Two papers, one for each respective animal, were published on June 20. The papers show that Egyptian fruit bats and mice, respectively, can “sync” brain waves” in social situations. Two years ago, there was a previous study that showed that the “rhythms of brainwaves between two people taking part in a conversation begin to match each other”. But why was this current study on the Egyptian fruit bats and mice important?
"Animal models are really important for being able to study brain phenomena at levels that we can't normally access in humans," says Michael Yartsev of the Department of Bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and senior author of one of the papers. "Because bats are extremely social and naturally live in highly complex social environments, they are a great model for tackling important scientific questions about social behavior and the neural mechanisms underlying it."
"If you think of the brain like a black box that receives input and gives some kind of output in response, studying social interactions is like trying to understand how the output of one box provides input to another, and how those two boxes work together and create a loop," says Weizhe Hong of the Departments of Biological Chemistry and Neurobiology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and senior author of the other paper. "Our research in mice allows us to peer inside these black boxes and get a better look at the internal machinery."
Previous studies showing how neural activity in humans becomes synchronized during social interactions have used technologies like fMRI and EEG, which look at brain activity with relatively coarse spatial and temporal resolutions. These studies found that when two people interact, structures in their brain simultaneously decode and respond to signals from the other person.
Because the new studies looked at neural activity at a level of detail that is difficult to obtain in humans, they could explore the detailed neural mechanism underlying this phenomenon.
Learn more about this brain synchronization study over at Science Daily.
(Image Credit: Dawson/ Wikimedia Commons)