Brain activity can predict where strangers will become friends

Strangers are more likely to become friends if their brains react in the same way to movie clips, suggesting that neural activities may predictions.

Across cultures, people tend to surround themselves with like -minded people. This phenomenon, known as homophilia, explains why previous studies have found neural similarities among friends. But scientists did not know that this is because it is becoming more similar over time or because people pull against them with similar thought process.

Carolyn Parkinson’s at the University of California, Los Angeles and her colleagues collect brain scans from 41 students before they before program. During the scans, participants saw a series of 14 movie clips spanning a number of styles such as documentary or comedy, and various topics included food, sports and science. The researchers then analyzed the neural activity of each participating in 214 brain areas.

Participants – along with the 246 other students in their program – completed a survey two months afterwards and again after another six months who asked who they enjoyed spending their free time with. People whom we friends at the eight-month brand had several similar answers in part of the left orbitofrontal cortex, a brain area involved in the treatment of subjective value than these wo was farthest apart in the social network-it means friends of friends of friends. This effect was detained significantly, even after the birthday of similarities in taste based on how much people evaluated their owl or interest in the movie clips.

Two months into the program, the neural similarities between friends and non-friends are not different, suggesting that people can initially form friendships based on closeness before finding closer friends over time. This was further supported when the researchers watched how friendship changed between the two studies. Participants who grew closer to this period had significantly greater similarities in the activity of 42 brain areas than those drifting apart. The connection is significant, even after explaining failure of failure such as age, gender and hometown. “Sociodemographic factors, at least in terms of what we were able to measure here, just seems to explain part of the picture,” says Parkinson’s.

Many of these regions are involved in brain networks that direct attention and help us to make sense of stories, which suggests of friendship, partly because of similartities in how people understand the world around them, says Parkinson’s. “People whose thinking processes are more similar find it easier to move forward,” says Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford. “When they say something, they just know what the other is thinking because that’s how they think themselves.

Dunbar, involved in the research, does not find these results surprise. Rather, they confirm what many have long suspected – “what attracts as, rather than people thrown together by accidents, approach their traits,” he says. “In other words, close friends are born, not created.”