Brain-to-brain coupling: a mechanism for creating and sharing a social world

Cognition materializes in an interpersonal space. The emergence of complex behaviors requires the coordination of actions among individuals according to a shared set of rules. Despite the central role of other individuals in shaping our minds, experiments typically isolate human or animal subjects from their natural environment by placing them in a sealed quiet room where interactions occur solely with a computer screen. In everyday life, however, we spend most of our time interacting with other individuals. In the talk I will argue in favor of a shift from a single-brain to a multi-brain frame of reference. I will present a series of studies aimed at characterizing the brain-to-brain coupling during real life social interaction. The data suggest that in many cases the neural processes in one brain are coupled to the neural processes in another brain via the transmission of a signal through the environment. The brain-to-brain neural coupling exposes a shared neural substrate that exhibits temporally aligned response patterns across communicators. The recording of the neural responses from two brains opens a new window into the neural basis of interpersonal communication, and may be used to assess verbal and non-verbal forms of interaction in both human and other model systems.