Mm-hmm

Right? And then, um, and, and then, uh, uh, uh, there was another thing I was thinking of that was so problematic.

Uh, my favorite scene that I actually enjoyed was the basketball game between the kids.

The, the best slapstick I saw, or just, like, comedic physical acting, was coming from the children playing the basketball.

[laughs]

... it's fine.

And I think, you know, we can't really fight that society has, like, very specific expectations of us, like, physically, um, and, and, and, and, uh, mentally, emotionally, and they, you know, we're put in a box and all of these things.

Um, I, so, so obviously I enjoyed the part of the film where the robot's like, "I'm gonna create the most perfect woman.

Hmm.

When they measured them later, they were still synced up in their heart rate and their neural patterns.

So that just shows you that when people get together in social situations, and I use social situations meaning when people are just together in a room, what they're doing.

But that's another piece of it is we started out talking about how you can build better interoception.

But also when you do communal activities, you tend to sync up with the people who you're with, whether it's meditation or dancing or biking or whatever.

But to rewind back to how to develop interoception, I-- people who are athletes now, that's something that you can really build your interoception if you're not hooked up to a fitness tracker or if you're not listening to earbuds or listening to a book or something while you're running and you're really paying attention, or walking or whatever you're doing for fitness, to really pay attention to your breath, to really pay attention to what your body's feeling like.

We become so divorced from our bodies by things like fitness trackers and Oura Rings and all of these things where you're almost relying on technology to tell you how you're doing versus how you yourself feel and doing this internal survey or surveillance of yourself of how you're feeling.

So I wanna talk about how we can avoid what I think you call emotional fusion, but like maybe just start by talking about the downsides of interpersonal synchrony.

Are you saying that the science at the heart of this, that we might observe the trend, but if we're trying to understand what's going on, are you saying that this is mirror neurons? What's, what's the mechanism at work that's, that's making face-to-face so powerful?

Well, let me just say at the outset is, you know, scientists have not figured this out, so I certainly haven't either.

But mirror neurons, they're, as you say, I think it was back in the '90s, so it made a big splash and people thought, "Okay, this was really gonna explain social interactions." And as the science has developed, they have seen that mirror neurons aren't necessarily a special class of neurons, but maybe a latent ability of all neurons or an artifact of-synchronistic activity between two people and their neurons.

So that's not entirely clear, but what is clear is that we mirror one another.

It is a human tendency, and in fact, I would go so far as to say it's a human superpower.

It's kind of like if you think about it as your spidey sense that allows you to pretty quickly, in less than thirty seconds, be able to distinguish friend from foe and also whether someone is sexually compatible.

It's sort of that gut instinct that you have for another person.

What is, what is the truth behind a, a bad apple at work or a bad apple in any environment?

Not a long time, necessarily, but, but it wasn't instant.

Well, that's the thing about clicking.

Um, and, and, and what they call it, what scientists call it, is interpersonal synchrony.

So just to throw that term out there.

And generally, we get a read on people within thirty seconds, less than thirty seconds.

But we also move into and out of synchrony with people all the time, and so things can change within us, within the other person, the context, just the dynamics, what happened to you right before that instance, that can make us do later click, come to lock into one another.

And a lot of it can have to do with just where we are physiologically, but it also can do-- have to do with the context and shared experiences.

Is there any-- Has there ever been a survey done or, uh, uh, has everybody clicked with somebody sometime, more or less? I mean, not, um, not everybody, but d- is it a fairly common experience, or is it a fairly uncommon experience?

Mm

... 'cause we, we, we don't pay attention to those feelings.

And we also, there are a lot of other things be- in modern life that really affect those primal feelings, that, that don't really affect the primal feelings but make us ignore them.

And also, I mean, I talk about in the book, speed dating-...

They've done so many speed dating experiments now.

I mean, who knew that that was a whole area of scientific research? Not only speed dating, but speed networking.

And they brought people together, and they did find, indeed, it happened in less than 30 seconds, and the people that said they wanted to see each other again and said they got a good feeling about somebody were the people that synced up on these various subconscious levels.

Why is that so important?