Kate Murphy

Thank you for having me.

It's a pleasure.

Interpersonal synchrony is what I consider magical, but now scientifically documented, tendency of human beings to sync or mirror one another.

And not only do we tend to mirror one another's gestures and facial expressions and postures, recent advances in technology have shown that we actually also sync up our heart rates.

our respiration, our neural patterns, meaning our brainwaves, our hormonal activity, and all these other neurophysiological processes within us.

So we're actually embodying the other person.

And the reason why we do that is for empathy and to understand the other person.

You actually become the other person in that moment.

It's kind of like your spidey sense that helps you immediately understand

get a sense of the other person, to tell whether they're friend or foe, not to mention sexually compatible.

Yeah, please do.

Well, another way to think about another analogy is to think of yourself as like a radio receiver where when you meet someone, it's like you're tuning into their frequency.

And some people you may pick up a little bit more static.

Other people, they may be broadcasting some music that you don't particularly care for.

But when you meet someone and instantly click with them, it's like they're playing music, a really groovy beat that makes you want to turn up the volume.

And we've all had those moments where we've met someone and felt like we instantly were this term, all these terms of phrase that we've said for eons, things like resonating, being in step, in tune, on the same wavelength.

They're actually true.

Now the technology shows that we actually are resonating with them on all these neurophysiological levels.

It's highly adaptive.

It is how we have adapted to be social beings.