Brain-to-Brain Coupling.

From Uri Hasson's website. A garish image if ever I've seen one.

This has so many implications my mind reels, careening from thought to thought, idea to idea. I can't possibly write them all down.

For now I've settled on making a note in Z Journal, contemplating the power of Art, capital A.

In a 2011 study the Princeton neuroscientist Uri Hasson and his team scanned the brain of a woman while she told a story out loud that the scientists recorded and subsequently played back for other subjects while their brains were being scanned.

When the reader's emotional brain region called the insula lit up during a certain portion of the story, so too did the listeners' insulas; when the woman's frontal cortex became active during a different part of the story, the same region in listeners' brains was also activated. The fictional story [appeared to] synchronize the reader's and listeners' brains.

Michael Shermer, on Reason.com

"My research is part of a growing trend in neuroscience towards the study of brain responses to natural real life events," says Professor Hasson on his Princeton University web page.

I described this effect to Claudia. "No wonder I like it so much," she said, "when you read my novel to me at bedtime."

And when we sit together in the evening for Foyle's War.