A new study found that best friends tend to perceive reality the same way since their brains display the same response to external stimuli. In other words, besties’ brains lit up the same way, MRI scans have shown.
Scientists believe that you can tell who your bestie is by just looking at how their brains react to the same media content. Close friends have similar brain activity when exposed to the same content.
The findings, which appeared in Nature Communications, also found that people with a genuine social network (and we’re not talking here about social media friends) have similar brain activity to a stimuli with people they consider to be best friends with.
Our results suggest that friends process the world around them in exceptionally similar ways,
wrote senior author Carolyn Parkinson.
The Study
The latest research monitored social ties in 280 college students. Researchers were able to tell what pairs were besties based on self-reports. Twenty-one pairs were asked to watch together a series of video clips and have their brains scanned with a fMRI scanner in the process.
The content students watched included topics like comedy, politics, and science. Each volunteer agreed to watch the videos in a strict order. Scientists next analyzed the brain activity of the pairs to determine whether those who were best friends had a particular neural activity.
The study shows that brain activity was very much the same in friends especially in the regions associated with emotions, attention, and reasoning. Study results were adjusted for factors that may influence the outcomes like age, sex, race, being left-handed or right-handed, and the link was still there.
Researcher Thalia Wheatley, who was involved in the study, noted that the latest findings prove that we’re social species and our lives remain connected to our peers in such degree that our minds shape each another.
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