The vast majority of neuroscientific studies contain three elements: a person, a cognitive task and a high-tech machine capable of seeing inside the brain. That simple recipe can produce powerful science. Such studies now routinely yield images that a neuroscientist used to only dream about. They allow researchers to delineate the complex neural machinery that makes sense of sights and sounds, processes language and derives meaning from experience.

But something has been largely missing from these studies: other people. We humans are innately social, yet even social neuroscience, a field explicitly created to explore the neurobiology of human interaction, has not been as social as you would think. Just one example: no one has yet captured the rich complexity of two people’s brain activity as they talk together. “We spend our lives having conversation with each other and forging these bonds,” neuroscientist Thalia Wheatley of Dartmouth College says. “[Yet] we have very little understanding of how it is people actually connect. We know almost nothing about how minds couple... [ read more ]