Rachel Carlson

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.

Like, for example, marijuana should be legalized or same-sex marriage is a civil right.

And then they specifically paired people up so the partners were strangers, they didn't know each other before, and also so that they agreed with their partner on two topics and disagreed on two other topics.

During agreement, Joy says they saw activity related to the visual system and also in the social areas of the brain.

But Emily, it wasn't just activity in these places.

These areas were also more synchronous when people agreed on the topic.

What does that mean?

So Joy says that when two people agreed, their brain activity looked pretty similar, so certain areas lit up in similar ways while they talked.