When I lie next to my wife and relax, I find that I
invariably synchronise my breathing with hers. Most of the time without noticing it. And whenever I am tense because of
some work situation, she tells me that my breathing is noisy.
Synchronising of footsteps in soldiers, synchronization of
the twinkling of the fireflies, … nature abounds in cases of entrainment of
cycles.
Normally - I thought - it is the dominant individual who
manages to force the others to fall in step. They extend their individual cycles a bit so that over time it is synchronised with the rhythm of the dominant individual. At least, this is the perspective that
emerges from the studies on synchronization of menstrual cycles in women living
together, as in jails and nunneries.
But a recent paper in PNAS reports that the brain activity of
the leaders tend to synchronise with those of the followers.
This is indeed surprising.
Of course, the leaders obviously need to know the pulse of the
followers. There has been this brouhaha about emotional intelligence in
leaders. Leaders do need to know the minds of their followers before deciding
the courses of action.
But is such empathy attained by synchronizing brain
activity?
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