Talk
So, here's something interesting.
Every now and then I come across a scholar whose work strikes me as extremely valuable and relevant, yet has almost fallen unnoticed into obscurity. The most recent example is William S. Condon, who discovered the 'dark matter' of psychology about forty years ago, to practically no fanfare.
What he did was quite simple and tedious: using film with a high frame rate, he taped people having conversations and did exhaustive frame-by-frame analysis of every little movement people made as they spoke or listened -- every eye jerk, facial twitch, finger curl, head tilt, elbow bend, etc. What he found was remarkable: not only did people's movements occur in rhythm with the articulated sounds of their own speech, but that of the other person's as well -- establishing a high degree of temporal correlation between the movements of both conversation partners, locked in rhythm with a phase-lag of about 40ms or so.
Now, mind this: the correlations are mediated by micromovements so brief that you can really only pick them up on a film running in the range of 24-48 fps -- faster than your mu/alpha rhythms. This is gamma-band shit, and might well be mediated by a direct brainstem/cerebellar level circuit with minimal cortical involvement. If so, in addition to being invisible to normal attention due to the short timescales, it would be relatively informationally closed to cortical circuits -- possibly as autonomous as, say, sinus rhythm is from our volitional control. There is an invisible dance going on in our every interaction, the consequences of which are probably enormous. Think about things like the mood of a room, or about first impressions formed in the first few moments of meeting someone, or the strange caprices of attraction and repulsion. For a start.
Condon got curious about this and checked a few other things. For one, you can observe this effect in newborns fresh out of the womb, who while they can't talk back still make micromovements in rhythm to speech they hear. For another thing, autistics are bad at it: there's a marked delay in their bodily responses to sounds, often lagging by a quarter of a second or more. (It's actually a bit more complicated than this, but that's the short version.) For a third thing, there are recognizably different rhythms associated with different languages, dialects and cultures. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to hash out some of the implications for things like language acquisition, interpersonal dynamics, and (mis)understanding.
This cuts to the core of your sense of self: with coupling this intimate even in something as non-committal as a conversation, it becomes almost mandatory to think of 'your' nervous system as something that extends well past the anatomical boundaries of your body, and overlaps considerably with other people's as you become entrained to each other. We are not in the habit of thinking this way, but if that's the way reality points . . .
Every now and then I come across a scholar whose work strikes me as extremely valuable and relevant, yet has almost fallen unnoticed into obscurity. The most recent example is William S. Condon, who discovered the 'dark matter' of psychology about forty years ago, to practically no fanfare.
What he did was quite simple and tedious: using film with a high frame rate, he taped people having conversations and did exhaustive frame-by-frame analysis of every little movement people made as they spoke or listened -- every eye jerk, facial twitch, finger curl, head tilt, elbow bend, etc. What he found was remarkable: not only did people's movements occur in rhythm with the articulated sounds of their own speech, but that of the other person's as well -- establishing a high degree of temporal correlation between the movements of both conversation partners, locked in rhythm with a phase-lag of about 40ms or so.
Now, mind this: the correlations are mediated by micromovements so brief that you can really only pick them up on a film running in the range of 24-48 fps -- faster than your mu/alpha rhythms. This is gamma-band shit, and might well be mediated by a direct brainstem/cerebellar level circuit with minimal cortical involvement. If so, in addition to being invisible to normal attention due to the short timescales, it would be relatively informationally closed to cortical circuits -- possibly as autonomous as, say, sinus rhythm is from our volitional control. There is an invisible dance going on in our every interaction, the consequences of which are probably enormous. Think about things like the mood of a room, or about first impressions formed in the first few moments of meeting someone, or the strange caprices of attraction and repulsion. For a start.
Condon got curious about this and checked a few other things. For one, you can observe this effect in newborns fresh out of the womb, who while they can't talk back still make micromovements in rhythm to speech they hear. For another thing, autistics are bad at it: there's a marked delay in their bodily responses to sounds, often lagging by a quarter of a second or more. (It's actually a bit more complicated than this, but that's the short version.) For a third thing, there are recognizably different rhythms associated with different languages, dialects and cultures. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to hash out some of the implications for things like language acquisition, interpersonal dynamics, and (mis)understanding.
This cuts to the core of your sense of self: with coupling this intimate even in something as non-committal as a conversation, it becomes almost mandatory to think of 'your' nervous system as something that extends well past the anatomical boundaries of your body, and overlaps considerably with other people's as you become entrained to each other. We are not in the habit of thinking this way, but if that's the way reality points . . .