Meeting of the Minds

There's a scientific evidence that backs up the claim that we "click" with some people during a engaging conversation. Brain scans of a speaker and listener showed synchronizing during storytelling. So, there may be a neurological truth to the idea of being on the same wavelength. A special type of MRI device showed that speaking and listening used common rather than separate neural subsystems inside each brain. In fact, during a good conversation, people will unconsciously begin imitating each other, using similar sentence structures, speaking rates, and physical gestures and postures. Listeners can get so tuned in that they can even begin to anticipate what the speaker is about to say. Details are in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

Stephen Goforth