OK, so it is everyone speeding up or slowing down heart rates at similar parts of the story, not all the listeners synchronizing heartbeats with each other so all heartbeats are simultaneous (when I read the headline, I thought it was talking about a phenomena like synchronizing metronomes [1])
When listeners pay attention to stories, their heart rates rise and fall in sync
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Re: When listeners pay attention to stories, their heart rates rise and fall in sync
#62> This correlation of heart rates, described this month in Cell Reports, could one day lead to new tools for measuring attentiveness, both in the classroom and the clinic. Shame such interesting science inspires such dystopian machinations. "People synchronize their bodies when absorbed in attention." --> "How can schools use this to make sure students are paying attention?" Please don't.
Another way to phrase it would be "How can schools know if they are engaging with their students?"
Or, "How can teachers better understand what engages students and what doesn't engage them?"
That said, a good storyteller or teacher knows if they are engaging their audience (or failing to) and can adjust for better engagement. Bad ones don't know this, or even if they do, don't necessarily know what to do about it.
Re: When listeners pay attention to stories, their heart rates rise and fall in sync
#63I don’t know why, but whenever I check my heart rate with a stopwatch, my heart beats synchronize with the watch ticks almost immediately (my normal pulse is 60 bpm). You’d think the likelihood of that happening is fairly low, but it happens almost every time.
Have you tried it against something you can control the frequency of, such as a strobe light? If you slowly turn the frequency down or up will your heart follow?
Re: When listeners pay attention to stories, their heart rates rise and fall in sync
#64Am following this topic from another thread on HN today about soundscapes and binaural beats, and what is the theoretical framework behind it, or is it just sympathetic magic? I was in a meeting yesterday about the truth and reconciliation stuff going on in Canada right now, and the first hour of the meeting was given to people who were sharing their experiences of residential schools by telling stories about them. T…
I'm not an expert on this exact subject, but my PhD was in computational neuroscience, specifically spiking neural networks, and I became a bit interested in the area of binaural beats. On exposure to binaural beats, neural networks in the brain can to synchronize in patterns that can be observed in EEG recordings (eg, Theta or Beta oscillations). So, while the science is conflicting and not settled there is plenty of actual research into this area. See https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00426-018-1066-8 for a recent meta-analysis.
Re: When listeners pay attention to stories, their heart rates rise and fall in sync
#65> This correlation of heart rates, described this month in Cell Reports, could one day lead to new tools for measuring attentiveness, both in the classroom and the clinic. Shame such interesting science inspires such dystopian machinations. "People synchronize their bodies when absorbed in attention." --> "How can schools use this to make sure students are paying attention?" Please don't.
Another way to phrase it would be "How can schools know if they are engaging with their students?" Or, "How can teachers better understand what engages students and what doesn't engage them?" That said, a good storyteller or teacher knows if they are engaging their audience (or failing to) and can adjust for better engagement. Bad ones don't know this, or even if they do, don't necessarily know what to do about it.
The immediate concern is that, if a metric indicates a problem, who will be forced to change? The student or the teacher? If Mrs. Smith realizes little Timmy isn't paying attention, is she going to accept and consider the possibility she is boring, or just punish Timmy? For perspective, consider how often children are currently drugged when they are found not to be paying attention in school.
Privacy may play a useful role here in directing us toward the good futures rather than the bad. For example, maybe schools are allowed to use heart rate attention monitors, but the data must be aggregated and anonimized. It's okay for Mrs. Smith to learn that 74% of her X (where X is greater than 50) students pay attention when she speaks and this puts her at Y percentile of teachers across the country in her subject. It's not okay for her to know the attentiveness of individual students.
Of course, in reality I have zero hope that this would be used in a positive way.
Re: When listeners pay attention to stories, their heart rates rise and fall in sync
#66Am following this topic from another thread on HN today about soundscapes and binaural beats, and what is the theoretical framework behind it, or is it just sympathetic magic? I was in a meeting yesterday about the truth and reconciliation stuff going on in Canada right now, and the first hour of the meeting was given to people who were sharing their experiences of residential schools by telling stories about them. T…
It seems to be a very general phenomenon, first noticed by Christiaan Huygens.
E.g. "32 Metronome Synchronization" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v5eBf2KwF8
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiaan_Huygens
See also "entrainment": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainwave_entrainment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrainment_(biomusicology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrainment_(chronobiology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrainment_(physics) etc.
There also seems (to some people) to be some form of "energetic" aspect to mesmerism/charisma but this has been contested going right back to Mesmer and Ben Franklin (in the West.) It's been rediscovered (and "debunked") several times in the last couple of centuries, for example Baron Von Reichenbach's "Odic force" and Wilhelm Reich's "Orgone". I should not fail to mention "chi" or "qi" in this context.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_magnetism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odic_force
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi
Gurdjieff called it "being-Hanbledzoïn" and said:
> “Hanbledzoïn is nothing else than the ‘blood’ of the Kesdjan body of the being; just as the cosmic substances called in totality blood serve for nourishing and renewing the planetary body of the being, so also Hanbledzoïn serves in the same way for nourishing and perfecting the body Kesdjan.
https://gurdjieff.work/ae/terms/en50/0238.htm
To the scientific skeptic this is all nonsense, of course.
Re: When listeners pay attention to stories, their heart rates rise and fall in sync
#67> This correlation of heart rates, described this month in Cell Reports, could one day lead to new tools for measuring attentiveness, both in the classroom and the clinic. Shame such interesting science inspires such dystopian machinations. "People synchronize their bodies when absorbed in attention." --> "How can schools use this to make sure students are paying attention?" Please don't.
Faith in humanity restored. I came here to make the very point you so eloquently made.
Re: When listeners pay attention to stories, their heart rates rise and fall in sync
#68Am following this topic from another thread on HN today about soundscapes and binaural beats, and what is the theoretical framework behind it, or is it just sympathetic magic? I was in a meeting yesterday about the truth and reconciliation stuff going on in Canada right now, and the first hour of the meeting was given to people who were sharing their experiences of residential schools by telling stories about them. T…
> The storytellers were fantastic, and one of them had a mesmerising and hypnotic effect that I was trying to isolate as a technique. I could see others attempting it as well.
Complete wild guess here, but I wonder if the indigenous speaking style might have developed from story telling during sweat lodge ceremonies?
> My interest in it is mainly for experimenting with music, but my own practice of a simlar dynamic would be exercising craft as a writer.
I've never been to one, but from anecdotal stories I've read, EDM concerts (especially when combined with psychedelics, which is pretty common) are often described as if they have a religious ritual element to them. Whatever it is, psychedelics + EDM music certainly does something very strange to the mind, and group chanting rituals can be found all over the place in different cultures throughout history.
Re: When listeners pay attention to stories, their heart rates rise and fall in sync
#69As the list of ways to trigger and activate the chimp brain gets refined, how long before we end up with something like a Laser for society? The echo chambers on social media and reinforcement/amplification they produce seems to be very similar to the mechanism to generate coherent light. Does analogy break somehow? Instead of syncing waves or particles just button press and sync a bunch of humans brains. I guess arm…
It's a stretched analogy, but humans do kind of exhibit the ability to behave either as individual "particles", but also in waves, kind of analogous to a large body of water when calm vs in storm conditions.
Re: When listeners pay attention to stories, their heart rates rise and fall in sync
#70> This correlation of heart rates, described this month in Cell Reports, could one day lead to new tools for measuring attentiveness, both in the classroom and the clinic. Shame such interesting science inspires such dystopian machinations. "People synchronize their bodies when absorbed in attention." --> "How can schools use this to make sure students are paying attention?" Please don't.
Exactly my thought. Instead of saying "hey, isn't this a really interesting finding and maybe we could use it to help people get over anxiety" or something like that, they go the dystopian route.
But I do wonder if they go that direction because they're interested in corporate funding for their research and that could be a way to get it.