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A new study finds that close friends' brains react similarly to spontaneous stimuli. Researchers at the Dartmouth College said they can predict how close two people are based solely on their brain activity in response to a series of unfamiliar video clips. To test the theory that people may choose friends with similar thought processes, they performed an online survey of 279 students, and had them each provide a list of classmates they had socialized with outside of school. Researchers were able to map the class' complete social network using this data. 42 of them were then selected for the fMRI experiment.
It is impressive, but not all that surprising that people with similar likes and dislikes are friends. There are also much simpler ways to see who your true friends are. Some that I have found work is asking them to help you move; hand one of them a shovel; and who is sitting next to you in the cell. Link to the full study can be found here.
Forty-two of the students were asked to watch a range of videos while their neural activity was recorded in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. The videos spanned a range of topics and genres, including politics, science, comedy and music videos, for which a range of responses was expected. Each participant watched the same videos in the same order, with the same instructions. The researchers then compared the neural responses pairwise across the set of students to determine if pairs of students who were friends had more similar brain activity than pairs further removed from each other in their social network.
The findings revealed that neural response similarity was strongest among friends, and this pattern appeared to manifest across brain regions involved in emotional responding, directing one's attention and high-level reasoning.
It is impressive, but not all that surprising that people with similar likes and dislikes are friends. There are also much simpler ways to see who your true friends are. Some that I have found work is asking them to help you move; hand one of them a shovel; and who is sitting next to you in the cell. Link to the full study can be found here.
Forty-two of the students were asked to watch a range of videos while their neural activity was recorded in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. The videos spanned a range of topics and genres, including politics, science, comedy and music videos, for which a range of responses was expected. Each participant watched the same videos in the same order, with the same instructions. The researchers then compared the neural responses pairwise across the set of students to determine if pairs of students who were friends had more similar brain activity than pairs further removed from each other in their social network.
The findings revealed that neural response similarity was strongest among friends, and this pattern appeared to manifest across brain regions involved in emotional responding, directing one's attention and high-level reasoning.
