(ORDO NEWS) — It’s no secret that people in love change a lot. Not so long ago, we said that during the period of falling in love, people even change their communication style.
Moreover, in recent years, scientists are increasingly finding evidence that changes occur not only at the level of behavior, but also in the work of the body.
In one study, it was found that people between whom mutual sympathy arises synchronously change the heart rate and electrical conductivity of the skin, as reported in the journal Nature Human Behavior.
But, as it turned out, that’s not all. A recent study by scientists from Stanford University and the China University of Electronics Science and Technology found that people in happy marriages have brains that work in sync in certain situations. But what does this mean and how is this even possible?
The researchers involved 35 married couples living in China who have been married for at least a year for their study. All participants completed a series of personality tests and demographic surveys.
In addition, they were asked to rate their degree of satisfaction with their marriage.
Thus, scientists wanted to find out whether happiness in marriage depends on the similarity of characters and strong individual qualities of people.
I must say that earlier studies have already been carried out on this subject, and the results have been ambiguous.
The current study showed the same pattern the association between behavioral scores and marital happiness was weak.
In addition, the authors did not notice a significant relationship between marriage success and age, gender, and other factors.
To find a more accurate way to predict family happiness, the researchers decided to find out how the brains of the participants in the experiment work.
To do this, they used MRI, and also measured the brain activity of the participants in the experiment while watching videos.
Some videos were devoted to marriage, couples, children and other family topics.
The other part of the commercials was not related to marriage. These were documentaries about food, architecture, flowers and other abstract topics.
The results of the work showed that in men and women who were satisfied with their marriage, neural synchronization when watching videos related to marriage was at a very high level.
That is, they recorded the same activity of individual parts of the brain at the same time. The authors of the work report this in the journal PNAS.
Videos on other topics did not cause synchronization in married couples, regardless of whether they are happy or not.
All of the married couples showed significantly higher levels of brain synchronization than random male and female couples who watched the same videos about marriage.
That is, for any pair, the brains work to some extent synchronously.
Synchronization was most clearly visible in those areas of the brain that are responsible for the so-called self-referential mental activity. What it is?
Such activities include thinking about oneself in oneself and in the context of others. Such areas of the brain are united by the common name “passive mode network”.
Self-referential mental activity is itself activated by the brain when a person is at rest and suppressed when a person is engaged in mental activity.
In addition, it is activated during social communication. For example, it can predict how the conversation will turn further.
But what does neural synchronization of the brain mean? According to the authors of the experiment, it assumes that two people process information in the same way.
However, the study does not make it clear whether the couples had the same thoughts and subconscious processes at that moment.
Unfortunately, science has not yet learned to read minds. In addition, the causal relationship is not clear.
That is, the synchronization of the work of the brain ensured good relations in marriage, or, conversely, as a result of good relations in marriage, the brains began to work synchronously.
If synchronization is paramount, then in the future science will be able to predict how a man and a woman are suitable for each other, and how happy they will be in marriage. But to find out, scientists have to conduct a number of additional studies.
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