BEACON TRANSCRIPT – Best friends are even closer than we might think. Apparently, their brains react in similar ways to the same experience, according to a study based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
This research targeted the brain areas that light up in reaction to video stimulants. In the group of 42 volunteers, the reaction patterns became increasingly alike as the relation between the participants got closer.
The brain areas tied to emotional response, the capacity to focus one’s attention, and high-level reasoning were the ones noted to react in a similar manner. This led the authors to the conclusion that friends understand and process their environment in similar biological ways.
“Friends had the most similar neural activity patterns, followed by friends-of-friends. You can predict who people are friends with just by looking at how their brains respond to the video clips”, declared Carolyn Parkinson.
She is the study’s lead author and also a director at the Computational Social Neuroscience Lab at the University of California in Los Angeles.
Study participants were asked to watch news clips, comedy skits, and documentaries, among others. These videos included, for example, documentaries about baby sloths from Costa Rica, and journalist debates over Barack Obama using humor in his speeches.
The brains of friends returned the most alike responses, while those of friends of friends had just similar reactions.
The Brains of Friends Revealed Even More Things
The study results seem to extend to social networks as well, as people are more attracted to individuals of a similar age, background, and physical appearance.
People tend to surround themselves with people who act and react similarly. Therefore, according to this latest research, relationships with people who have different opinions don’t last long.
This could help explain the existence of strong communities on social media platforms. However, by focusing only on such communities, we might miss out on fresh information. This might happen because people prefer facts that confirm what they already know or believe.
The study did not clearly establish whether we begin a friendship by surrounding ourselves with people with similar opinions or if they start thinking alike after a while.
However, the researchers did conclude that humans, as representatives of a social species, experience life in connection with everyone else.
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