Download Dr. Uri Hasson

The School of Psychology invites you to a Special Seminar with
Dr. Uri Hasson
Psychology Department
Princeton University
on:
Face to Face, Brain to Brain:
Exploring the Mechanisms of Dyadic Social Interactions
Tuesday, February 22, 2011, 10:30 a.m., Faculty room,
IDC Herzliya Campus
Cognitive neuroscience experiments typically isolate human or animal subjects from their natural
environment by placing them in a sealed quiet room where interactions occur solely with a computer
screen. In everyday life, however, we spend most of our time interacting with other individuals. Using
fMRI, we recently recorded the brain activity of a speaker telling an unrehearsed real-life story and the
brain activity of a listener listening to a recording of the story. To make the study as ecological as
possible, we instructed the speaker to speak as if telling the story to a friend. Next, we measured the brain
activity of a listener hearing the recorded audio of the spoken story, thereby capturing the time-locked
neural dynamics from both sides of the communication. Finally, we asked the listeners to complete a
detailed questionnaire that assessed their level of comprehension. Our results indicate that during
successful communication the speaker’s and listener’s brains exhibit joint, temporally coupled, response
patterns. Such neural coupling substantially diminishes in the absence of communication, for instance,
when listening to an unintelligible foreign language. In addition, more extensive speaker–listener neural
couplings result in more successful communication. The speaker-listener neural coupling exposes a
shared neural substrate that exhibits temporally aligned response patterns across communicators. The
recording of the neural responses from both the speaker brain and the listener brain opens a new window
into the neural basis of interpersonal communication, and may be used to assess verbal and non-verbal
forms of interaction in both human and other model systems.