The egregore passes you by - by Erik Hoel

Every so often scientists do something like this: they take a bunch of listeners to classical music and monitor their vitals as they sit in a concert hall together. Then they notice something strange, which is that not just people’s movements but their actual vitals themselves begin to synchronize—measures like heart or respiration rate, even their skin conductance response. Similar findings are easy to come across, such as how, when looking at brain-to-brain neural synchrony, romantic couples are more neurally synchronized during a conversation than strangers are. This isn’t fringe stuff—both those links go to Nature, one of the premier scientific journals. These sort of studies always remind me of an issue in consciousness research called the binding problem. You experience a single stream of consciousness, one in which everything, your percepts and sensations and emotions, are bound together, and the “problem” is that we don’t know how this works. It’s difficult to figure out becaus

Every so often scientists do something like this: they take a bunch of listeners to classical music and monitor their vitals as they sit in a concert hall together. Then they notice something strange, which is that not just people’s movements but their actual vitals themselves begin to synchronize—measures like heart or respiration rate, even their skin conductance response. Similar findings are easy to come across, such as how, when looking at brain-to-brain neural synchrony, romantic couples are more neurally synchronized during a conversation than strangers are. This isn’t fringe stuff—both