Brains Might Sync As People Interact

Brains Might Sync As People Interact - and That Could Upend Consciousness Research

by Conor Feehly

When we cooperate on certain tasks, our brainwaves might synchronize. This finding could upend the current understanding of consciousness.

The conscious mind’s boundaries could also be under constant renegotiation during exchanges with the environment and other people, Froese explained in a 2020 Neuroscience of Consciousness article. When we socialize, inter-brain synchronization neurally binds us together and extends consciousness.

“An upshot of this proposal is that it can potentially validate our most intimate experiences: When we become aware that ‘we’ are sharing a moment with someone else, it is no longer necessarily the case that we are fundamentally separated by our distinct heads — we could really be be two individuals sharing in one and the same unfolding experience,” he wrote.

Froese’s ideas build on a school of thought called complex systems theory, which would agree that consciousness emerges from multiple interacting brain networks.

He goes a step further by asserting that certain characteristics central to our experience of consciousness, like our deep sense of social connectedness, cannot be explained by reducing the system to one individual brain. Similarly, water can’t be reduced to its components of hydrogen and oxygen because the two complex systems’ interactions drive its complex behavior.

The mainstream neuroscience field hasn’t yet accepted these ideas, though.

Yeah, I've thought this for a long time. But...

When we socialize, inter-brain synchronization neurally binds us together and extends consciousness.

... which is cause and which is effect?

Ok, my experience is that this can happen at a distance too, so I don't think physical brains are interacting, because there are no physical transmission channels possible using conventional physical phenomena. But I do think consciousness can synchronise. Then, maybe the brain can follow.

“An upshot of this proposal is that it can potentially validate our most intimate experiences: When we become aware that ‘we’ are sharing a moment with someone else, it is no longer necessarily the case that we are fundamentally separated by our distinct heads — we could really be be two individuals sharing in one and the same unfolding experience,”



Mark 10:7-8

7 ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, 8 and the two shall become one flesh’; so then they are no longer two, but one flesh.

Yeah, I've thought this for a long time. But...
... which is cause and which is effect?

Ok, my experience is that this can happen at a distance too, so I don't think physical brains are interacting, because there are no physical transmission channels possible using conventional physical phenomena. But I do think consciousness can synchronise. Then, maybe the brain can follow.

Yeah I think this idea of physical brains syncing, along with the idea of consciousness going beyond the brain to include other physical systems, is definitely wrong.

But it's a step in the right direction to start looking beyond the brain, hopefully the pacing is correct for my prediction that Psi becomes accepted by mainstream Western academia in 20-30 years.