A study conducted by researchers at the University of California has revealed that people with similar brain activities are more likely to fall in good friendship. During the study, researchers put 42 business school students in an MRI machine and later showed them 14 videos. As the
participants watched the video, researchers analyzed the brain activity of these students, and the results helped them to predict which of those students are friends, and who among them were just classmates. The study report is now available in the latest edition of journal Nature.
Friends will have the same wavelength
"Neural responses to dynamic, naturalistic stimuli, like videos, can give us a window into people's unconstrained, spontaneous thought processes as they unfold. Our results suggest that friends process the world around them in exceptionally similar ways," said Carolyn Parkinson, lead author of this study. Parkinson is also the director of the Computational Social Neuroscience Lab at the University of California in Los Angeles.
According to the researchers, the neural similarity is closely associated with a dramatically increased likelihood of an intimate friendship. The researchers revealed that friends in close circles possess exceptional similarity in the way in which things are perceived and the pattern in which they respond to various circumstances.
Connection of cognition and friendship
Previously, several studies were done on close pals in terms of physical attributes like age, gender etc, and this is for the first time that researchers have studied about the cognitive connection between friends. According to scientists, this new result indicates that people usually befriend with others who think in a similar style.
"These results suggest that we are exceptionally similar to our friends in how we perceive and respond to the world around us, which has implications for interpersonal influence and attraction," wrote the researchers in the study report.
Even though scientists have proved the cognitive connection between friends, the billion dollar question regarding the mystery of friendship continues; do we befriend with people who already perceive the world in a way we do, or do we come to see the world through our friend's eyes?
