The Neuroscience of Story, Pt 3: Neural Coupling
Long story shortest. When we listen to someone telling a story, our brains sync up, like a BlueTooth connection, through something called “neural coupling.”
(Check out parts one and two if you haven’t yet.)
My aunt Judy is a very engaged listener. When you talk with her, she locks eyes with you, nods frequently, and smiles a lot. You never wonder if she’s actually listening. And anytime I’ve told her a story, she does something really fascinating: her head and mouth often move the same way mine are. When I’m nodding, she’s nodding. When I look surprised, so does she. Her mouth even seems to try to form the words I’m saying. And it’s not just me; she does this with anyone engaging her attention. When I was young, I used to think it was just “Judy being Judy.” But now I know differently: Judy’s brain is lit up with a phenomenon known as “neural coupling.”
Uri Hasson is a neuroscientist at Princeton. A decade ago, he and his team of researchers set out to study what happens in our brains when we listen to a story. In one of his studies, he asked five people to listen to the same personal story. Despite their brains having different neural activity before the story began, soon after it started, their brain activity did something very interesting: it aligned.
Uri tried to see if there was more to this than just the structure of a story. So he tried playing the story backward, having them listen to complete nonsense, and even mixing up all the sentences of the story so it just sounded like random facts. The effect was very different. Their brains did not sync up.
What Uri found was that listening to a story activates a process called “neural coupling.” This means that the same parts of the brain used to tell the story are the same parts of the brain used to hear the story. The brain activity of teller and listener sync up, like they’ve locked in via BlueTooth connection.
“The brain activity of teller and listener sync up, like they’ve locked in via BlueTooth connection. ”
These are brain scans from Uri’s study. In the top, you seem random screen shots of brain activity from the teller of a story. And in the bottom, you see simultaneous screen shots of brain activity in the listener of that story. Read all about the study here: https://paw.princeton.edu/article/clicking-how-our-brains-are-sync
And that’s not all. As Carmine Gallo points out in his book The Storyteller’s Secret (p. 5):
Researchers now know that a thought can elicit a “somatic state,” meaning the thought triggers the same regions of the brain that would be activated if you were actually experiencing the event in real life.
These two facts—“neural coupling” and the “somatic state”—are why stories feel so connecting, at least neurologically speaking. We all know this feeling. Whenever I ask people why stories are important, one of the first responses I get is, “They connect us to each other.” This is true, and this research in large part explains why.
When we listen carefully to a story, get lost in it, feel engaged—like my aunt Judy—our brains begin to mirror the brains of the person we are listening to. We can feel as if the whole story actually happened—or is happening—to us! This helps explain why we jump in our seats while watching some horror film, or while we yell at the TV in fury because Ross and Rachel can’t seem to get their act together. It’s as if our brains forget that we aren’t part of the actual story.
We feel like we are.
