When you talk to someone, your heart rates, breathing, and brain activity start to sync up. This neural entrainment happens even over distance, as your brains align and you begin to share the same mental state.
It's interesting when we're in a conversation with another person, our body and our brains start to change. So even in this conversation, you're in Australia, I'm in the United States, we're separated by thousands of miles, but in this conversation without either of us noticing it, our heart rates will start to match each other. The rate at which we breathe will start to match each other. Even the dilation of our pupils of our eyes will become similar. And if we could see inside our brains, what we would see is that your thoughts and my thoughts are becoming more alike. They're actually achieving somewhat of a synchronicity, which you can actually see on these brain graphs. And that kind of makes sense when you think about it, because if I tell you about an emotion I'm feeling, you actually feel that emotion a little bit, right? Or if I tell you about an idea, you experience that idea. So it makes sense that our brains would become more similar. But it turns out that within neuroscience, this is known as neural entrainment, and it's the thing that makes us feel connected to each other.
