Mind-melds aren't just for Vulcans anymore

We humans can mind-meld too

"There's now scientific backing for the old adage that when two people "click" in conversation, they have a meeting of minds. The evidence comes from fMRI scans of 11 people's brains as they listened to a woman recounting a story.

The scans showed that the listeners' brain patterns tracked those of the storyteller almost exactly, though trailed 1 to 3 seconds behind. But in some listeners, brain patterns even preceded those of the storyteller.

"We found that the participants' brains became intimately coupled during the course of the 'conversation', with the responses in the listener's brain mirroring those in the speaker's," says Uri Hasson of Princeton University.

Hasson's team monitored the strength of this coupling by measuring the extent of the pattern overlap. Listeners with the best overlap were also judged to be the best at retelling the tale. "The more similar our brain patterns during a conversation, the better we understand each other," Hasson concludes.

There was no match between the brain patterns of the storyteller and the listeners, however, when they heard the same story in Russian, which they could not understand."

So there, Mr Spock. We humans can mind-meld too! Ha!

There are many other exciting experiments like this:

deanradin.blogspot.com...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if the subject's brain pattern PRECEDED the control pattern, wouldnt that be definitive proof of ESP, or subconcious portents of the future?

reply to post by dashen


No. And it's not mind melds either.

Hearing a story incites thoughts and emotions. It's not very difficult to know where a story will be going in the next few seconds, at least not if the storyteller's any good. The passive listeners lagged by 1-3 seconds, but the people who had heard the same or a similar story (or who could predict the next sentence or so) followed the story from the leading edge.

Nothing even interesting in this study, in my opinion. In case you're interested in my authority level, I'm an MRI researcher.

Originally posted by dashen
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if the subject's brain pattern PRECEDED the control pattern, wouldnt that be definitive proof of ESP, or subconcious portents of the future?

Hmm - perhaps it just a matter of people anticipating what is going to happen next - for example, many movies are so predictable that you know how it going to end half way through - but you have to keep watching because the other person with you wants to see the end ..

Have you ever seen footage from the speeches Hitler gave? The audience is caught up in it, responding in a brain washed frenzy. This article reminds me of that.

Originally posted by dashen
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if the subject's brain pattern PRECEDED the control pattern, wouldnt that be definitive proof of ESP, or subconcious portents of the future?

No, it's simply your brain anticipating the next part of the story. How many words over the course of normal speech come out in 1-3 seconds? 3 words per second?

Example-I was driving to the grocery store the other day and this old lady ran...


A red light and hit me.

Not ESP. No different than getting into a movie and knowing whats going to happen next.

Here is another article pertaining to this:

Successful Conversations Involve Mind Melds, Study Reveals

[...]

"Researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study their subjects' brain activity. They recorded the brain activity of one subject telling a real-life story, as if to a friend, while the subject lay in an fMRI machine. Next, 11 subjects listened to the story, also while having their brains activity recorded."

[...]

And yes I do think there is intermittent psi involved.

[edit on 27-7-2010 by Student X]

I'm more of a Star Wars guy, however this is really awesome. It's studies like this that really kind of get my old cogs turning even though the "old" cogs are only 21 years old. Hmm, I wonder if this is ultimately trying to point to a "big picture"?