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When listeners pay attention to stories, their heart rates rise and fall in sync

blog.pnas.org

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Re: When listeners pay attention to stories, their heart rates rise and fall in sync

#81

Post by pjerem »

Cerium wrote: post #63
SimeVidas wrote: post #35

I 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?

Why bother doing cardio exercising when you can just turn up the strobe light button ?

Re: When listeners pay attention to stories, their heart rates rise and fall in sync

#82

Post by LuisMondragon »

ramblenode wrote: post #60

> 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.

They turned something beautiful and poetic into a Black Mirror prompt.

Re: When listeners pay attention to stories, their heart rates rise and fall in sync

#83

Post by teddyh »

dang wrote: post #58
teddyh wrote: post #13

Fake headline. This is not the usual meaning of the word “synchronize”. As many other commenters here point out, this makes the story a non-story. Strictly speaking, the headline is true in that the heart rates “synchronize”, but not the heart beats , which I would think that most people would mis-read the headline as.

Ok you guys, I didn't think the title was so bad, but I've put "in sync" up there to accommodate you. Let's discuss the more interesting stuff now?

That’s perfectly adequate, yes. It also makes the story a completely obvious “Well, duh!”, as it should be.

Re: When listeners pay attention to stories, their heart rates rise and fall in sync

#84

Post by tfehring »

ramblenode wrote: post #60

> 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.

As dystopias go, it seems pretty charitable to jump to education instead of to surveillance monopolists. “Ad attentiveness too low, please drink verification can”, etc.

Re: When listeners pay attention to stories, their heart rates rise and fall in sync

#85

Post by dang »

teddyh wrote: post #83
dang wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok you guys, I didn't think the title was so bad, but I've put "in sync" up there to accommodate you. Let's discuss the more interesting stuff now?

That’s perfectly adequate, yes. It also makes the story a completely obvious “Well, duh!”, as it should be.

I don't think that's quite fair.

Re: When listeners pay attention to stories, their heart rates rise and fall in sync

#86

Post by LocalH »

ALittleLight wrote: post #65
pugworthy wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 usefu…

>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.

As someone who was diagnosed with ADD in 1988, this point is very poignant. Society largely tends to ignore and downplay the fact that everyone's experience is subjectively different and that not everyone has the same "brain wiring".

Re: When listeners pay attention to stories, their heart rates rise and fall in sync

#87

Post by LocalH »

d88 wrote: post #3

As 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…

I mean, there's always the time it takes the signals to make it in or out. I think they estimate it at around 80ms? Seems like that'd be a hard cap (yes, our brains can compensate for that in some scenarios, but it doesn't always do it correctly, look at the phenomenon where you look at a ticking second hand and the very first tick seems like it lingers a bit longer than the following ones, because your brain literally lied to you about what it saw).
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