We share with them the same neural patterns
The study was conducted among 280 students
It is not trust, nor shared experiences. What binds us to our friends is that we perceive the world in a similar way, at least neurologically. This is affirmed by a recent Dartmouth University study that points out that friends have neural responses similar to real-world stimuli and it is these similarities that can be used to predict who your friends are.
The scientists, led by Carolyn Parkinson, discovered that it is possible to predict friendship ties by observing how their brains respond to video clips. Friends had the most similar patterns of neuronal activity, followed by friends of friends who, in turn, had a more similar neuronal activity than people three degrees away (friends of friends of friends of friends).
Published in Nature Communications, the study is the first of its kind to examine the connections between people's neural activity within a real-world social network.
"Neural responses to dynamic stimuli, such as videos, allow us to observe people's spontaneous thought processes as they develop. Our results suggest that friends process the world around them in exceptionally similar ways,"says Parkinson. .
The study looked at the friendships or social ties of a group of nearly 280 students. The researchers calculated the social distance between individuals based on reported social ties. Students were asked to watch a variety of videos while their neural activity was recorded on a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. The videos covered a variety of subjects and genres, from politics, science, comedy and music. Each participant watched the same videos in the same order, with the same instructions. The researchers then compared the neural responses to determine whether students who were friends had more similar brain activity than the most distant couples in their social network.
The findings revealed that the similarity of the neural response was stronger among friends, and this pattern appeared to manifest in the brain regions involved in the emotional response.
We are a social species and we live our lives connected to all others,"concludes Thalia Wheatley, co-author of the study. If we want to understand how the human brain works, then we have to understand how brains work in combination, how minds shape each other.
The next step for the authors is to explore whether we naturally connect with people who view the world in the same way as we do, whether we become more similar once we share experiences, or whether the two dynamics reinforce each other.