How a speaker herds the audience: multibrain neural convergence over time during naturalistic storytelling.

ABSTRACT: Storytelling-an ancient way for humans to share individual experiences with others-has been found to induce neural alignment among listeners. In exploring the dynamic fluctuations in listener-listener (LL) coupling throughout stories, we uncover a significant correlation between LL coupling and lagged speaker-listener (lag-SL) coupling over time. Using the analogy of neural pattern (dis)similarity as distances between participants, we term this phenomenon the "herding effect." Like a shepherd guiding a group of sheep, the more closely listeners mirror the speaker's preceding brain activity patterns (higher lag-SL similarity), the more tightly they cluster (higher LL similarity). This herding effect is particularly pronounced in brain regions where neural alignment among listeners tracks wi

SUBMITTER: Chang CHC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11421471 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature