JAMSHED BHARUCHA
Professor of Psychology, Provost, Senior Vice President, Tufts University

“An understanding of how brains synchronize ” or fail to do so ” will be a game-changing scientific development.”

Highly recommended, go read it all

clipped from www.edge.org Few behavioral forces are as strong as the delineation of in-groups and out-groups: ‘us’ and ‘them’. Group affiliation requires alignment, coupling or synchronization of the brain states of members. Synchronization yields cooperative behavior, promotes group cohesion, and creates a sense of group agency greater than the sum of the individuals in the group. In the extreme, synchronization yields herding behavior. The absence of synchronization yields conflict. People come under the grip of ideologies, emotions and moods are infectious, and memes spread rapidly through populations. Ethnic, religious, and political groups act as monolithic forces. Mobs, cults and militias are characterized by the melding of large numbers of individuals into larger units, such that the brains of individuals operate in lockstep – a single organism controlled by a single — distributed — nervous system.