In spiritual/mystical literature there are many references to enlightenment being the realization that all consciousness is connected.
In the light of this research I wonder if what they are talking about is synchronicity. Perhaps meditation enhances the brains ability to synchronize quickly, leading to that feeling?
Exactly. The claim is that brains are more like antennas than they are producers of thoughts.
An example of modern spirituality subscribing to that idea is Martinus:
Summary of a section of Book of Life:
> The brain and nervous system as an antenna system for "electric" waves. "Electric" waves as the basis for the individual's experience of life. The brain and nervous system as the individual's gateway into the spiritual world. Special centres or complexes in the brain and nervous system for the various spiritual functions. Disharmony in the brain and nervous system as identical with "insanity", "mental deficiency" and "paralysis"
If you took two computers and ran the same program and observed the same values in the same registers on both machines would you say that the machines are connected and experiencing synchronicity or just responding similarly to the same inputs?
Two people interacting don't entirely have "the same input" though, do they?
But we have neurons that try to mimic the feelings and thoughts of those around us, to give us empathy and help us communicate.
These might somehow simulate having the same inputs, leading to synchronicity?
In that case you could probably argue both, in that they are synchronized by the operator’s intention, the identical nature of the programs being run, as well as each computer’s ability to identically do so and output the same values.
Synchronicity could be just that. Two systems responding to inputs in similar/identical ways, because they evolved to do so or were made to do so. Both functions of the overarching nature of cause and effect.
It gets more interesting when you let those two computers talk to each other and each becomes an input for the other. Interference and synchronization abounds.
If two computers modify their initially different programs to match inputs and outputs - I would say it is synchronicity. The key difference with just two running copies of the same program is the ability to observe behavior of each other and modify it accordingly.
Seeing as all that writing is based on pure made up stuff and there is no "universal energy flowing through us all". I would be more apt to write it off as a coincidence rather than anything spiritual or woo woo. It makes sense that there's a chance that if you're both talking about the same thing, in agreement, enjoying a moment, etc that brains could start reacting similarly. Thus, become somewhat synchronized, since brains are still brains and essentially work the same way in almost everyone.
I wonder if this is related to the brain's pattern matching. Brain A anticipates the actions of SocialBeing B and rewards being right. Ditto the other direction. Anticipated and confirmed behavior leading to synchronization in brain waves.
Curious if we can see cross species effects, like a person and their dog.
Actually, that's plenty of time for meaningful evolution in humans too. Lots of changes in general distributions in response to environmental influences occur in that time.
We don’t have any specific genes to point to like with lactose tolerance but humans have definitely coevolved with dogs, especially pastoralists and hunters.
With dogs most of the obvious coevolution has just been cultural.
> What they are seeing goes well beyond previous research on so-called mirror neurons, which represent both the self and another. (When I watch you throw a ball, it activates a set of mirror neurons in my brain that would also be activated if I were doing the same thing myself.) In contrast, the self and other cells Hong and Kingsbury discovered encode only the behavior of one individual or the other. All three kinds of cells—mirror, self and other—were present and aligning in the mouse brains.
I didn’t see any detailed discussion about what they really mean by brain waves, or what information is contained within what they measure as brain waves. I assume they don’t believe brain waves encode cognition in a meaningful/complete way. It seems more like comparing the engine noises of two cars running at the same speed. Why not expect similarities/synchronization when human cognition is powered by the same brain/engine design.
I see this type of comment and attitude way more often than I think is healthy, at least on HN. I think it's intellectual anxiety and or toxic masculinity.
It’s nothing of the sort. It’s the kind of reply you’d get if you tried to answer a exam question with nonsense words that doesn’t advance the conversation, at least intellectually. Your claim of toxic masculinity is absurd. People want to talk rationally and it can be very frustrating to have nonsense smeared all over a thread.
An evolutionary pressure may indeed exist that encourages the synchronization of brain patterns in situations involving power dynamics between individuals with varying levels of authority. This could go beyond mere synchronization, potentially favoring the adaptability of individuals in subordinate roles whose brains can align with those in dominant positions. This capability could have enhanced survival within structured social systems throughout human history.
Moreover, if brain synchronization is a reality, it might suggest the possibility of memory linkage across spatial distances. This notion aligns with the principle that neurons which fire together wire together. Consequently, if individuals' brains are synchronizing, their neurons may be forming connections, or wiring together, across distinct locations.
You don’t have to assume dominance hierarchies are a platonic ideal for this idea to work materially - all you need is the assumption that a receiver is adjoint to a generator to have some kind of coupling-like phenomenon.
Like how antennae are shaped to capture certain geometries of electrical field flux, and how the transmitters of those signals are shaped to produce those geometries.
In this case it seems fairly benign to assume that thoughts, which probably flow in a high-redundancy, fault-tolerant way through the brain, can be decoded and incorporated to be processed in a high-redundancy, seemingly structure preserving way. If you hear a tree fall in a forest, that’s ‘cause your perception made it make a sound, subjectively speaking, etc..
Let's discuss one instance of human sensitivity with abstract chemistry.
When a person orders a pieces of meat in a restaurant and tells the waiter the temperature, rare or medium, they are not specifying a subjective state of the meat at serving time, they are specifying the max internal temperature of a piece of meat during the cooking process. For the rare piece of meat, the max internal temperature is between 125 and 130 F for beef or lamb. For the medium piece of meat, the max internal temperature is between 140 and 150 F for beef or lamb. There is a relationship between the color and texture of the meat and the max internal temperature. [0]
One way to tell if the meat is at a certain temperature is to cut it open and look at the color. In this case visual perception can determine and make an association to the max internal temperature of a piece of meat. This is discouraged like sticking a thermometer into the piece of meat as the contracted proteins in the hot meat will push out liquid. Ideally, after the piece of meat reaches the max internal temperature it should rest at a warm temperature so that proteins have a chance to relax. In order to prevent puncturing the meat to determine the max internal temperature, chefs will use a light thumb or finger press making the association between tactile pressure and the internal max temperature. Moreover, there have been several chefs who can simultaneously roast several pieces of meat in an oven and determine the max internal temperature by sound of the roasting juices sizzle on the roasting pan.
This isn't extra sensory or any such thing. It is deterministic. It is simply the human mind is capable with practice to associate color with a temperature, tactical touch with a temperature, and the cadence of roasting juices hitting a pan with a temperature.
All I'm saying is that the motivating force for a chef to learn these associations between color, pressure, and sound is to not piss off the patron with an incorrect cooked piece of meat. The power relationship is important to the learning process.
>synchronization of brain patterns in situations involving power dynamics between individuals
An extreme example of this might be the abusive Narcissist/Borderline couple dynamic. There's a handful of psychological literature from established researchers that speculate in these kinds of abusive couples, the victim and abuser entirely synchronize with each other using entraining. For example, the Narcissist uses repetitive, triggering speech patterns to brainwash the victim so the victim acts only the way the Narcissist thinks she'll act. On the other side, the Borderline might cause entraining by begging her partner to regulate her labile emotions. [1]
This entraining is also speculated to cause dissociation and amnesia, allowing the Narcissist to wipe clean and replace his victim's memory. [1]
Might have been an adaption in the distant past, but in my eyes most people in leadership are neurotics, and they don't like to regulate other peoples' emotions to any extent like the Cluster B's
> likely brains of people in subordinate positions syncing with brains of people in dominate positions might have advantage surviving an organized social structures through human history than not.
"Likely"? It's possible, but do you have any evidence for this? There could easily be other explanations and to determine something as likely needs more than a feeling of it making sense.
In earlier times, people thought it's "likely" that if you have a disease then it would help by getting rid of a lot of blood. That made sense, blood carries lots of things, and making fresh blood surely must help recovering. Turns out, nope, people die quicker from blood letting.
It could explain why individuals within a group that has decided to act chaotic/evil have difficulties to escape. It might not only be social pressure but synchronization. In that case it is not just a capability but dangerous, too.
This is in the thin line between telepathy and network science, and provides an interesting basis to research further. Would there be a possible link to quantum entanglement?
The article discussed several experiments conducted on bats.
Bats possess the remarkable ability to echolocate using high-frequency waves, similar to sonar. Just as humans do, bats ascertain the direction of a sound wave by comparing the time intervals at which the sound reaches each ear.
The crux of the matter is that, much like humans, bats can demonstrate exceptional sensitivity. One intriguing experiment I would consider involves determining the distance at which an isolated bat can remain from its colony while maintaining synchronized brain waves. Given that bats can echolocate, their auditory sensitivity is incredibly high. If their synchronization is based on vocalizations, and the synchronized activity of scores or even hundreds of bats amplifies the signal to which they're attuning, what is the maximum distance a bat can be from the synchronizing colony and still participate in this collective rhythm? Could it be 10 feet? Or perhaps 100 feet? Or even 1000 feet? This would be fascinating to explore.
I think we're taking the fact that the article says "similar" a lot and running too far with it. As they say, it only makes sense that similar areas of the brain would activate when processing similar stimuli. That's not telepathy or entanglement.
I wonder how this synchrony can be used for efficient coding. I love and hate pair programming for its efficacy and inefficiency respectively. Is there a way to make it more efficient, as it’s already infinitely more enjoyable?
Cute, but seems wrong. This seems to be an emotional appeal to Godel's incompleteness theory/similar that system's can't necessarily answer all questions about themselves, but of course a) the brain is not a formal logic system, and b) it has evolved to understand/predict our environment which seems way more complicated than our brain.
Maybe a bit early to be confident about it, but the more we see architecturally simple artificial neural nets able to perform tasks of human perception (speech, hearing, vision) and now language and primitive cognition, the less likely it seems that the brain is using a radically different or more complex approach to do these same things.
Evolution appears (as one might logically expect) to act in localized incremental ways. The result is that our body+brain is more of a modular design than a monolithic intractably complex one. We seem to be well on the way to understanding how these cortical functions of perception and cognition are working and what types of representations are being used, so once we refine our understanding of the other major moving parts such as thalamus (and thalamo-cortical loop) and hippocampus, it seems we'll be well on the way to understanding the overall architecture.
A) claiming the brain "is not a formal logic system" either makes the brain weaker, or says that the Church-Turing hypothesis isn't true. It takes a bit more than hand-waiving to make that claim.
B1) C. Elegans has evolved to understand its environment.
Sure, we don't understand (can't predict) everything about our environment, but the level of complexity we can understand - Saturn V rocket for example - is pretty astounding. If you look at the brain as a bunch of interacting subsystems, then the level of complexity really doesn't appear that great. I think historically people have overestimated the theoretical complexity of the brain for a variety of reasons.
Brains that are processing the same information show similar properties when measured? That doesn't sound surprising.
> Neural waves in certain brain regions of people listening to a musical performance match those of the performer—the greater the synchrony, the greater the enjoyment.
This specific case doesn't seem unexpected either. Unless the same experiment is conducted with an artificial performer (with sufficiently believable human-like properties), and no such sychoronization (with data from the time of recording) occurs.
The article didn't seem to cover any of that. Hopefully it is somewhere in the original research.
Also raises questions on how this is perceived. For example some study said introverts have a higher emotional response from inanimate objects, such as when chatting on the computer.
So could one person perhaps perceive a virtual discussion to be synchronized when it in fact is not?
I vaguely remember the concept of “languaging” from the works of Maturana & Varela, where two entities (minds) in this interaction would gradually converge to a similar structure.
> After the conversations, the groups watched the clips again, as well as new video from the same movies. After further discussion that reached consensus, patterns of brain processing aligned across participants as they watched the second round of videos.
What happens when one of the participants is a Language Model. Is it noticeable that there was a language model in the discussion? Do human brain waves changes in non-human ways or language models are just too similar to humans?
It would be good that having the technology we started to study what talking with artificial intelligences do to human brains and if they are altered in any noticeable way.
I wish they would be specific about what exactly the waves are that synchronise. When they show wave diagrams, the source of the value is never described.
In the article, they call our two squads of bats. When flying together and squeaking, their brain waves synchronize. When separated (even with shared audio of squeaking), synchronized brain waves were not seen. It seems to be a social thing.
In the light of this research I wonder if what they are talking about is synchronicity. Perhaps meditation enhances the brains ability to synchronize quickly, leading to that feeling?