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Welcome to deep into the pages
What if i told you
It takes exactly thirty seconds for your automomic nervous system to decide if you were going to fundamentally connect with someone right just thirty seconds
Yeah
You could be
You know sitting across the table talking about your favorite movies or outlining your five
Your financial plan or discussing your core life value
All the stuff we think matters exactly
But underneath all of those words
Your heart rate
The dolation of your breathing and the micrrhythms of your breathing are uh
You're th really running this intense biological background check on the person sitting across from you
There's a phenomenal thing to consider i mean
Not we spend so much time creating what we say and how we present ourselves so for sure yet the actual decision of whether we click with another human being is being made by this ssciticated ancient neurological surveillance system that we don't even consciously control
And this springs of a concept i've been really fascinated by especially as someone who spends their life putting words out into the world
You know you and i speaking to the listener
Right now we haven't actually met in the physical sense
No we have it right we are broadcasting our voices or i am writing my thoughts
And you the listener are
Wherever you are right now reading or listening
Yet somehow across all this distance a specific thought can precisely trigger a connection it really can and in chinese culture there's this incredibly beautiful almost mysterical concept that captures this exact phenomenon
It's called yag thouin
You're on fin
Yeah for centuries
It's been this poedic eoterc explanation for destiny and searipiputy and human connection
It's described as an invisible magnetic field that draws two people together
That is unexplainable poll
Exactly we say that this kind of connection is wonderful and beyond words
A magnetic poll that can only be sensed ed
But is never fully mapped out which is exactly
Why the source material we are looking at today is so disruptive
We are diving indicate movies increase redibly compelling book
Why we click the emerging science of interpersonal synchrony
Such a good book
It really is
And what merphy does is take this highly romanticized philosophical idea of destiny
Um this you onfin and she grounds it in rigorous measurable biology
And that is the ultimate mission of our deep dive
Today we want to provide a scientific foot note
Because this beautiful concept of you unfend
Because we really need it right right we do
Because let's face it for you the listener living in this modern era
Where algorithms constantly dictate what we should watch
Who we should swipe right on
And what contcontent we should consume making a genuine click with someone feels incredibly are yeah
It's is precious
It really is precious
We have the technology to contact any of the eight billion people on earth
And an instant yet we collectively feel more isolated than ever um
So we want to look at what is actually happening in your body and your brain
When you finally meet someone
Who cuts through all that noise and makes you feel truly seen and modern neuroscience is vealing
That this chemistry is not just a metaphor
It's not just about matching vibes
Shshring similar hobby
We're laughing at the same jokes
Right is a bibiological reality known is interpersonal synrony
When two people resonate deeply magical things happen on a physiological level
Like what kind of things
Well
It's not merely that we unconsciously mimic each other speech patterns or facial expression
Though you know that happens is much more profound okay our heart rates are breathing patterns
And even the undealating ways of our brain activity literally adjust to the exact same frequency in that moment of connection
The biological barrier between self and other becomes incredibly fin okay let some pack this
Because the idea that our bodies are literally sinking up like biological metronomms is mind blowing it is wild
I need to understand the mechanics of how this actually plays out in the real world
How do we visually or physically see this biite happening to see it in action
Murph's book introroduces a brilliant contrast between two neighbors
Um first there's jones
She is this magnetic octagenarian okay the crossing guard
Yes
The crossing guard
So the back story is that after her husband died
She moved to a new neighborhood felt a bit of drift and decided
She needed a reason to get out of bed every day
So she became the local crossing guard
Which is adorable
But she doesn't just hold a stop sign
She completely transforms physical environment around her
She wears this bright orange vast hands out
Enthusiastic thumbups to every single driver and the community response is just stagerring
Yeah
The book said
People literally rolled down their windows to handter donts and fresh kale smoothes
It sounds like a scene from a movie
But the detail that stood out to me was the physical transformation of the people passing her
The author notes that tired sty faced commuters suddenly become alert and animated the whole demeanor shift yeah
Kids trudging along with heavy backpack
Suddenly walk with a lighter johne step
It's as if everyone who enters a radius
Becomes a miniature iteration of smiling jen now contrast that with her neighbor jen
Jen represents the exact opposite and the the phythure logical spectrum
Oh Boy Jam
Yeah
The book describes her as a tenured professor
Highly accomplished
Very attracted
Physically fit someone who meticularsly logs all her steps on her fitbit sounds gray on paper right
But she carries this intense downbeat energy
She constantly dwells on outrageous minor inscretions and ggrivanances
And the physical effect is just
The neighborhood is just as palpable as jones
But entirely negative
Completely negative neighbors physically close off around her
They don't just avoid eye contact their bodies react
They cross their arms
They shove their hands deep into the pockets
They shift their weight nnvouously from foot to food
Yeah
The physble avoidis real
There's even that anecdote about a neighbor who admitted to literally hiding behind some bushes
Just to avoid interacting with jane
Which is hilarious but sad
And it wasn't because jane was actively insulting her
The neighbor just said that talking to jane felt like too much work
And this contrast between jone in jane perfectly illustrates
The biological reality of the vibe
We use that words so casually we say
Oh
They have a good vibre
The vibe was off all the time
But what neuroscience reveals is that we are all essentially walking tuning forks
We are constantly emitting and receiving biological frequencies
This isn't you know or a reading your psuto science
Right
It's not magic
No
It is quantifiable biometric data
Your vibe is an a malgamation of your internal state
It's the rhythm of your heart rate
The pace of your blood
The pace of your respraation
Wow
Yeah
The my new dillaation of your
Your pupthe
The pace of ation tension in your the little muscles and the neural firing patterns cascading through your brain way
Any deposit there i understand how i can hear a tuning fork
If you strike it
I understand how i can see someone smiling but how on earth
And i detecting someone else's blood pressure or neural firing patterns
The great question like if i'm standing next agen
My body doesn't have a built in blood pressure cuff for her
How is my body reading those internal metrics
That is the brilliance of human evolution
We don't read the blood pressure
Directly we
We be mmicroexprespresons in physical manifest stations
That the blood pressure causes
Yeah
So when someone's blood pressure spikes because they're agitated the capitaliies in their face slightly engorge causing a micro flassh
Their breathing becomes slightly shower wer suddenly shishifthe the movement of their shoulders
And we pick up on that extly tly their pupes might construct their brains
Visual cortex in a migler are processing millions of these microscopic data points
Every single second completely outside of your conscious awareness
So my brain is essentially running a massive subconscious data scraping operation on everyone i meet exactly
And because humans are exquicently social creatures
Our bodies are designed not just to read that data
But to seek out and match the rhythms of the people around us think of a roomful of pendulum m cloks mounted on the same wall
If you start them all at different time swinging ing
Chaotically
Eventually the subtle transfer of cannetic energy through the woodwall will cause all the pendulums to sink up and swing and perfect unison
That is such a cool visual it
It really happens your human beings do the exact same thing through the transfer of sensory energy
When you meet someone
Your pendulums start seeking that unified swing
And why do we do that weevolved to do this
Because thinking up leads to empathy and mutual understanding
Which you know in the harsh environment of early human history was the ultimate survival skilme right working as a team
Exactly if our nervous systems are sint
We can coordinate to hununt
To build shelter and to recognize threats together
Without even speaking that makes incredible sense from an evolutionary standpoint
But this instinct isn't something we learn in our twenys
When we're trying to network at a corporate mixer
No
Not at all the source material points out
That this biological synchronization begins at the very dawn of our existence
It literally begins in the wound
It does our intermetrroomes
Our biological clocks
Our heart's natural pacemaker
They consoldy during the third tramimiter of pregnancy and actually line with the the motherbibiological patter
Wow
We learn the rhythm of life before we even take a breath
And once we are born
Our nervous systems are completely
Mature
We cannot regulate our own temperature
Our own heartaor our own stress
Hormones
Babies are totally helpless
Completely
We still rely on
Entirely on those maternal rythms to regulate ourselves so why hospital so heavily prescribed kangarou care or a skin diskin contact for prepreure ure newornes right placing the baby directly on the caregivers beare chest yes
And the medical results of this are a stounding
When you place a disregulated infant on a calm adults chest the infant biology literally hijacks the adults rhythm
I Jax said
I love that freezing
It's true
The baby's heart rate stabilizes to match the adults
Their breathing deepens their blood oxygen situation improves
And their immune system gets a measurable boost
That's incredible
The baby is using the addopt synchronzed physiological rhythm like an external hard drive to learn how to operate its own body
There was a detail in the book
Regarding this that absolutely blue
My mind
It's a historical and artistic observation about how we physically hold babies to facilitate this sink the text calls it the left side cradling by us
Oh Yes
This is fascinating
I want to explore this
Because it sounds almost like an old wives tatale
But the science backing it up is wild
The left side cradling bias is a remarkable phenomenon researchers noticed that regardless of whether a mother is right handed or left handed
There is a nearly universal instincual tendency to cradle an infant in the left arm against the left side of the body
Which is so specific
It is
And you can see this stretching back centuries and art
If you walk through any museum and look a classic medonnan child paintings
The virgin mary is almost always depicted holding baby jesus on her left side
Intutively that makes sense to me
Because the heart is slightly on the left side of the chest
You hold the baby theirs they can hear the heart beat
They'been listening to for nine months that's part of it sure
But the book reveals there is a neurroanatomic layer to this
That goes way beyond just the sound of a heartat at neneurananomomis is work is truly profound
我的好的
When you hold a baby on your left side
The baby's face naturally falls into the left side of your visual field
Okay
Because of how human optic nurves cross over in the brain visual information gathered from the left visual field is transmitted
Directly to the right hemisphere of brabraright
And the right hemisphere is deciside priliterally resible for emotional decoding and readal processing readreading facal al expressions let me make sure
Meting us by holding the baby on the left youthe literally hardwiring their tiny subtle emotional expressions directly into the emotional processing center of your own brain
That is the mechanism
It creates a high speed biological broadband connection for brain to brain synchrony
That is
While the caregiver can instantly intuitively read the infant subtle facial cues a micro front
A slight whwidening of the eyes
Infant ant learof from the bababy ararns from exacactly infant ant intern learns how to tune its own developing social brain by interacting with the caregivers synchononzed perfectly timed responses
This early interaction is the absolute foundation of onability to connect the text highlights a massive lonitudinal study on this exact dynamic conducted by roof feldman a psychologist and neuroscientist in israel
She spent years studying what she termed the human attachment network
Yeah
Way way she went ent about is fascinating fellman's research is a cornerstone in understanding interpersonal synchony
She didn't just look a baby in a lab for a day
She
She foled a cohorts of children from the moment of birth
All the way into their twenties
She paintakingly coted thousands of hours of video mapping the micro interactions between mothers and infants
Like what kind of interactions
How often their gazes met
How their vocalizations matched other heart rates sigked up during play
And what did she actually find when those babies grow up
She found that the degree of that early mother infant synchrony
That primal biological and behavioral rhythm was the single greaence predicor of the child literability to feel empathy regularly their own emotions and enggage in complex social interactions
Wow
The single greatest predicor
Yes
She used fmri scans on these individuals
When they reached young adultiod she identified specific some cortical regions in the brain
Like the imigla in the insula that make up this attachment network
And what to the stanshow the crucial finding was this if an infant lacked tight biological synchony with a cacarever ver during those formative months
Those specific regions of the brain literally showed stunted development and less act tivity decades later
So early synchrony is basically the mater key
It unlocks the physical brain architecture required to love
To connect
To feel
That you unfan with someone else later down the world
That's a beautiful way to ruit it
When
When kekey is misthat
The results are just devastating the sources bring up the infamous harry harallow experiments from the onless st fifties with racist monkeys to illustrate this dark alternative
The harleless studies are notoriously cruel
Yeah
They are hard to read about the bluntly tragically traate the absolute cost of a synchronst development harlo took newborn racist macacx and raise them in total isolation chambers just awful
They were physically healthy
They were given all of the necessary dutritrians
Their cages were cleaned
But they had absolutely no living creature to synchwih
No heart be to listen to no warmth
No facial expressions to mirror
They gave them these horrific dummy mothers
One was just a wireframe that dispensed milk and another was a firreframe covered in terry clock
Right the baby monkeys would clan to the cloth dummy literally pressing their years against the fake chest
Desperately tely searching for a arart beat
That wasn't there
They were starving for biological regulation
Because
Because they lack ked early physiological and emotional tuning
The consequences were irrereversible
What happened to them
When those isolated monkeys were eventually introduced to other normally socialized monkethey their behavior was wasfthere they were viently aggressive
Or they would sit the corner and rock back in forth biting themselves
Because they didn't know how to interact
Exactly they were entirely incapable of understanding the social overtures of their peers a simple play gesture from another monkey would send them into a canic
Because their brains had never learned the biological language of connection
They were profoundly out of snc with their own species so bringing this back to us to you
The listener navigating the world today
我对对
K is this basically like our bodies are constantly searching for an open blue tooth
Pairing with everyone we meet
I like that analogy
Because listening to this
It ounounds like we are engaging in incincdibly ly deep seated in voluntary method acting every time we talk to someone
We really are
We are so consciously mimicing their microexpressions
Tweaking our breathing
Altering our vocal pitch just to understand how they are feeling inside bluetooth pairing is a great modern analogy
But it's even more vistral than that you aren't just passively downloading their data to readad on a screen
You are temporarily running their emotional operating system on your own biological hardware
Wow
Think at the motor cortex
When you see someone smiled genuinely
Your brain instantly triggers a micro contraction in your own zygatic major muscle
The smiling muscle
Even if i don't realize
Even if he don't realize
The movement might be invisible to the naked eye
But that physical action sends an afphant signal back to your brain
Saying you're experienting joy that is so cool
You understand their happiness because for a micro second your body is physically manifesting it the same goes for anxiety ty
Yeah
If you're talking to someone
Whose heart is racing in his breath is shallow
Your veggest nerve detects those subtlequeues your own heart rate elevtes your breathing clips you literally channel their anxiety to comprehend it
Think about your own day
Today
When you walked into your first meeting
Or when you sat down at the dinner table
Did you bring the weather
Or did you just reflect the weather that was already in the room
It's a great question to ask yourself
It's while to think about are you a jone radiating a regulating com or are you a gene m maeveryeveryone's courters of spike right
How much of your current mood
How much of the actual physical tension in your neck right this second genuinely belongs to you
And how much is just residual frequency from the last person
You spoke to it forces us to reconsider the boundaries of the self
Your emotions do not begin and ended your skin
They rupple out and physically alter the biology of everyone around you
But this raises a fascinating dilemma especially in an arena
Where biological thinking is put to the ultimate test
The search for romantic connection
Oh Yes
Dating
If true connection requires this massive subconscious exchange a physiological data
How does that work in our hyper digital age
It's a real problem
Let's look at the history of manufactured connection
The sources dive into the invention of speed dating
Now most people attribute
This to a rabbi named the yook of deo in the late nineteen
Ninety
Nineties in los angeles
Who used a purram noise maker to shuffle jewissingles from table to table every ten minute
Yes
The modern gamification of dating
The idea that you can comppress the complex dance of human connection into a highly efficient ten minute interview
是的 对的
Wait
Though the book notes that the underlying concept goes back away
Further than the nineteen ninety in in in thousand nine hundred and century victorian era
They had a custom called new year's day calling eligible bachellers would literally sprinting around the city dropping off in graved calling cards at the homes of young ladies
They were even invited to take off their coat
Right
They had a strictly enforced five minutes to comment on the whether compliment the lady swallow in noiser or a piece of cake and rush to the next house one guy lodged visiting a hundred ds seven houses in a single day
That sounds exhausting
So we've been trying to speed run romance
Long before modern dating apps
It is a brilliant historical parallel
The victorians were just as obsessed with efficiency as we are clearly
But what modern science has revealed about these rabid fire encountors
Whether it's a victorian parallel or rabbi dios ten minute tables is that even five minutes is vastly over estimatating
How long the brain needs really yes
Studies show that it takes the human auonomic nervous system listen thirty seconds to decide if it icicks with someone thirty seconds
So the other nine a half minutes of the spedy are completely point is very much
You could be talking about your favorite book or your political views
And your brain is just ignoring the content and hyper focusing on the biological meta data
The content of the conversation is largely irrelevant to the initial biological locking
When researchers first started studying
Spedating they were baffled by the data
Why what did they see participants would fill out these extensive multipage questionairs beforehand stating their absolute hard deal breakkoh i've done that right
It would say my partner must make this much money
They must be of this specific religion
They must live within a twenty mile radius
And they must love dogs
And then what happened at the end of the night
They would consistently choose partners who violated every single one of those proammbers
Because their brains hijacked their conscious preferences precisely furthermore the researchers found the physical attractiveness well obviously helpful for graving initial attention did not guarantee mutual affection or a second date or a reasring
What overwhelmingly predicted a successful match was whether the couple fell into biological interpersonal synchrony within the first few moments of sitting down
So how do researchers actually measure that synchrony in a thirty second interaction
What are they looking for they track several channels with communications simultaneououly ly t's
T's like linguistics first because it's fascinating
It's not about finding out you both like the same indie band
It's about so one called style matching stle match
When two people are clicking their brains so consciously begin to use function words in the exact same way functiond memeanly like a the
It And yes
These are short frequently used words that carry almost zero inherent meaning outside the structure of a sentence
Okay
Because they are process so rapidly and so consciously by the brainlanguguage centers
We don't think about how often we use them
But when two people sit down
It's stmirerering other's rate and usage of these specific fillar words
It indicates a deep underlying neural alignment
Wow
Their brains y're literally serving the exact same linguistic wave predicting each others catence that isn't credible
And it goes beyond words to the physical body
Itself the sources mentioned the mirring of postroal sway
Yeah
If i lean against the bar
You lean against the bar
If i shift my weight
My left fit you shift yours
Yes
But the involuntary metrics are the most telling
Because they absolutely cannot be faked
Researchers use neurroimaging laser motion sensors and smart gasses and smarack couples that sounds ftense it is
And they found that couples who icick were mirring micro expressions
These tiny fleting twwitter chaes of the muscles around the eyes and mouth
That happened in a fraction of a second and what else they were matching the depth in ficty of their gays
They are skin conductance
Which is a measure of how much microscopic sweat is on the skin
Yeah
Indicating emotional roousel was sinking up
Even their brain waves and breething patterns fell into a shared rhdom
They became a single visiological unit
Here's what it gets really interesting
Because if true connection requires this massives of conscious exchange of raw physiological data
It completely explains why modern dating apps are leaving everyone so perfectly miserable and exhausted
It perfectly explains the fundamental failure of the digital magic model
Yes
Dating apps operate on the flawed premise
That human connection is a cognitive rational process
You check boxes
Yeah
High occupation political affiliation
Whether they want kids treoing it like a shopping list
Exactly the algorithm process is this data and spits its out a perfect match
But as the text quotes from a researcher at light university
True attraction is a much older evolutionary animalistic process
Right
It doesn't happen in the prefront cortex
Where logic lives
It happens in the automomic nervous system
You can
Can ate your
Your photos
You can use the best ring light
You can spend an hour writing the woodiest bio with the help of chat
I puity people definitely do that
Oh Yeah
But you cannot put an instagram filter on your automomic nervous system
When you finally meet that perfect on paper person face to face at a coffee shop
If your nervous systems don't sink up
If your breathing patterns clash in your micro expressions sink up
All you're going to be thinking about is how quickly you can fake in emergency text to get home
To watch netflix
That's exactly right
Because what you're actually searching for biolologicspespeace king ideological coregulation
Coregulation in a healthy relationship
The partners act as a homeopsttic tic balance for other's nervous systems one partner tapes
The gas
The attapes breaks
How does that work in practice
Well
If you get highly anxious the mere physical presence of a supportive partner holding your hand will measurably lower your heart rate
Decrease your quartersall levels
And even decrease your physical perception of pain
And achieve an
Achieve an optimal or ouzsel zone together and algorithm runching data points on a server
Simply cannot predict how your unique biological freak qucies will interact in real time
And this isn't just a problem for dating apps
It is the exact same underlying reason
Why zoom fatigue became such a massive society wide issue
The last last few years be absolutely we thought
We were connecting with our colleagues and families
But we were actually starving our brains video conferencing is the ultimate example of a synchronous communication mascurating as synerity
The tetechnology requires your voice in image to be digitally encoded
Compressed sent through servers and decoted the other end
This creates micro delays
Subtle blerring dropped frames
Which our brains hate exactly digital artiffets completely scramble the subtle le social ues our brains rely on to achieve synchrony
You can't see the microexpressions
Because the resolution isn't high enough
You can't read the postroal sway
Because you can only see them from the shoulders up
And you certainly can't feel the ambient shift in their body heat
Or so consciously procestheir faremonmonone of the experts on the text had this brilliant analogy
They compared a zoom call to eating a package bblueberry muffin that contain zero actual blueberries just artificial flaverings and blue died sugar beits
Yes
It tastes vaguly like the real thing
But it provides zero actual nutrition tion
You eat many of them
Them you are just just going to feel second hollow
It's a perfect metaphor during a video call your brain is expanding massive amounts of metaablic energy trying to fill in the missing data gaps
It is desperately searching for a biological reson
That simply isn't transmiting through the screen
So it's working over time for nothing
It's like a computer process are running at a hundred percent capacity
Trying to render a corrupted file
Um
That is why you log off
Feeling completely drained
That makes so much sense latten phrase for being alive is intertrammonim esa
Which translates to to be among men
To be dead is to ceased to be among man
We require physical fleshy three dimensional presence to receive the full band with of human connection
But this raises a critical question
If our bodies are this sensitive to the ve it in imimmediphphysvvinity
What happens
When we're trapped in a room with someone broadcasting pure toxicity
Um being in the flesh isn't always a positive experience
Just a sinking can create empathy in love
It can also create absolute chaos
It do we survive have a bad apple
This is a crucial pivot
The dark side of interpersonal synrony is just as powerful as the light
The source is share a terrifying the relaliable story about a man named ian masy to illustry this
He am a library dean
Yes
He landed what he thought was his absolute dream job running a massive academic library
Using a big guy played in a beedles cover band
In his spare time
Sounds like a fun guy
He was
But on his very first day
He encountered a tenured librbran
Who was essentially a walking black hole of negativity
The book describes her behavior
And it is chilling
She refused to shake his hand
When they met
She stared blanktly at the wall during meetings
And she immediately launched into how much the library sucked how terrible
The administration was
And how doomed ed every project was awful
And because she had tenure
Ian couldn't just fire her
But the terrifying part wasn't just her bad attitude
It was how biologically contagious
It was contagious as the perfect word
The text describes her two neighbing office mates
As her back up singers
It
It was just not ununisand every negative thing
She said new hires would start out opergetic and optimistic
And within weeks they would become solen withdrawn and bitter many just quit citing a toxic culture
Yeah
The synchrony was so powerful
That even in the optimistic musician
The themselves thinking to her toxic rhthm
He
He arted bring your negativity home
He he
He came blunt ant aggressive with his family and wahe
He had never been before he actually had to consult his docor er going
Going on
Added presence the biological environment of that offthis literally altered his core personality
This is a textbook
Example of what organizational psychologists call the bad apple
Effect
The idea that one rotten apple truly does spoil the whole barrel
And there is a phenomenal study detailing
Exactly how this works conducted by will phelps pilps was aphd candidate of the university of washington
When he decided to rigorously measure this phenomenon in small business teams
How did he do it
He set up an experiment
Where teams of four undergradual students were tasked with making comon flex management decisions
But he hired a trauma student amed nick fashitelly to be a confederate a mall in the study hi plant fashitelyy's job was ininftrate these teams and act out three distinct bad apple personneas
The jerk
The slacker or the depressive downer and fashion telly was clearly the perfect guy for this
The book notes
He had previously played doctor frank and furder in a production of the rocky horror picture show
He knew exactly how a command and manipulated rooms energy
When he played the slacker
He would sit down
Immediately lean way back in his chair
Put his feed up eat food
Food louer and act completely disinterested in the task
And what happened to the rest of the team
The physiological and behavioral synchony was immediate in devastating within minutes the other three students who had previously been highly engaged and motivated
Would involuntarily mimmic his posture
Just like that
Just like that
They start leaning back
They put their own feet up
They adopted his verbal one one prestting sing the task was meaningless
What about the depressive condition
When he play the depressive condition putting his head down on the desk
Signing heavily acting authorgic the rest of the team did the exact same thing
The energy was sucked out of the room
That is wild in crucially the into higher groups objective performance on the task plummeted by thirty to forty percent compared the teams
Without a bad apple
The group didn't correct his behavior
His behavior corrurupted the biological baseline of the group
It's a dark mirror of the pendulum clock metaphor
If the loudest heaist penendulum in the room is swinginging with apathy or anger
Everyone else's pendulum swings to match it just to maintain socially glibrary
Exactly a researcher named a isin craft actually found a way to mathematically quantify this he studied what he called effective presence
Effective presenis one of the most fascinating metrics in modern psychology
It asks a profound question
嗯
Do you have a consistent intrinsic vibe that reliably changes the emotional state of the people around you regardless of how you are actually feeling yourself right eyes and craft study two hundred thirty nine mba students who work together in groups over a long period
He wanted to know how much a person's mood was their own
And how much was caused by their teammates
The book says
He used something called complex variance partitioning to figure this out
Break that down for me
What does it actually mean in plain english for someone sitting in a stressful office meaning right now imagine taking a pie chart
That represents one hundred percent of your bad mood on any given tuesday variance partitioning is a statistical method of slicing
That pie to see
Exactly where the mood came from okay
Did a slice come your lack of sleep
Did a slice come from a fight with your spouse
Icy crapped use this math to isolate the specific effect of the people in the room
And the results
He discovered that a massive twenty three percent of your negative emotions
Almost a quarter of your bad mood is literally being forced upon you by the effective presence ence of someelelse's biological broadcast a quarter of my stresses and even mind that is deeply unsettling it really is isin craft gives exexample of two tech executives leading their respective teasis through massive corporate crisis
One executives effective presence was frantic or ratic and stressed and predictably that anxiety infected the whole team leading to panic and poor decisions
Right the other executive was internally terrified
His company was facing the same crisis
But his biological system metabliically process the stress sed differenhe radioated calm
He spoke slowly
He kept his breathing steady
And his team stayed calm and solved the problem
This introduces a parreleous psychological dynamic known his co disregulation
We talarto a co regulation earlier
Where partners sue each other codesh regulation is a destructive accelerating feedback loop
How does that look in an argument
Imagine an argument one person is slightly angry
Their voice raises the other person's autonomic nervsystem dedetects this threat spiking heart art rand causing them raraise vovoice deenenveveand it just just escalates this louder voice makes the first person feel you even more threatened
So the yell louder
The pendulum swing wider and wider until you spin completely at a control
嗯
And psychoanalysts have a term for the subconscious often mlicious mechanism behind this projective identification
Projective identification
I've read about this
And it sounds an awful lot like emotional gas lating on a biological level
It is exactly that it is the subconscious offloading of intolerable internal emotions onto someone else dime an example
Lesay i feel entirely incompetent terrified and worthless at my job instead of consciously processing that psychological pain
My behavior
My clip tone
My aggressive micro expressions and my erratic breathing project that's worthlessness ouward ok
Through the mechanisms of biological synchony y you mico worker absorb that frequency yeah nervous is a mmmicmmind
You actually begin to feel a deep sense of incompetence and anxiety
Yourself
Wow and then the project or you looks at you seize your exiiting
And they see you're the one
Who's a mess
You're the one with a problem
I have to push back here
Though if we are so deeply biologically wired to think like this
If twenty three percent of my mood is dictated by the loudest person in the room isn't it just utterly exhausting to constantly fight off ad vivives it is exhausting
Because blaming my bad mood on my coworker's effective presence feels like a bit of a copout
At what point is it just my own lack of emotional regulation rather than their biological vibe infecting me
And i just doomed to absorb the toxicity of every ean massive library
And i meet it is an exelellary
Seand you 're not dodoed
But which is exhausting
Which is ebiounoundary setting
Cannot just be emotional or verbal practice
It must be a physiological discipline
A physiological discipline yes
You have to actively intervene in your own biology
Ichard plumbo a psychotherapist mentioned in the text suggest a brilliant vivisualization technique to protect yourself from projective identification
He calls it the mute button
I love that when you're interacting with someone who is highly agitated toxic or trying to drag you into a codest regulation imagine pressing a giant physical nete button on them
Stop up causing on the content of their words
Which are designed to hook you and instead observe their biology like step back from the conversation
Exactly notice their rapid breathing
Notice the tension in their job
Notice how there are arsals
Trying to wind your houzl up by shifting from being a participant to being a clinical observer of their frequency
You prevent your own body from subsciously adopting it
You break the mirror
Precisely you practice what executive coach christian meicholes energy hygene
You intention scrubed the emotional ressie of that interaction off your nervous system before you move to the next meeting or go home to your family
How do you do that practically you intentionally break the sink
You take deep diatramatic breaath to manually slow your heart rate
You consciously relax your shoulders
You lower the pitchen speed of your own speech
And that works miraculously because synchrony is a two a street
When you scoverdenly ground your own biological rhyththm
The toicic person will often lose their momentum
Deprived of the feedback loop
Their pendulum will slowly begin to sink to your calm
As the author notes graces wrding the tide is entirely ok and necessary to intentionally desink
That is incredibly empowering
Okay we have covered how we sink in the physical world from the life of firming crossing guard to the high sticks biology of a speed date to navigating the tretuious waters of a toxic boardroom
But if wanto take a massive leap
Here i want to bring this back to the core theme
We introduced at the very beginning regarding you on fin
Because if everything we've discuss so far coregulalaccchching microexexpression thinking
Heart beats requires physical fashy presence to work right
How do we explain the magic of the writer and the reader
How do we explain the literal goobubumps
The physical chill down the spine
That we get from reading strangers
Words
Ds written thousands of miles away or perhaps even hundreds years ago
This is where the science of synchony leaves the realm of the ordinary and touches on the sublind
The book explores this in a later chapter
Looking at what happens to the brain
During storytelling
Storytelling is so powerful
It is when we read a deeply compelling story or listen to a profound piece of audio
We are not just cognitively percessing text on a page or sounwaves in the air
What's happening in stead
When funtional mri scans machines to track real time bloodflow in the brain
Show something aaoniishing
When you read about a character performing in action or experiencing a deep sorrow
The exax same neural motor networks and emotional centers light up in your own brain
As if you were physically performing the action or feeling the emotion
Yourself
Oh wow
This phenomenon is known as neural coupling
So when i read hamlet's ililically
Or when i read an essay from a bloger on the other side of the world
That deeply resonates with my current life struggles
My brain is essentially performing a high fifidelity biological simulation of the author's mind at the moment
They wte te it that exextly what is happening
You're synchronzing with the creators neural firing patterns across the barrier of time
The text quotes the legendary literary critic heral bloom
Who said we read to heal our solitudes
To heal our solitudes
That's beautiful
Even without fiscal proximity
A powerful narrative acts as the shared medium
It replaces the wooden floorboards
Connecting the pendul in clocks
The story itself becomes the veicicle
That alws ws your brain waves
Algn perfectly with the authors and the source material doesn't just stop at neuroscience
It goes into some incredibly off on guard
Almost science fiction level physics to explain how this might work on a cosmic scale
Chapter ten
Yeah
Chapter ten introduces the concept of sticky synchrony entiit to quananm ic tangleen
I need you to explain this carefully because jumping from weet brain biology to suabomic physics is a wild ride
How could the brain possibly operate on a quantum level
It is a highly controversial
But captivating theory champion by physicists like roger
Pen
Rose and anesstthesial just like store hammer off
Okay
Quantum tanglement is what eberdyininstein famously
It's typically called spooky action at a distance
It's improved phenomenon on in quantum mechanics
Where two subatomic particles that have interact to become inextrorabably linked
If you separate them by thousands of miles
And you change the spin of particle
A particle will instantly change it spin to match in zero time
Seemingly violating the speed of light
They act as a single entity regardless of the space between them okay
I track the physics of particles
But how does that apply to human beings the theory posits
That structures inside our brains
Neurons called microtubiles might be capable of sustaining quantum states way really yes
If human consciousness and biological rhythms operate even partially on a quantum level
It suggests ted
When your brain achieves profound resonant synrony with someone elseis when you truly deeply click that connection leaves a lasting entangled structural impprint
A structural impprint the syncty is sticky
It persists even when the person leaves the room or leaves your life
It provides a theoretical framework for why you might suddenly inexplicably think of an old friend you haven't spoken to in years and a second later your phone rings and it's them
Oh
That happenly enall time time
Your neural pendulums once deeply enangled led are still responding to each other's icroscopic shifts across the vast distances
This brings everything full circle beautifully
It perfectly captures the essence of the chinese concept of you own fhim
Think about what this means for you
The listener or anyone who creates or consumes art
It's so perfound as a writer
A speaker er even just as a person moving authentically through your daily life
Every time you polilish article share of vulnerable thought or simply express your true self
You are broadcasting a very specific deeply human biological and emotional frequency into a vast chaotics see of noise and someone is listening and the reader you perperlilising to my voice
Right now you are the one who mised all that noise precisely catches that freency exactly across different lives
Across completely different sorrows
Across different joys and circumstances
For that one fleeting moment
A book or an audio deep dive allows two complete strangers to share the exact same heartbeat and brain
With it completely transforms the solintary act tive reading or listenwith headphones in a crowded train or an act to profound into personal synherring
It proves that you are never truly alone
When you are engaged in neurrocouvering the author's frequency is living inside your neurology
So does this all mean
It means that you unfend that magical invisible thread of destiny is real
It is not just ancient poetry roromantic myth
It has a verifiable biological signature
It absolutely does in an age where we're constantly told what to icick on by cold calculating machines finding the human who makes you truly biologically click is a marvel of neuroscience
It is a testament to our shared humanity minds us that our bodies are not closed isolated systems
We are exqusitely tuned
Instruments designed by millions of years of evolution not for solitude before profound vibrating resonance with one another let's sumized incincredible ourourney of the the
The oundof lethe d vmvaried ed and
And stretime time will never replace the necessity of leshsion blood
We need to be in the room
We navigated the treacherious contagious waters of toxic offices and bad apples
Learning how to use our biological mute buttons to protect our own frequencies
And finally we explored the profound time travelling connection of neural coupling
Where a writer in a reader can share a soul across the span of history
The overraging lesson of murphy's work is that we are radically premiable
We literally internalizze one another
And with that premieability comes tretremenous ous beautiful reresponbility for the frequencies
We chochoose se to men to the world
And the frequencies es we choose to absorb
And that leads me to a direct message for you are listener as i was preparing for this discussion
Whether you the thousands of invisible connections being made right now so many connections in this new year
Whether you find yourself in a season of good times or bad
Whether you are settled in your life or drifting searching for meaning
好的好的
May you always find that magical moment of shared frequency
That's a wonderful wish
May you find that perfect yun fan in the words
You read the art
You consume
And the people you meet
May you find the people who make your pendulum swing in harmony
And as you take off your headphones and move back into your day
I want to leave you with one final lingering thought to moll over
If our brain waves can truly synchronize across time and space
Through a simple shared story
What kind of invisible lingering network are you building with every single piece of media
You choose to consume today
Thanks for listening and see you next episode
