Interbrain synchrony and human connection

Nov 12

Episode #75: A conversation about neural synchrony, how we might model the “third brain” that arises in interaction, and why misalignment matters: with biologist Nicolás Hinrichs hosted by philosopher Andrea Hiott

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We seem to know when we’re in synch, especially when we’re together in person (it’s a little harder via Zoom). Maybe you’re in deep conversation with someone, and you feel the shared flow. You’re finishing each other’s sentences, moving through ideas together like dancers who’ve practiced the same routine. This is that feeling that there is a ‘third entity’ as Beck Todd puts it in another Love & Philosophy conversation (via a term that came from dancer Steve Paxton) where it’s not you and not them but something happening as both.

This might sound magical and it can feel a bit magical, too, which is why we don’t quite know how to talk about it or how to model it in ways that can be rigorous. Other guests on the show have been finding ways through perceptual crossing experiments (for example) or through developing new ways of doing experiments like PRISMA. This week’s guest, Nicolas Hinrichs, is trying to develop mathematical and experimental models that might be able to help us better express and visualize what is happening via the data we record in neural activity.

But even without all those EEGs, fMRIs, and fNIRS, as a living experiment, it’s pretty natural and easy to observe this in yourself, if you take seriously that we are co-creating reality together as we communicate. In everyday moments, we can notice how a conversation or interaction with someone (even through a book or television show or podcast) can create a different sort of thought cloud around us for a time, and how this shapes our ways of thinking through the day. This is powerful stuff, the ways we shift one another potentials.

All that seems to imply being in synch. But what if the most interesting (and perhaps most important) moments in human connection aren’t only about being perfectly in sync? What if all that wonder and magic is also about the places we ‘misalign’ so that it’s about the dance and the ways we react to those misalignments together that creates the wider dynamic?

That’s one of the provocative ideas of this week’s Love & Philosophy conversation with the Chilean-German neuroscientist and biologist Nicholas Hinrichs.

Nico specializes in something called hyperscanning, which is a technique that might sound like science fiction but is increasingly revealing profound truths about how we connect. The basic idea is that instead of studying one brain at a time (the traditional approach), researchers record the brain activity of two people simultaneously while they interact.

Imagine two people wearing electrode caps (like shower caps covered in sensors) or lying in adjacent brain scanners while, talking, playing games, or working together. Scientists can then watch in real-time as patterns of brain activity ripple through both brains (or the parts of the brain they are watching), sometimes aligning, sometimes diverging, always in motion.

By doing this, they are finding that during social interactions, certain brain regions synchronize between people. Our nervous systems (Andrea and past guests would say ‘our entire bodies’) really coordinate together. We change each other’s movement, pace, and patterns by being in conversation, and that doesn’t only mean being in conversation with words.

Still, most study and model synchronization, looking for and finding these moments of synchrony and treating them as a standard of good communication.

Hinrichs thinks this is too simple, and that we need other ways to visualize the dance that is happening between bodies and their brains. As he puts it:

“If you think of interaction, it’s not just that you move in the same beat and then that constitutes your relevant marker... I think of it more as a choreography. And so there you also have other layers on top of the beat... and maybe sometimes that loosens or tightens and definitely shifts.”

In other words, real human interaction isn’t like two metronomes clicking in perfect unison. It’s more like a dance and in any dance, there are moments of coming together and pulling apart, of leading and following.

Under the traditional view, when two people’s brains fall out of sync during conversation, that’s called ‘noise’ which is something to be filtered out of the data, a sign that communication has broken down. Scientists usually do not put this into the final results and it can be overwhelming to the experiment to have too much of it. But how might we create tools that use the noise?

Hinrichs argues that misunderstandings, tensions, and ruptures aren’t noise at all. They’re ‘signals’ too, to put it in experimental terms; they’re meaningful.

Some of the most transformative moments in relationships happen precisely when we’re not aligned. When you realize your friend has been processing your conversation completely differently than you have, that opens a portal for a new understanding between you.

These moments of misalignment, what Nico mentions in the conversation as “phase transitions”, might actually be where the deepest understanding happens. They’re not failures of connection; they’re part of the process of connecting. This is hard to hold, but also where the potential is.

One of the most beautiful ideas in the conversation is what Heinrichs calls “the third brain”, an idea which threads with previous L&P conversations to express this emergent process that exists between two or more people in interaction (or maybe even between you and yourself at times).

Hinrichs is developing what he calls “geometric hyperscanning” to try to capture and visualize this third entity. Instead of just taking snapshots that show “aligned” or “not aligned,” he’s looking for ways to map the actual choreography, the dynamic, shifting patterns of how two or more brains move through interaction together. He and Andrea discuss ways of modelling this as “constellatory cognition” (or what Andrea discusses as kaleidoscopic), suggesting that maybe we can think less about linear alignment and more about multiple dimensions of connection happening simultaneously.

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Papers and references:

Active Inference Institute and Symposium

Geometric Hyperscanning of Affect under Active Inference

On a Geometry of Interbrain Networks

Nico’s homepage

Watch on YouTube

The Art of Asynchrony

TRANSCRIPT

📍 holding paradoxes

you know, understanding each other, lives. As a thing of its own, between us, right? So I think via geometry, we're trying to formalize that, right? And seeing not just that there's a perfect sort of like coordinated pattern, but actually one that's mutating, uh, in real time spatially and temporarily in our brains, and more importantly in the sort of third brain that emerges between us.

📍 I think what geometric hyper scanning can offer us is to name, you know, the moments that matter in human connection, and by doing so, we can make them tractable for care.

📍

Hello everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. This is Andrea Hiott and this podcast is about trying to hold what feels irreconcilable, trying to explore, knowing from the heart. And these are mostly unscripted conversations with thinkers and seekers from all sorts of scientific and philosophic paths.

And I'm really glad that you are here and that you are. Hopefully gonna help us try to move beyond either or, or even figure out what that means. 'cause we're all doing this together as we try to imagine a new philosophy of cognitive science, of understanding that sees paradox as a portal and I'm not the only host. You'll hear others, if this is your first time, uh, it's usually me, but other hosts also come on

We think of this as a community project. So anyone out there listening who has a wonderful idea for someone they should talk to about the themes of this podcast, uh, or someone, some one of us should talk to about these ideas, then please do reach out, send us an email. We'd love to hear from you.

Today our guest is Nicholas Heinrichs. He is a Chilean German. Biologist and cognitive neuroscientist. He's investigating how minds coordinate in real time through something called hyper scanning, which is a wonderful word, hyper scanning, and I'm gonna explain that in just a little bit.

But he's at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, and you've probably heard me mention that before because I was a guest researcher there for a while, and I also did my master's thesis. as part of one of the labs there on these topics related to the hippocampus. So, Nicholas and I are gonna also be taking part in an active in infant symposium, which is coming up pretty soon.

So if you're interested in that and you'd like to hear more talks about hyper scanning, which is what we're gonna talk about here, or about the hippocampus, which is what I studied. Uh, relative to some of the other ideas like kaleidoscopic cognition, which you've heard me talk about and which I know sounds a bit crazy but isn't, then check out the Active Inference Symposium.

I'll put the links below. Should be just a couple days after this podcast comes out that you can watch it. Karl Friston will be giving the keynote and there's lots of great speakers. So this conversation is just to get you ready for that in a way. But it also stands alone by itself. And we are also doing a piece on Substack about Synchrony brain synchronization.

So have a look for that too. But today we're talking with Nico about hyper scanning. So hyper scanning is this neuroscientific technique that records brain activity from two people, two individuals simultaneously while they're having some sort of interaction. we're gonna delve into the mechanics of that here.

We're gonna talk about brain synchronization and, 📍 um, how that might reflect shared attention, empathy, our effectiveness, communicating and coordinating. And we're gonna touch on some broader issues about, you know, how we bond relationships, different kinds of disorders, how hyper scanning might advance our understanding of what social interactions are and how this relates to various insights relative to.

Philosophy and ideas of participatory sense making, which you have heard of a lot in this podcast. And, uh, Nico's also working with a lot of these four e cognitive science ideas. So you'll hear a lot of those themes resonating here too. Uh, we also highlight the potential of hyper scanning to maybe help us understand mental health better through something like holding paradox when it comes to how we're doing our science and what we're really thinking of as what mental is.

this is a conversation that's really neuroscience related as some of these are, but even for those of you who don't know anything about neuroscience, I think you'll still find a lot of interesting themes here. Which resonate with other episodes that we've had. if you are a neuroscientist and you already know everything about hyper scanning, you can go ahead and skip the next four or five minutes and get right into the conversation.

Although you might want to think about this term, geometric hyper scanning because it's something that Nico has come up with and it's an empirical neuroscientific method and there's no way I can completely describe it here because it has to do with foreman, risi, curvature, and all these sort of topological reconfigurations.

There are also other authors on that paper, like Mel Albaraccin, who you may remember from this podcast. She's also going to be joining, Nico and I on the Substack post. So anyway, I'll put the preprint of their paper in the show notes, if you're really into that kind of stuff and you wanna look at it because it has a lot to do with inner brain networks and entropy serving as a proxy for phase transitions. And it has some really interesting points about rupture and re attunement and co-regulation.

And if none of this is making any sense to you, don't worry.

It hardly makes any sense to me either, to be honest. even so, I think there's something really important and interesting here regarding the themes of this podcast. Even if we don't all understand it perfectly, what is being said and all of these ideas about active inference and geometric hyper scanning and whatever.

But basically, you know, we're looking at two, the dyad even still in this paper, but I try to push us towards thinking about constellation cognition or cog cognition as a constellation. And Nico actually says he's thought about that before too.

and even thought of that word before.

So that's cool. So what does that mean? So right now when we're dealing with hyper scanning, which I'll tell you about in just a second, we're usually looking at two different brains, a dyad We're also looking at the alignment of those, but of course, misalignment or ways of layered alignment.

if you think of it instead of just this linear either or, it's either aligned or not aligned. Actually the brain is, you know, multidimensional, multi multilayered. And the ways that we measure it are often choosing a little part of it to measure. But what if we could understand ways and places where the brain is aligned and other places where it's not?

And start to think of this in a more kaleidoscopic, there's that word or constellatory way so that we can understand how different alignments or misalignments might be telling us something when two people are in conversation.

So Nico's new method is, at least, at least as I understand it, is designed to capture these phase transitions and how two brains coordinate in social, emotional, effective, um, interactions. So that's amazing because it's going beyond this normal temporal synchronization and it's looking for structural changes in the actual network topology of the inner brain connectivity.

So even though we're still dealing with two, two brains, this is a way of maybe thinking about it not as two. Because as you'll hear him say, he's starting to think about the brain activity more as like a choreography or something. Instead of these snapshots of, okay, here are brains aligned and here are brains that are not aligned.

So it made me start to think about almost like a dancer, you know, like this third entity, if you've heard that podcast that I had with. Shea and Beck, uh, about the third entity, this kind of entity that comes when two people are in a conversation. It's like the third thing, which is both of them. And what if we could better visualize that with our methods, because that's what this is really.

It's these, this, what we're talking about with the geometrics are, are a method, a way of doing something with the data that we get. So what if it could be like a kind of dance that we're watching of these two brains aligning, but also where they're not aligning? You know? Do you see what I mean? So yeah, that's a little far out, but I think it's worth mentioning because we do touch on it a bit in the conversation and who knows, maybe somebody out there.

Is listening to this and they'll know exactly how to kind of create something like that that will help us all better visualize this third entity that is the conversation.

Maybe not the conversation we're having with words or language, but that the bodies are having, that we're all having all the time with one another, that we're sort of co-creating one another daily with these ongoing bodily alignments and misalignments. I, as I was reading the paper, I was of course seeing it through my own lens and I was thinking, okay, well this is like a way for us to start to look at these many di dimensions of alignment and misalignment, not being necessarily an either or thing, holding the paradox and all of these themes, which this whole podcast is built around That's the lens through which Nico and I discuss his work a bit because he is also interested in these ideas and his other work in different areas of social, uh, interaction is already, I think, trying to do this, to hold these seeming contradictions that, you know, misalignment and alignment in the brain seem like you have to choose one or the other.

But in actuality, when we're in a conversation, there's a lot of alignment and misalignment going on all at once. how do we explore whatever that is that's gonna let us understand those and hold those, uh, as one? And that's this kind of holding paradox idea comes into play there. But you know, of course that is itself 📍 a kind of care.

that's what we talk about here. You know, really caring. Like why, why, why do we need to do all this hyper scanning? I mean, the point is to try to help one another understand these difficult situations we are in when we have relations with each other and with ourselves, you know, and that can be everything from mental illness to social issues, or just to maybe something that happens with you and someone you care about.

You know, what's this alignment, misalignment going on? Okay, so I know that's already way too heavy for a lot of you. So for those of you who haven't heard of hyper scanning, let me just talk about that for a second.

Nico, and I'll go into it even more, but I just wanna talk about how it's done. So basically you have. The, these different ways of monitoring brain activity through like FMRI or EEG or functional, um, near infrared spectroscopy.

I can never say that word, right? F-N-I-R-S. There's all these ways, but just in general, you can think about, you've probably seen these ways that people wear these little, like hats with wires on them to, to monitor their brain activity. That's one way. Or, or in an f FMRI.

And that's what you'll hear Nico call these white tubes. You've probably seen them in the movies or FMRI machines, these big, long white tubes that you kind of go into. That's what we're talking about with the

In any case, you're monitoring the brain activity of two people at once and they're engaging in some sort of interaction, playing a game or doing something on the screen at the same time.

Collaborative tasks, sometimes these trials are pretty constrictive, uh, in terms of like how the body can move, but a lot of this new technology that, some of which I already mentioned is helping us do it in ways where we can move around a lot more. So it's getting better and better. But the point is you're analyzing the patterns that.

Of activity in the brain, whether it's blood flow or whatever. And you're seeing how those patterns relate between the two people, how they synchronize or how they couple between the participants. So it's a really fascinating technology and we do find, you know. That it does synchronize in social interactions that certain brain regions do become synchronized between two people when they're doing activities together, so they can sort of align or almost mirror each other, or they just sort of become, you know, part of the same pattern, which is really fascinating.

So this is helping us understand how, Our brains, our nervous systems, which are our bodies actually. They're not just these things in our heads, even though that's basically what what we're measuring the activity in. It's actually a whole bodily thing. But we are coordinated together and we change each other's movement and we change each other's pace when we are in conversation together.

So hyper scanning's pretty new, It was, I think it started in the early two thousands and more and more people are starting to do it. And again, it's just the technology's getting a lot better. So it's becoming easier to be able to do this. I guess it's important to mention that we are talking about neural synchrony, so it's, you know, patterns of neurons which are all through the body.

But these are mostly being measured in the brain, becoming aligned. that's a bit different than, you know, Jung's synchronicity, which I know a lot of you probably are thinking of that idea of Carl Jung's idea of meaningful coincidences. But these are philosophically pretty different terms here.

So researchers have speculated a bit about whether there might be some inner brain synchrony going on with what Carl Jung calls synchronicity or these meaningful coincidences. Like when you are thinking about someone and they suddenly write you, but. I'll just put that on the side. You can think about it and maybe later I could write about, about how there might be some resonances between these ideas.

But this is about, uh, the brain and about neural synchrony, about brainwaves and activity levels falling and rising together, and patterns of cells firing basically, or blood flow becoming temporarily, aligned. Firing in coordination, so to speak. And it tells us about attention about. You know how we have conversations, what happens in our bodies as we're kind of taking turns talking, tells us a lot about, perhaps about emotional resonance, empathy, joint action.

Maybe you remember Fred and I talking about joint action and joint language and you know, there's a lot of wonderful themes and layers. from other podcasts that could be explored through this method of hyper scanning. And in fact, some of the philosophers and scientists that we've had on are working with Nico to, think about how this might be done.

So I. It all fits together in different ways. And it's also interesting to think of in terms of active inference in Carl Hurston's framework where you know, you're trying to minimize surprise or prediction era and how this relates to with this synchronicity experience or synchronous experiences of the brain, generating predictions about what's gonna happen next and how when you're matching with someone, you might be more easily able to, of course, predict what they're gonna do next, but.

All that's just kinda speculation and just a little bit of titillation, I guess, to get you to go watch Nico's talk, uh, at the Active Inference Symposium. 📍 But for now, let's just go into the conversation and learn a little more about hyper scanning. I hope you're all doing well out there and, uh, having a good November that things are going your way, that you're seeing some beautiful fall leave somewhere.

Uh, I was just driving through the country. I saw some really beautiful leaves and beautiful colors and, uh, it's a wonderful time of year. So I hope you find a place to enjoy it and be away from your screen. And, um, yeah, I send you a lot of good thoughts wherever you are in the world. Okay, then time for some hyper scanning.

pronounced, I'm trying to speak. It has always been so hard.

Yeah, yeah. I know. It's, it goes both ways though. 'cause I was raised here in Germany and Spanish wasn't so, I wasn't like raised by culturally from the get go.

'cause I guess in the nineties. Some paradigm reigned for some reason with like, not confusing children. they didn't speak Spanish at home, so we had German and English. Right.

Oh wow. But

then when we moved to Chile, I had to learn it and then sort of the, I realized that like 11,

oh, that's a hard time.

It, it's a tough, tough moment. Yeah. Yeah. Critical phase. And so, yeah, then just, then I real, I mean in retrospect of course I realized like, oh, Spanish is, you know, a hurdle of its own. Because usually people say German is trickier, but Spanish is like, you know, it has so many times and, uh, very subtle pronunciations.

So yeah. Can imagine too, even

more coming from Germany to. It's, it's a whole different kind of dance, isn't it? Linguistically? Absolutely.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Hi, Nico. Welcome to Love and Philosophy.

It's great to see you today.

Hi, Andrea. Thanks for having me. Such a fan.

So we're gonna talk about something we haven't talked about ever on the show, and that is hyper scanning. I don't think many people will know what it is. So just from the start, maybe you could help us understand a little bit.

I You don't mind? What is that?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

My favorite topic. So, um, it just means that we record two, the, the brains of two people at the same time. Um, that's sort of like the umbrella term. Then you can get like. Um, more nuanced in saying, um, it's also people that are interacting, um, and we want to overcome in, in my sort of broader project, um, a couple of the limitations that I've seen in, in that, um, type of methodology that belongs to social neuroscience, uh, mainly, um, in that the metrics that it have been used and that have sort of like made up the, the field and sort of like make it stand for, for what it is nowadays.

Um, they're, they're a bit limited in, um, trying to point towards, um, synchrony. So the coordination between people, but in a very sort of. Um, let's say simplistic way, right? It's like if you think of, uh, interaction, um, it's not just that you move in the same beat and then that constitutes your relevant marker, right?

But it's, um, there's more factors. Um, I think of it that more as a choreography, right? And so there you also have other layers at, on top of the beat, right? Um, and maybe sometimes that loosens or tightens and definitely shifts, right? So we wanna acknowledge all of that, in this very novel, uh, type of, uh, methodology that is brain imaging just.

Simultaneously. So in people that are Yeah. Interacting. So for

people who've never don't know what brain imaging even looks like, I mean,

yeah.

Are you just taking pictures of people's brains or, I mean, sort of, yeah. So could you try to set it up a little bit?

Sure. What

do you, what do you do when you do an experiment?

For example, are you a neuroscientist Is that how you would define yourself? Or a psychologist, or both, or?

Um, I usually like to think of myself as a biologist.

Biologist, okay. Yeah.

Yeah. Neuro neuroscientist. Um, with a philosophical bent maybe.

Okay. So when youre doing these experiments, what does it look like just in general? Like, if no one's ever seen it before, just describe the room.

I, I think the, the, the most typical scenario would be a somewhat clinically looking room. So maybe, you know, all white, um, or all gray or something like that. So kind of like a very hygienic, um, uh.

And then, um, if you want to have two people interacting, then um, you'll have sort of an isolated room, um, for that, within that larger lab, um, where, um, they can, you know, be isolated from external noise. So in the case of EEG, it looks like a shower cap with electrodes, usually 64 placed, um, uh, through that cap. And then that one is really great in um.

Doing literally snapshots as you are pointing out. Um, but at a very high temporal resolution, right? So you can, um, kind of get a video, um, in a way. Um, and then the spatial resolution will be a bit limited. So you will get the outermost part of the brain with that one mainly, and not dig deeper into the volume of the entire brain, right?

And then if you move into other methodologies that inverts slowly where you get like really static, uh, pictures, um, but maybe, uh, not maybe, but you, um, trade that off with, uh, volume. So you can see structures in 3D. Um, so yeah, it depends on what paradigm you're testing. Um, whether you wanna go with one or the other, but it's usually in that clinically looking room.

And you'll have people wearing or being maybe inserted into, uh, a tube, which would be the other, um, extreme of the spectrum of methodologies, namely FMRI, where they barely can move, but, um, we gain this, um, insight that's volumetric into their brains. So yeah, you pick, you pick your poison,

And you're looking at the brain activity. We don't have to get into how all that happens with the blood flow and everything, but we're looking at the brain and its activity. But hyper scanning is different because it's not just one person, which is what we all assume and what, you know. That's pretty much all I ever did, and that's kind of the norm.

You know, you just one person. Yeah. So how old is two people? How are two people? We're looking at two brains at once with the same stimulus? Or how would you describe.

Yeah. Yeah, that's a great question. So I think it comes in all sort of, um, flavors. Um, for instance, right now, we want to, replicate a study made with F-F-M-R-I that came out last year by AVAs spear, um, from Princeton that in, explored, uh, interacting diets.

So pears, in a somewhat naturalistic conversation, right? So imagine the tube, so you're basically immobilized, but you're talking with one another. You can't really see each other, right? 'cause you're both stuck in tubes. Um, so that, that detracts from the ecological validity we call it, you know, the fancy term to say like how representative of daily life that is.

So we wanna replicate that with a method that's, um, called F Nurse, which is mobile. and it still offers sort of a midway between EEG and FMRI in terms of spatial temporal resolution. So I was just describing, to, uh, enhance that, uh, ecological validity that's somewhat limited in, in the published.

Uh, article on that project. So you kind of, yeah, as I was saying, you have sort of a trade off, right? And, uh, in that kind of paradigm, we're basically saying, you know, if you're talking with one another, at least you, you need to be able to see each other, right? And then, if, if you want be even more naturalistic, maybe you can go into proxemics or haptics, right?

People sort of like, touching or like, um, getting, getting closer or distant more distance from one another. Uh, and that will certainly exclude already FMRI 'cause you can't really do any of that, within the tube. but then maybe you want to even move past ners into EEG to be able to interact even more.

so yeah, it, it really will depend on, on the limitations of the technology. What kind of paradigm you can even think of, um, to undergo without, uh, risking, to have too much noise in your signal. uh, you can think of the oscillations like in a light detector, um, for the audience, you know, going like all over the place.

And then that basically means that your data, once you wanna do some calculations to make sense of it from a mathematical point of view, you can't, 'cause they're so spread out, so sparsed out everywhere that you can't have, like, you can't pinpoint statistically meaningful markers, in, uh, uh, from that data.

So you kind of have to leverage that.

And what are you trying to figure out here? I mean, what's, like, maybe we should talk about IBS or something because

Yeah,

yeah. I, we can just assume we're trying to understand how two people are in relation together somehow. Mm-hmm. And what the brain activity is doing at the same time.

And the main idea is we're, we're two people in relation and we're looking at how our brains, what synchronize, I guess, would you, would you go into that word a little bit?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So that's sort of the hallmark, um, metric of these simultaneous and interacting studies, which in a nutshell, it just means call occurrences.

Right. So maybe, um, that part of your brain, um, is activated while that part in my brain is also activated. Whatever that part is that we, we will skip that. The neuroanatomy for now. so. What has been cool for the past 15 years to realize is that IBS, as you named it, inter brain synchrony, has been shown to, so the co-occurrence of activations in, in, in areas during these experiments, um, has been shown to be, you know, me, meaningful for, uh, a bunch of, um, uh, cognitive and interactive phenomena, right?

Um, like for instance, enhancing just mere comprehension between two interacting parties, right? So that tells you already that there is some kind of interplay at the neurobiological level, um, that is, uh, accounting for, uh, or is, is in part a meaningful substrate to the phenomena, right? Um, but we haven't moved past that.

And I wanna overcome just that simple synchrony, um, f. Understood as co-occurrences, uh, towards a more sophisticated mapping of each function, um, in time and in space. That's basically the, the whole gist of it, right? It's not just the canonic reproducing canonic work that asks, you know, are these two individuals in sync?

Uh, but actually are there patterns that change as they talk and move, uh, perhaps repair, you know, uh, during a, a misunderstanding? you know, that's going back to the analogy of, of moving beyond the beat, you know, which is like perfect coordination. Um, let's get it deeper into the real choreography, right?

Um, so that's, that's basically what we want to do, um, by making use of geometry, uh, to detect, um, deeper patterns in the activations that we record with these, um, electrodes.

a few of the conversations here, uh, like with the neuroscientist, Beck Todd, for example, and others, we talked about this kind of third entity idea, which I think relates very well here, right?

To this synchrony, and that comes from dance, where the bodies are synchronized, so to speak. I mean, in a way we can think of it in a really obvious way, that when you dance, you have the music and you're sort of synchronized to the music. And so the bodies are synchronized I guess we could think of the brain as, you know, somehow sync, you know, in sync at the same time.

But it's wonderful. This is a great paradox holding for me because, we all understand that in a way, and it can be beautiful to think, oh, we're having a wonderful conversation and our brains are in sync, We can't get into how limited all of this, uh, imaging technology is, but we decide what we're gonna look at and we can look at what parts are gonna be in sync and there might be so much else that's changing all the time and not in sync.

yeah, yeah, exactly. I love how you phrase it 'cause it isn't indeed holding a paradox.

Um, I, I was just yesterday talking about the same topic and it feels like to me like the, the intuition that I have with this, um, 'cause, 'cause I don't consider myself a philosopher, but, but some of the ideas that I've had to incorporate, so based out of need to make sense of, uh, uh, to make it. Deeper sense of the topic at hand, right?

With everything that it involves from a philosophy of science, um, uh, perspective. Um, I had been thinking of, you know, the gentle cut that one makes and it's inevitable. So why don't we empower ourselves and, you know, own up to it and say, okay, this is the essential cut. You know, I'm not gonna discourse this away, um, in a sort of neatly packaged, um, paragraph, um, in my paper.

No, I'm actually gonna improve on the methods that, um, are the, for me, the constituent part or one of the, certainly one, but maybe the core of what scientific praxis is, right? So holding the paradox, sort of like motivating it all. And I want to. Not dissolve that in just words, in my, in my research. Right. I wanna, I want to that potential of the paradox mm-hmm.

To sort of like shine through the entire, um, research. And so, um, as you say, the, we have so many limitations with the tech, um, but we, we can certainly try to make sense deeper of, of what we have with those limitations. And, um, I think, I think it's fair to say that, you know, hyper scanning is learning how to walk.

If anything, um, you know, it's very, very young as a sub-discipline, let's say. Um, it's not even a coherent discipline as of yet. Right. Uh, that might even be, uh, a bit generous on my behalf because I like it, but, um, uh, but it's not, you know, there's not even an agreement on what's, what constitutes synchrony.

For some, it's like areas in the brain, as I was saying before. For some, it spikes in the oscillations, um, which is a completely different thing to consider. Um, certainly related in the same locus, sort of neurobiologically speaking, but, um, completely different measure, um, methodologically seen. And so I'm, I'm even like motivated to, to try to write, um, call everyone on the hyper scanning front, um, to write a consensus paper, which most certainly won't have a consensus, you know, but that's the point of it, um, to, to sort of make a snapshot, you know, of, uh, I guess it would be next year, 2026, what is Synchrony now, um, for us?

And then look what, and then maybe in the future, you know, we can look back and say, oh, wow, okay. All of these assumptions. Wrong, and some of them may be held true. Uh, I think that's a, that's an interesting exercise to do, but I like the idea that you play the limitations of tech to the maximum. Um, you know, and, uh, and, and see, see what's left, you know?

it's not that those things have to be either or either, right? Mm-hmm. I mean, there's also a way in which there might be many different kinds of synchrony depending on where, what the experiment is. there might be a definition of secret synchrony that's very general that could apply to all those, but each experiment's gonna probably have its own definition, and you probably have to take whatever the experiment is as part of the definition that that still feels like a little bit hard to hold, or does it?

Yeah, no, I think that's, that's, uh, true for me as well. Um, I think you need to, um, for so many other disciplines as well, you kind of like need to be contempt with certain narratives or certain stories that can be also just standalone and meaningful in being that, you know, um, that's certainly progress in on its own.

Right, right. But, um, I think in, in trying to, um, tackle something like interaction, um, especially so, 'cause in the future I would like to, um, apply this, um, to mental health intervention. I think there's so many intimate nuances and, um, responsibilities also, um, in treating those topics, um, that deserve. A more refined take and not just, you know, your one, uh, research article, right.

But like, actually a body of, um, frameworks that coalesce together to make it context sensitive, you know, ethically grounded and ultimately useful.

Yes. And also you did a paper with some people who've been Elena Ari, and I know you've, you're working with Hana de Jager and

I know you've brought up Prisma in your paper and

Yeah.

This, which is a kind of a different way of thinking about experiments too. you know, the, the way you described the experiment at the beginning, we could have a very different setup where, you know, you don't just have the scientists sort of watching pictures of brains, maybe there's some way to think about what's going on there, because that's what we really care about, isn't it? Like we're, you know, you brought up mental health. These have very real implications, which it, with all this kind of talk and all these big terms that we're using, we can forget that all of this is actually towards the fact that in everyday life interaction is so important and our health is so tied to it.

Yeah. So, yeah. How do you think about that notion of synchrony and that kind of bigger way?

Um, I think, I think the main, um, driver within that complexity for me is, is what I just mentioned in passing, namely the, the responsibility, right?

If you have. Someone who's willing to seek, uh, change that's good, or for foreseen, hopefully good for them, um, uh, in, in their life. And you're reaching out, uh, for someone to, to take on that sort of co navigation, right? Then there's a huge sense of responsibility there, right? It's not just whether your method is ethically grounded, but it's a personal, very intimate, um, uh, journey that you take on.

So I think it's like only fair to, um, bring together all of these complex considerations. 'cause uh, um, the, the journey by definition, by default is complex, right? So I think it's only, you know, living up to that complexity really, the, uh, the, the fact that that, that it's, you know, uh, com complex maybe to the point of being a little messy too, right?

Um, but that's. What drew me to Neuro Phenomenology and within that, um, talking to, to different, um, uh, researchers, um, I think a lot of these ideas have resonated very well with Elena and Hane, um, who were introduced to me, by the way, by ndo first. So she was the first, um, point of contact I would say for me with Prisma.

Um, she's doing very interesting

work too. Yeah,

yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Elena actually introduced me to her because they did a paper right? Re rather recently. Yeah.

And Za recently, yeah. Yes,

yes.

And, um, which I've always pronounced Hy Synthes, but someone corrected me recently. Yeah. So I didn't, I, to be honest, I, I didn't know about Prisma until Nada introduced me to it. Um mm-hmm. I, I had, um, you know, of course read, um, linguistic bodies. Um, but, uh, I didn't know the, the core of of, of Prisma as a meth, you know, methodology of its own. It's pretty new though. Anyway, so, yeah, that's true.

And, um, maybe fast forward with the, the three of us, the four of us, sorry, I was excluding myself, um, are trying to extend Prisma. So, which is basically a, a method. I, I'm probably gonna, um, butcher it if I try to explain it in detail. Um, but let's say that it's a phenomenological methodology, right? Um, for interacting, um, groups and where the participants are considered co-authors of your experiment, if you will, right?

Um, and there's feedback loops, um, where that assure that they, they have that role. And so we wanna extend Prisma. It's one way of saying it, um, into hyper scanning. Or we could also say we want to expand hyper scanning towards prisma. It can be go either way. but um, basically it's a, it's a way of grounding, um, the search for a method, um, that's neurologically framed via the neural substrate.

And, um, I think the broader implication or aim is also to build, um, on the science of participatory sense making right to, um, leverage all of these tools that have been coming up, but by these great, um, researchers and, um, sort of like pointed at neuroscience.

Yeah. And this, I mean, for people who don't know, this is not exactly an easy task Oh, no.

Uh, to bring these things together and we're trying to find ways to really look at what's happening, you know, that we're not just in the lab and then we're in real life, or there's not just. Philosophy where we think about what mind and consciousness are, and then the way we study it in the lab. So this interaction that you all are having, I find really beautiful in that way because, hyper scanning is a great place to try to work this stuff out.

It's gotta be messy. And I actually just took part in a Prisma with Hannah. Cool. Yeah. And Austria not too long ago. And I was really surprised by it, because I hadn't thought a whole lot about it. I'd heard of it through, you know, her work, just briefly, for those who haven't heard, you really are the, you are the experiment.

So I was, I was the experiment with three other people, and it's hard to describe, it's a very different setup from what I'm used to in neuroscience where. everything is like you described at the beginning.

So I love that that's even getting brought into the idea of hyper scanning and that maybe the technology has to kind of somehow come into that space. Mm-hmm. But also the philosophy has to kind of, opens up another way of thinking about what science, the, the rigor is still gonna be there.

Exactly. Have you had to hold those things in your work?

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I, and, and again, I really like this concept, um, that you, um, brought up the holding paradox. 'cause I think that's, for me the, um, maybe, maybe the, the second, second order sort of, um, uh, reason why or motivation, um, of why to do this or why to attempt to do it.

Right. Um, the primary motivator, of course, is care. Right. Um, but, um, a second order one is, is, um, that I think. If we do not, you know, steer ourselves in holding that paradox meaningfully, then we will tend to gravitate towards what I call unnamed centers, right? Of attractions, uh, or attract in a landscape of, you know, discourses, um, as researchers, as, um, you know, knowledge creators.

Um, uh, what, what has been called, uh, you know, social materially augmented research. I think Tom, Tom Awa is called it like that, right? Because we have all these tools to sort of like pinpoint at, at concepts and then sort of augment them. Um, and, um, I think the, the, the risk is that those centers, um, that we cannot name, Can fill your own discourse of considerations, you know, or the considerations of your own praxis if you leave that unchecked. Right? So I think that's, that's why I think the, you know, becoming cherishing, the, the holding the paradox right, is I think, important to me as a secondary sort of, uh, motivator. Um, and a, and a sanity check in and of itself.

Um, because if left unchecked, as I was saying, I, I fear that, you know, something else will, um, uh, trickle into, um, uh, your discourse or, or the discourse of your praxis, right? And I think in, in, as I was saying before, like in, in, in topics like these that deserve a ki, a specific kind of, um, very detailed and nuanced view, that's crucial.

Then, um, yeah.

It's wonderful you brought up care alongside that, because that's basically this show in a way is, I mean, I actually think what you described as, you know, holding the paradox or holding these contradictions, seeming contradictions or seeming opposite sides without trying to decide one is better than the other, and without trying to like, uh, ignore one, you know, in the way you were talking about is a kind of care.

I mean, you ha Yeah. You have to sort of, that is a space of care, which is why it's so hard. that also reminds me of other parts of your work where I think you're also through care, through affect and emotion even. Mm-hmm. If we wanna put it in.

Kind of more scientific language, but I, I feel like it's coming from that space of care. you're also trying to hold these, and, and just to go back to that idea of synchrony where it's not so simple. we aren't just holding this space where ev where we all line up perfectly and everything's aligned, and so we all fully understand each other and we're, that can be an image of it, but in your work, you're also always bringing in the tension and the rupture and the fact that the point isn't just to match

Yeah.

To each other. As you were saying before, we're sort of aligning and, how are we, you know, kind of moving through this together in a way. can you talk about that a little bit?

Is that important for you? What does that bring up?

Yeah, no, that's great. I, I think, um, the, the crux that I see in trying to, um, create this participatory hyper scanning, if you will, um, is precisely o overcoming, um, these like linear views, um, of, of like the perfect mirror image in interacting parties, right?

Um, and I think, but I think it's very intuitive to see the benefit of recognizing that, for instance, misunderstandings, you know, under a perfect mirror image there would be noise, right? Um, but. It turns out there are signals, there are meaningful signals instead, right? In, in, in everyday life, right? So how, why don't we operationalize them within our experimental paradigms as such instead of, you know, regressing them out of our, uh, math.

Um, so I think that's sort of been, been, uh, the, the crux in, in the sense that that's where I want to go at. We're not there yet. Um, but that's also, you know, what I see as, uh, the core of what will constitute, um, an improvement in, in how we do social neuroscience as a whole. Um, and then based on that, I would hope to, um, you know, start decomposing different.

Pillars, I would say, of in, of interaction, right? To, to see how, you know, the same, in the same way that we're, we're saying, you know, there's no, you know, perfect mirror, uh, instance of these, um, uh, phenomena, um, with an interaction. You know, there's, um, there's rather, you know, face transitions. You know, you flip states, um, during a conversation, you, um, and so you need to think less about an average harmony, right?

Um, or a mean harmony. And you need to think more of transformations. Um, I say, you know, this, this is the imperative voice. I apologize for that, but that's, it's just me saying, you know, I think that we should do this.

Part of this whole relationality we've talked about, there's two. And so there's the self navigation, which you might think of like where we're, we're, we are ourselves trying to navigate, uh, through whatever is is happening. But we've been talking about this relational thing. So you brought up some terms there.

It made me think of like a manifold or, um, right. That, that everything can kind of be seen different ways, you know, according to what we're trying to study or look for. so does that relate to what you were saying about it's not just about, you know, matching to each other, because I'm trying to get towards your geometric way of thinking about hyper scanning, right?

Yeah. Because for me, when I was reading about that, it, it opens up more like a manifold or like a constellation. Yeah. Instead of this linear kind of way that we've thought about it before. So, yeah. 'cause it might not be just a diad, it could be a triad or whatever. I mean, this generative systems. Uh, you know, common many forms.

So is, do I read that correctly? Are you trying to kind of consulate what is, is linear?

Absolutely. I think I might have used that word in the past actually. Now it's Oh, wonderful. I don't even, I didn't

even know if it was a word, but I, I use it all the time. Constellatory.

Yeah, I think, I think at some time, at some point I wrote something about cognitive constellations.

Oh wow. You have to send that, but it feels like a Find it. I'll, I'll, so, but it, it felt like a nostalgic echo, you know, I'll, I'll Oh, wonderful. I'll dig, dig that up. Please do. But yeah, absolutely. I think, um, you know, this goes back to active inference and an action, I think. Um, so you co predict and co-regulate.

I would say that those are the, you know, respective, um, uh, take home messages from those frameworks for this. So, um, you know, understanding each other, um, it lives. As a thing of its own, um, between us, right? So I think via geometry, we're trying to formalize that, right? And seeing not just that there's a perfect sort of like coordinated pattern, but actually one that's mutating, uh, in real time spatially and temporarily in our brains, and more importantly in the sort of third brain that emerges between us.

Um, and we can see is, is a certain moment in time that we can, you know, describe neuro phenomenological, neurobiologically. That's a big word. Neuro, yeah. At the discourse level with the proxemics, with the haptics, et cetera. Whatever, whatever you choose to have in your multimodal paradigm, right? And mix and match that with your neural signals, then it'll be certainly meaningful.

Whether your network is perhaps more local or globally spread between us. You know, are we in agreement? Are we in disagreement That time. You know, and then it suddenly changes. So I think to me, that's the only, you know, or, or the most natural way to move forward with the current tech we have for that. In, in thinking that, you know, we assume that this is true, that we co predict each other and at the same time we're co-regulating each other and interaction is its own thing.

Then, um, then we need to dig deeper and not just take these snapshots, um, that show us has have shown us important correlations. Um, but, um. Are limited in showing us these more mechanistic, um, implications of these modalities.

Yeah, that reminds me of, you write about time and temporal things a lot and you know, related to emotions because what you just said in this whole consolatory cognition, often when we're communicating together, you know, we might be in sync, in sync in some parts, but maybe I'm, yeah, maybe I'm reliving something based on the words that you said, and I know you talk about something like temporal aiming where, so my trajectory is I'm aimed towards my past and I'm kind of thinking about something in the past and maybe you're looking towards the future and so Exactly.

Maybe there's a part where we're synchronized, but we're really aiming temporarily in different ways, which can cause. Trouble. And that seems incredibly complicated to try to actually model in science and visualize. Yeah. But I feel like you're trying to move towards that with the geometric idea or with this consolatory idea.

Right. We first have to kind of imagine it before we can start to model it. Is that fair to say? Are you thinking about that? Yeah.

yeah. Yeah. I think, I think that's a fair description for sure. 'cause these spaces are oriented. Right? Um, and so, it was Mao who we've interviewed before, who came up with temporal aiming, uh, while we were, um, uh, writing our paper that got, um, accepted by the way, at the international workshop, um, of active inference.

Um, so congratulations. We're presenting that in a couple of weeks. Thanks. And, um. So I think it's, it's a work in progress for sure, but we've already established that, you know, for our model, it will make it, it can only make sense if we take into consideration these as you exemplified, um, retrospective and prospective, um, orientations that you will have in holding the spaces of, uh, you know, knowledge, uh, about, uh, the other and yourself in relation to the other during, um, communication or interaction.

So that, that'll be, that'll be a big one to, to, um, formalize further and put to the test empirically.

that's wonderful. I'm really excited about that and about just trying to think of, you know, even if we just try to think of this as like a landscape that we can always take many different paths and how do we visualize that and how do we, you know, even put math on that just to model it so we can all kind of look at it, you know, and, and see that maybe we're not always in the same place.

Um, I find that really inspiring. I don't know if there's anything about the geometric evaluation method, uh, relative to this kind of inner brain network stuff that you wanna say here. Um, I can just point people to the paper, but it is kind of a new way of thinking about all of this, right? About yeah.

How would you, I know you can't summarize it, it's very hard. Most people don't even understand active inference, including me, probably. so even though I've studied it forever, so, but yeah. Like for people who, you know, are just curious, like, what's different about this? What would you, is it, is it this opening of space

Yeah. I think it's, it's giving us, uh, a glimpse into, um, how it might be, you know, more biologically realistic, um, realistically depicted, um, uh, account of, of, of interaction, right. So. Um, it's, it might in and of itself be its, you know, own sub, sub-discipline. Perhaps in the future or as we are playing, um, uh, uh, a bit around with, with El Elena and Hannah and Nada, um, maybe framed within, you know, participatory sensemaking or maybe, you know, um, our collab, our collaborator, Guion Dumas just came, um, just brought out, you know, gen a generative account of neuro phenomenology.

So maybe we steer it also more towards the machine learning, um, side of things. It, the future of course, will, will, um, show what ends up being the space of, you know, probabilities that, that, that ends up coalescing best with, with a method like that. But I think it's fair to to, to describe it as you say, in sort of at already from the get go, from its inception.

It is intended to, uh, to be responsive and attentive towards the co-reg, co co-regulation, um, and core prediction of beings. Um, so I think, um, yeah, um, uh, even if I do say so myself, I think it's, it's a, it's a promising avenue in regards to making interaction. Be lived up to, um, in the lab, right? Instead of just, you know, um, being explained away by, um, you know, your consensus on neuroanatomy or sort of relinquished from the lab entirely via, um, just being limited to discursive practices, um, that don't get to mingle that, um, intimately with, uh, neurophysiological studies, right?

So it's a, mm-hmm. We're trying to, to merge them or inter integrate these approaches, um, and, uh, and advance a fuller account of, uh, of interaction and as, uh, as we were discussing before because of the importance that it holds in therapy or parenting, you know, uh, even broader in society. Right? Um, uh, so, uh, that's, that's, I think that's the, the general direction.

Yeah.

we were talking about, you know, holding the paradox or holding these seeming opposites. And if you can kind of visualize or imagine some sort of shared, generative manifold that might even be MA's kind of terminology for it or yours. I don't know who says it, who says what and what papers or where, but you can, you know, if we start having ways to visualize this, maybe we can start to understand that, you know, we might be sharing the same space and sync synchronizing and also experiencing that same space completely differently at the very same time.

Yeah. um, it feels really important. And it also feels important to other parts of your work when you talk about asymmetry or when you talk about, um, neuroprotective rituals, for example. Right. Because, you know, another weird thing here is that every brain is different.

So even when you're setting up the hyper scan, you really actually need to kind of be able to configure it completely different for every brain. So there's all these levels of this, um, yeah, holding of paradox, but do you see that connected to, to, for example, how you might help someone with who's struggling, you know, with mental illness or something?

Um,

absolutely. Yeah. That's, that's the entire, um, sort of intention behind that. Um, now that you pointed out, pointed to, to the, uh, neuroprotective rituals, that's actually a term I came up with very recently, um, in our, um, conversations with Mark James from the Okinawa Institute. Oh yeah. Wow. Great. Science and technology.

He's been on

the podcast.

yeah. Um, a lot of our work sort of, um, uh, seems motivated by, by similar sort of intentions of care. Although our works, uh, don't, don't intersect formally yet. so it's, it's been really interesting. I think we're all trying to reach towards

each other, you know?

Yeah, I agree.

I agree. Just finding, trying

to find each other.

Yeah. And neuro neuroprotection as a whole, uh, as a thing exists, of course, it's a sort of a medical technical term. Um, but the neuroprotective rituals is something that we came up with Mark, uh, during our conversations. And, um, it's sort of hinting at, um, possible solutions to, um, issues such as, for instance, chronic inflammation of the brain, which usually happens, um, as a response to, um, uh, some, uh, external agent or for instance, um, uh, stress, which can be as Augustin, um, showed last year.

I think in nature, um, can also. Be, be produced by, uh, social inequality, right? So if you point your research at, so at something like that, um, you can certainly try to help people and, and, and overcome, um, uh, the situation where, you know, the brain is just under constant, um, you know, disadvantage if to not say, you know, under constant sort of pathological even influence, right?

By circumstances that we all share, right? So I think that's where, where, where the notion of like having rituals, which perhaps can, uh, not just recreate. Um, but even complement and enhance, um, therapies that are metabolite based. So something that you ingest, right? Or something that is sort of done to you as a passive, um, client or, or patient, which is sort of passive is the definition of, of patient, right?

Um, so something that you can, you know, actively, um, seek. And, um, so that's I think how we wanna, uh, close the loop there in, in using interpersonal synchrony, right? Um, as, as a more global sort of account of synchrony within which inter brain synchrony is one, uh, of possible synchrony, um, to entrain, you know, autonomic effective cortical systems to be more adaptive against these stressors, right?

Mm-hmm. when you were talking, for example, I was thinking of how lonely people feel when they don't Yeah. Seem to be experiencing the world the way others are.

Right.

You know what I mean? you know, whatever kind of, if, if you wanna call that an illness or an a misalignment or whatever, um, even though they are sharing that space, so there's rituals tend to bring us into shared space, I guess.

True, right? Yeah.

I, yeah. But

if we could also understand that we're, we're, we're, we're coming into shared space and we're all gonna experience it differently. It's not an either or. Then it could be really helpful because you don't feel so lonely because Yeah. You're, you're sharing the ritual, which is what rituals help us do.

And then at the same time, it's okay that you're not experiencing exactly the same way as someone else. Like that becomes almost like a portal.

Yeah, yeah. You

know? Yeah. I find that really exciting. Right. To Oh,

that's great. Yeah. Yeah. That, think about what that could, I like that,

what that could do or help.

I yeah, I think, I think that's great. It, it sort of made me think of, uh, Michael Levin who've you've also, uh, had on, on the podcast

who's also trying to open this manifold.

Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And, and for me, it resonates with ideas of his, where, you know, I don't know where he said it.

Um, but he was speaking about intelligence, right. And how it is shared by definition in the sense of it being something, or, or was it consciousness? Regardless, he was speaking about how we as agents sort of tap into it, right? As almost as a, as something that's feels like phrase like that as if it's something else, right?

Or something beyond ourselves that we access to. But it's really just a way of saying that it's, you know, biologically realistic as, as a reality, as an aspect, right? Um, right. And so I feel that when, when, when we talk about rituals, um, maybe people tend to think of, or one could read this as sort of an exercise of sociology, but it's, and, and it can, but I think it's not just that.

I think it's saying that, um, you know, the space between agents is socially distributed as a biologically realistic. Thing, right? Mm-hmm. Um, so I think that's where we're tapping in with the, with the neuro side of things, right? Yeah. We're trying to, um, understand how the unfolding inside of a system, um, is, is indeed, um, uh, capturable in a meaningful way, right?

Um, by, by interacting, uh, agents. In our case, we're limited to diets duals right now, but we at some point we'll definitely have to scale this up, uh, to collectives. Um, but uh, yeah, so I think it's both, right? It's, it's sort of this social biological, um, view, uh, that, um, all, all of these matters are distributed, hence the possibility of modulating their, its their intrinsic dynamics.

Mm-hmm. By different methods, right? Yeah. Not just the metabolite route in the, um, institution, right. Um, but other ways are possible too.

And even just seeing the diet differently, you're already doing something there. You're not just assuming the dyad, you're doing what you brought up at the beginning of, you know, seeing that you're using the diet, but you could, it could be, you know, a constellation.

And um, and also when you were talking, I was thinking of that. Co cognition or consciousness or that, that understanding that we've kind of tapped into it, as you put it mm-hmm. Is also just kind of the tip of the iceberg of actually what cognition is. I mean, you know, when we become aware of it and when we're thinking about it, um, that cognitive light cone to, you know, talk about Mike Levin or something, that, that too is nested.

Right. And, and true. The same model could kind of help us understand that too, because it's a quite a hard thing to really take in, uh, without going crazy. I mean, that's that old Fitzgerald quote, right. How to hold two opposed ideas in mind at once with and still say Yeah. Saying, um, but I'm hearing a lot of, I'm hearing a lot in, in everything that you're saying, and I'm wondering about you and your path and how you got here.

Mm-hmm. Like,, how did your. Relationality, you know, how did you get here, Nika?

Yeah, yeah, sure. I can try. Um, I, it feels like I, I should, you know, start like autobiographically.

Um, but yeah. I think, but that, I, I think that might, might, um, perhaps ease, ease, um, um, the, the narrative, um, the, the autobiographic part in relation to that sort of curiosity, I guess. And the loving to learn, um, type of, you know, epistemic stance, I guess.

Um, that, that I do, um, you know, perform, uh, on a daily basis. Um, that was definitely, you know, scaffolded. Um, uh, on top of, uh, you know, what, what my parents or our parents, 'cause I have a, a, a bigger sister, older sister, um. Offered us, right? Um, they, they were really, um, doing cool stuff, right? My mom, a cello player, my dad a theoretical physicist.

very open disciplines, but very focused disciplines too. Right? So holding paradoxes

so much discipline and yet,

yeah, yeah. And much expansion. And then, and then, but I think throughout that, all of that discipline and like, you know, the learning to love, um, uh, sorry, the other way around, loving to learn, although that also kind of like, um, you, you find, you know, throughout all that discipline, you also find your desire, right?

Um, and, and, and what you wanna apply this to. And I think that's, um, that's also something that I, that I talked with Mark about a lot. It's like, there's certainly, you know. Episodes in life where you thought, okay, this is, you know, unacceptably, you know, under determined from the perspective of science.

Something like, for instance, mental health intervention where, um, even one of, one of my collaborators, um, dear Leonard TBA has, you know, admitted that, and, and it is, this is a, this is a, a, a a a a term, a technical term, you know, that a lot of work in that area in cognitive neuropsychiatry is based on what's called, uh, referred to as a clinician's intuition, right?

So I think it's just not enough, right? Uh, we need to double down and drill down, you know, on, on, on what is underlying all of this, um, because of what's at stake, right? And so I think all of that sort of curiosity that comes from a really. Nice place. You know, from my, um, life history and a bunch of influences, um, I felt sort of, you know, uh, that, that I had to direct it to something that actually matters because if not, then I feel that, you know, the exercise of critique or the exercise of, of, um, uh, traversing data spaces are both in and of themselves, you know, just stale, right?

Um, but I think combined and geared towards something that, that is of, of, uh, of benefit for, for someone else, um, that is sort of like, um, golden. Yeah.

It's interesting that I was thinking when you're about therapy, I mean, of course most therapists are, are doing their best, I guess, you know, but what we were talking about before, we're all coming from a certain path.

So it's that, it's that same. Uh, what you're trying to do with your work. I can see how it could help with that. Mm-hmm. Because if the therapist and the person who's, you know, in the therapy, if there was some way to understand that you're not just making your best intuition or, or that you are, but you know, you, you're pinpointing that you're saying that and maybe there's, um, some kind of resource for how to, I don't know, what, try out different ways or, I mean, I guess what I'm trying to get at is, you know, these things are also kind of powerful in their immediacy.

These kind of relationships, like with the therapist or, you know, when your mom, she pro probably practiced so much and it's so disciplined, but then there's this immediacy and the people just fill it and it's like, you know, we don't wanna, um, we also don't wanna over structure that. So have you had, do you see what I'm saying?

Do you ever feel that kind of tension where. You wanna let the magic happen too, right in.

That's true. Yeah.

How, how do you I find that a very hard thing to, to in this, what we were talking about with this, for example, participatory sense making meeting Yeah. Hyper scanning. Um, how do you not over determine it or under determinate to kind of think about hana's ways of talking about love.

Yeah. You know?

Yeah. Yeah. That's so interesting. I think, uh, I, I would even, um, you know, content that there we're in an era where that is actively being done, right?

Right.

Um, so you reduce mind to brain. You reify signals from the brain that's being read and used as a proxy to describe the mind. Right. And, um, around that, there's certainly, you know, forces building what, I guess, you know, Fuko would've called, uh, you know, biopolitics and Chan, uh.

Han calls micropolitics, and perhaps you could call it micropolitics nowadays, right? Mm. Um, where our attention and emotions, et cetera, are, are, you know, um, being commodified. Um, so I think what you're pointing out is, um, is, is is not just, you know, um, a question mark to, to, you know, contemplate, but to actually act upon, you know, um, uh, definitely and, and you know, I'm not talking about, you know, futuristic risks, um, but you know, something that are, that we can actually, um, uh, trace, right?

So I think, um, maybe, maybe that, that will have to be studied in, in, in, in groups that, um, have to do, you know, with, with regulatory frameworks and policies. Thinking here of, of, um, something that's instantiated in a, um. In, in a, in a, perhaps in a legal way. Right. But, um, I think that's, that's my way of saying, um, this, this whole sort of, uh, perspective on, on how these, these, um, em milus these different, um, spaces of knowledge about ourselves.

Um, it's not a question of whether they're connected or not, right? It's, they're already being, um, made use of in a connected way, right? Yeah. So, so I think we, we need to pay more attention to them. I dunno if, if that answers, um, the question. Yeah. But I, I went to that place.

No, it makes sense. And somehow I was also thinking that maybe you learned how to hold these differences growing up the way you did with having the hard science and the art.

Right. Maybe seeing that both had parts of each other in them or something. Does that make sense?

Yeah,

absolutely. Do

you think that's helped with you bringing this in?

Yeah. Yeah. Totally. 'cause there's like this sort of functionalist view, if you will, like how, how things can actually matter on a math point from a math point of view.

Mm-hmm. But there's also the participatory and I think there's some flexibility that you need to traverse those perspectives, right? It's, and I don't think either is, is the full picture. Right? Um, so I think that's, that's actually sort of where, where, where I sit most comfortably and trying to juggle both.

Yeah. You probably learned it in your existence, you know, as a kid that, because I've always found those worlds, people seem to think they're so different, but what they, they hold similar. Constellations or, you know, they have, they just do things, they do the things differently. But both have kind of the rigor, for example, and the Yeah.

Expansive, you know, soul

Yeah,

soul part too. Um, yeah,

absolutely. Yeah.

But taking those both seriously at the same time, as we've said is hard. But just to kind of come back to hyper scanning, just to end, I'm gonna ask you an impossible 📍 question. Okay. how does this relate to the way that we do care for each other?

Can we, can something come from hyper scanning that helps us, widen the circle of care? Do you, what do you really feel about that? You know, does it help us? Could it help us? How do you see it? Yeah.

Yeah. Great question. Thank you. Um, so if we're holding the paradox.

I think what geometric hyper scanning can offer us is to name, you know, the moments that matter in human connection, and by doing so, we can make them tractable for care.

Mm-hmm.

Do you have any kind of connections to love or anything, uh, about that word that you might wanna share at all?

Yeah. Um, I think it, I'm

feeling like I want to tell you, but perhaps not the listeners.

Mm-hmm. That's fine. So Okay. I can

go ahead and stop it then, so then you can feel safe. How about that?

Thank you. Yeah. That's okay. Yeah.

Hey everyone. Uh, we stopped recording there and didn't actually kind of say bye. So I just thought I would say bye. Thanks for listening and if you wanna support the project, this endeavor, it would be much appreciated. Just sign up for the substack or do the buy me a coffee, which is new, but no one's used it yet, or, Send an email and tell me what you'd like to see more of on the show. Whatever anything you can do to support this, help us would be really appreciated. Alright, hope you're doing well. Bye. I.

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Andrea Hiott

Interbrain synchrony and human connection

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