“Empathy, basically, is the ability to feel and understand other people’s emotions. This is especially important when trying to study something like empathy. To better understand what may be occurring in the brain when we interact with others, she argued, it is vital to take a “two-brain approach,” and look at both parties. But that is not sufficient to understand the neural underpinnings behind such complex interactions, said Simone Shamay-Tsoory, Ph.D., a social neuroscientist at the University of Haifa. Historically, scientists attempted to understand social behavior by looking at one person at a time. We’re only just beginning to uncover how these mechanisms may operate in real world activities, and the findings are really exciting.” Empathy and Interbrain Synchrony

It allows us to come together and do things that we wouldn’t be able to do on our own.

“This social behavior is a critical part of our adaptive toolkit. “Human beings are wired to connect – and we have the most complex and interesting social behavior out of all animals,” said Michael Platt, Ph.D., a biological anthropologist from the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine who moderated a press conference on the social brain at the conference. At Neuroscience 2019, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, researchers from around the globe came together to discuss the latest insights into the social brain – and suggest that strong social connections may be facilitated by synchronous brain activity between two or more people. The great philosopher Aristotle once wrote, “Man is by nature a social animal.” And while his statement, at the time, had more to do with the benefits of a civilized society than how the human brain may be wired, decades of research in the neuroscience realm has largely supported his thoughts on the matter.

We are not human beings experiencing