Research results show that the brains of the speaker and listener are coupled. Is this evidence for the sense of thought?
Rudolf Steiner describes the sense of thought as the sense of perceiving the thoughts of other human beings. This sense is especially cultivated, for example, when one reproduces the content of another human being’s speech before expressing one’s own opinion. The prevailing contemporary model for communication is based on the principle of the encoding and decoding of thoughts by way of speech. We can imagine the process as follows: Person A has a thought. They encode it in speech. They speak. The speech reaches the ear of listener B. The listener perceives the speech sounds, decodes the speech, and finally grasps the thought of A. Like two cave dwellers, each in their own cave, who communicate with smoke signals. They don’t perceive each other at all, only their encrypted messages. Is this really how communication works? A brain scan would, therefore, show a time delay for B, as it would take a moment between A’s thought process and B’s thought perception. This experiment was actually carried out in 2010 for a study at Princeton University. Person A was placed in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner and asked to tell a story. The story was recorded, and the brain activity was measured. The result was a series of photographic pictures of brain activity for every fraction of a second of the story. Person B then went into the MRI scanner and the recorded story was played back to them while their brain activity was measured. Now it was possible to investigate whether the two brains exhibited the same patterns with or without a time delay. The result was astounding! For the most part, the processes were absolutely synchronized, i.e., without the slightest time delay at all. Sometimes, the speaker was ahead, and sometimes, even the listener!
Coupled Brains
Apparently, communication works quite differently than previously imagined. The authors of the study refer to the process as neural coupling. From my point of view, however, this concept is already an interpretation. In the case of two synchronized swimmers, we do not speak of coupling but only of synchronization. During a lecture, we listen to a speaker. We hear her speech with our ears, but we soon go along with the speaker’s thoughts. We immerse ourselves and are in the same thoughts at the same time as the speaker. Sometimes, we surmise what’s going to happen, but sometimes, we’re surprised by a sudden turn or a leap of thought. This simple observation is now fully confirmed by the study. We are not the lonely cave dwellers, but as listeners we are mentally a unity with the other. In my opinion, this study is a clear indication of the existence of the sense of thought and offers a completely new approach to understanding communication.
Link to the study G. Stephens, L. Silbert, U. Hasson, “Speaker-Listener Neural Coupling Underlies Successful Communication,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 32 (Aug. 2010): 14425–30.
Translation Joshua Kelberman
