological interviews. Compare synchrony around the marked moments with the rest of the session, and with an ordinary group conversation recorded the same way.
Pitfalls
Two people doing the same thing can show matching EEG rhythms without interacting at all: Burgess (2013) found apparent coupling between people recorded separately. In a circle everyone hears the same speaker, so build pairs who were never in the same room as a baseline. Speaking and moving also disturb EEG, and a brain signal is one more measure of a moment, not proof that minds have met.
Builds on
- 2017Brain-to-Brain Synchrony Tracks Real-World Dynamic Group Interactions in the Classroom
- 2017Brain-to-Brain Synchrony during Naturalistic Social Interactions
EEG from both partners during a free conversation: couples’ brain activity fell into sync and strangers’ did not, and couples’ synchrony peaked during social gaze and shared positive feeling, whatever they talked about.
- 2013On the interpretation of synchronization in EEG hyperscanning studies: a cautionary note
The usual measures of between-brain synchrony found coupling in simulated signals where there was none, and in pairs of people recorded separately, because doing the same task gave their EEG similar rhythms.
- 2002Guiding the study of brain dynamics by using first-person data: Synchrony patterns correlate with ongoing conscious states during a simple visual task
EEG trials were sorted by participants’ own accounts of how ready they felt before a visual illusion appeared; each kind of readiness came with its own pattern of brain synchrony, which also went with how they then performed.
- 2006Describing one’s subjective experience in the second person: An interview method for the science of consciousness
A methodological paper explains how guided interviews can bring out details of lived experience and discusses how to assess the resulting accounts.
- 2014The neural bases of feeling understood and not understood
Cautions: Small sample
A brain-imaging experiment found different activity patterns when people felt understood or misunderstood, alongside differences in how much they liked the supposed listener.
- 2007Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition
Introduces participatory sense-making: an enactive account of how people understand one another, in which their bodies and the dynamics of their interaction play a part, not only what happens in each person’s head.