Collective thinking is real: scientists have proven the existence of hivemind

An extremely interesting and urgent problem - the effectiveness of “working at a remote location” - is the subject of several articles in foreign scientific journals at once. It turns out that online communication is not very suitable for solving creative problems, since the so-called “co-creative” does not work under these conditions.

And the problem is not that creativity "doesn't work at all" at a distance, but that when you solve a cognitive task together, it turns out more efficiently due to the peculiarities of our brains. It turns out that when people solve problems together, neural rhythms of the brain can be synchronized. So the phenomenon of "collective intelligence" now has a purely scientific explanation.

Studies have shown that people during a conversation copy the gestures and posture of the interlocutor, synchronize the heart rate and breathing while watching emotional films together. But, people can also synchronize the neural rhythms of the brain, according to an article by Japanese scientists.

What is it for and why is it important? The synchronization of neural rhythms explains how the group finds the answer to the tasks that one person cannot cope with.

Our brain is made up of billions of neurons. When they work - by sending information to nearby neurons, they emit electrical signals that can be tied to certain frequencies and resemble a wave, with a peak indicating a surge in neural activity, and, accordingly, a decline, explains the article by American researcher Conor Fili.

Cognitive tasks often require different parts of the brain to "talk" to each other, and when information is transmitted between them, the neural frequencies of different parts of the brain are aligned - this is called phase synchronization. This activity can be measured using EEG and MRI. Scientists measured it in people who performed tasks in pairs or in a group, and found that "between the minds" of interacting people appeared functional connections, that is, neural brain oscillations in different people were aligned.

In turn, a study by American neurophysiologists revealed neuronal synchronization in jointly solving the puzzle. And when the same subjects solved the puzzle separately or watched others solve it, their level of synchronization dropped.

That is, we can really “think together”... the experts of the “PLAYERS. Bet on intelligence".