“Hyperscans” Show How Brains Sync as People Interact

“Hyperscans” Show How Brains Sync as People Interact

by Lydia Denworth

Beyond the practical challenges of interactive neuroscience, a more philosophical question has circulated as to whether the neural information obtained from measuring people during social interaction is significantly different from scans taken when people are alone or acting simply as observers. Does it matter if the person you look at looks back? Is there a difference between speaking a sentence and speaking it to someone who is listening?

Yes, apparently there is. The evidence is growing, says psychiatrist and social neuroscientist Leonhard Schilbach of the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, that “social cognition is fundamentally different when you’re directly engaged with another person as opposed to observing another person.”

Demonstrating those differences does not necessarily require studies of more than one brain at a time, but it does require relatively naturalistic experiments that are challenging to design within the constraints imposed on standard laboratory protocols...