Rachel Carlson

Yeah, our amygdala.

That is like our brain's threat detector.

I found a study from 2021 looking at exactly that.

So I called up the lead researcher, Joy Hirsch, to talk about it.

She's a neuroscience professor at Yale School of Medicine.

And the beauty of this study is that Joy and her team monitored the brains of multiple people at once while they talked to each other, which is so, so cool because it's pretty new in the neuroscience world.

Usually you're just looking at one person's brain at

time.

Right.

You're just like slid under an MRI machine.

Exactly.

And in this case, people wore these things that looked like swim caps on their head and they have these little thingies all around the caps.

What is little thingies?

What's that for?

It's literally the term that Joy used when we were talking about it.

She told me they're technically called optodes.

So some of these are like little lasers that emit light into the brain and then some detect that light.

So researchers like Joy can then use these measurements to look at neural activity.

Yeah, it's a really interesting family dinner.

They surveyed a bunch of people on Yale's campus and the New Haven area on statements that people tend to have strong opinions about.