Scientists say they can predict who you're friends with based on brain patterns alone
Maybe your friends really do "just get you" after all.
At least, that's what a new study of graduate students at an Ivy League school suggests.
For that study, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, a group of brain researchers and social psychologists at Dartmouth College looked at the brains of 42 students, and monitored their reactions as they watched some retro video clips.
The students watched America's Funniest Home Videos, saw an astronaut at the International Space Station, peeked in on a wedding ceremony, and glanced at footage of the discontinued CNN show "Crossfire."
MRI scans showed that friends watching the same clips reacted in strikingly similar ways: some of the same brain areas lit up, notably those associated with motivation, learning, affective processing, and memory.
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The researchers said the similarities in brain reaction patterns were so striking, they could actually use them to predict who the participants' friends were. (The scientists based their assessment of students' friendships on the results of an online survey taken by the participants, as well as the other 279 students in their graduate program, about who their friends were.)
Conversely, people who weren't friends had different reactions to the same clips. The activity patterns were less similar in friends of friends, and even more divergent in people who were in separate social groups.
"Our results suggest that friends process the world around them in exceptionally similar ways," lead author Carolyn Parkinson said in a release .