Synchrony Quotes

The combination of physical synchrony with other humans and being part of something bigger than oneself (and thus losing momentarily a sense of self) leads to a greater sense of happiness.

One of the key algorithms of compassionate artificial intelligence is Mother-Infant Inter-brain Synchrony algorithm, which mimics the brain-to-brain synchrony of gaze, facial expressions, touch and heart rhythms of mother and child.

Mother-infant inter-brain synchrony algorithms of compassionate artificial intelligence and social robots are developed based on brain-to-brain synchrony of gaze, facial expressions and heart rhythms between mother and child.

A writer is like a tuning fork: We respond when we’re struck by something. The thing is to pay attention, to be ready for radical empathy. If we empty ourselves of ourselves we’ll be able to vibrate in synchrony with something deep and powerful. If we’re lucky we’ll transmit a strong pure note, one that isn’t ours, but which passes through us. If we’re lucky, it will be a note that reverberates and expands, one that other people will hear and understand.

Kiss me hard, let your wetness linger along my lips. I want to drown against you, our bodies woven together and raging in ecstatic synchrony. I don’t want to lie in an easy, hollow embrace. I want to feel the hunger emanating from you. I want the desire to swallow me. I want it to hurt. I want you to show me that this matters. That we matter. That you would risk it all for me. Love me with everything you have or don’t love me at all.

The human brain is incredible in its capacity to heal and rewire itself. The human brain can be shaped and trained to be more resilient, calm, compassionate and alert—we can condition ourselves to be successful. Through mindfulness meditation, we can literally re-wire our brains through new experiences, which modify our neural network and our neural chemistry. Mindfulness also enhances gamma synchrony and improves the function of the human brain.

Once out of your cradle, you don't focus on the world in the abstract, perceiving things for the first time, but in synchrony with your accumulated knowledge, which enriches and helps define your experience, as well as ensuring its uniqueness.

Many fathers who don’t have daily hands-on contact may fail to form the strong daddy brain circuits required for parent-child synchrony. The environment for eventually establishing such a close interaction may start before birth. During the last months of my pregnancy, my son’s father would play a tapping game with him. His dad would tap tap tap on my belly, and he’d tap tap tap back—kicking seemingly with the same rhythm. The father-son relationship had begun.

Every forty-three blinks, the flashing lights on the police cars that follow my van into Houston synchronize. They flash separately for a few turns, then start flashing in series, like leading-in lights. Then, for a second, they all flash at once. What I learn as I’m driving into Houston under the low, still clouds, and choppers, for the first day of my trial, is that life works the same way. Most of the time you feel the potential for synchrony, but only once in a while do things actually synch up.

As for Barbara Fredrickson, she defines love as a positive resonance that manifests when three events occur simultaneously: the sharing of one or several positive emotions, a synchrony between the behavior and physiological reactions of two people, and the intention to contribute to the other’s well-being, an intention that engenders mutual care.

Mother-infant inter-brain synchrony provides a template for designing compassionate artificial intelligence and social robots.

Current studies of networks (Newman, Barabasi, and Watts 2006) using notions of community and synchrony within subgroups help to make the niche concept more precise. However, it is noteworthy that few network studies concentrate on the formation of boundaries within a network. And there is even less study of mechanisms for the formation of hierarchies—mechanisms that would explain the pervasiveness of hierarchies in natural systems.

Nike acted in synchrony, pledging “a $40 million commitment over the next four years to support the Black community in the U.S.”27 This followed Nike’s widely aired commercial featuring former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who kneeled during the national anthem in protest of social injustice. The trick? Distracting you from Nike’s practice of employing child labor in sweatshops across southeast Asia or marketing $200 sneakers to inner-city black kids who can’t afford to buy books for school.

The physical impact of taiko music, along with the sheer visual poetry of a choreographed ensemble presenting its music in perfect synchrony, is so powerful and inviting that taiko is beginning to catch on as Japan's most influential and lasting gift to world music.

Time is weird. That much is obvious. Sometimes I think everything happens at once, which is anything but obvious and even weirder. I feel sorry for people who brag about 'living in the moment'; they're like people who come into the cinema after the film has started or people who drink Diet Coke—they're missing out on the best part. I think time is like the dial on a radio. Most people like to settle on a station with a clear signal and no interference. But that doesn't mean you can't listen to two or even three stations at the same time; it doesn't mean synchrony is impossible. Until quite recently, people believed it was impossible for a universe to fit inside two atoms, but it fits. Why dismiss the idea that on time's radio you can listen to the entire history of humanity simultaneously?

single regulatory system.5 All are a product of the synchrony between the two branches of the autonomic nervous system (ANS): the sympathetic, which acts as the body’s accelerator, and the parasympathetic, which serves as its brake.6 These are the “reciprocals” Darwin

mathematician Steven Strogatz puts it . . . In every case, these feats of synchrony occur spontaneously, almost as if nature has an eerie yearning for order. And that raises a profound mystery: Scientists have long been baffled by the existence of spontaneous order in the universe. The laws of thermodynamics seem to dictate the opposite, that nature should inexorably degenerate toward a state of greater disorder, greater entropy. Yet all around us we see magnificent structures that have somehow managed to assemble themselves. This enigma bedevils all of science today.2

It hits him again with the strength of a revelation. Rhythm rather than harmony is the organizing principle. Rhythm is what connects everything together. We all walk to a melody we hear inside our heads, he thinks. But that rhythm beats differently for each of us. Perhaps love, then, he considers, is where an absolute synchrony establishes itself between two people.

Energy: vibrant color and light Abundance: lushness, multiplicity, and variety Freedom: nature, wildness, and open space Harmony: balance, symmetry, and flow Play: circles, spheres, and bubbly forms Surprise: contrast and whimsy Transcendence: elevation and lightness Magic: invisible forces and illusions Celebration: synchrony, sparkle, and bursting shapes Renewal: blossoming, expansion, and curves

Over time, she accepted the fact that the price for this great love was this great fear. Love's unfortunate alter ego. Fear, she came to realize, was utterly enamored with love. Obsessed with it. Vying for its attention, modulating its own particularities to suit love. And love was equally accommodating to fear: creating space, ushering it in, giving it a home, the two of them operating in comparative measure and perfect synchrony; clinging to each other like warm bodies in the night.

neuroscientists monitored guitarists playing a short melody together, they found that patterns in the guitarists’ brain activity became synchronized. Similarly, studies of choir singers have shown that singing aligns performers’ heart rates. Music seems to create a sense of unity on a physiological level. Scientists call this phenomenon synchrony and have found that it can elicit some surprising behaviors. In studies where people sang or moved in a coordinated way with others, researchers found that subjects were significantly more likely to help out a partner with their workload or sacrifice their own gain for the benefit of the group. And when participants rocked in chairs at the same tempo, they performed better on a cooperative task than those who rocked at different rhythms. Synchrony shifts our focus away from our own needs toward the needs of the group. In large social gatherings, this can give rise to a euphoric feeling of oneness—dubbed “collective effervescence” by French sociologist Émile Durkheim—which elicits a blissful, selfless absorption within a community.

I identified ten aesthetics of joy, each of which reveals a distinct connection between the feeling of joy and the tangible qualities of the world around us: Energy: vibrant color and light Abundance: lushness, multiplicity, and variety Freedom: nature, wildness, and open space Harmony: balance, symmetry, and flow Play: circles, spheres, and bubbly forms Surprise: contrast and whimsy Transcendence: elevation and lightness Magic: invisible forces and illusions Celebration: synchrony, sparkle, and bursting shapes Renewal: blossoming, expansion, and curves

I live here on the Prade Ranch alone-already years beyond the age my mother was when she returned to the ranch-to the particular elements of the earth: soil, water, carbon sky. You can rot or you can burn but either way, if you're lucky, a place will shape and cut and bend you, will strengthen you and weaken you. You trade your life for the privilege of this experience-the joy of a place, the joy of blood family; the joy of knowledge gotten by listening and observing. For most of us, we get stronger slowly, and then get weaker slowly, with our cycles sometimes in synchrony with the land's health, though other times independent of its larger cycles. We watch and listen and notice as the land, the place -life- begins to summon its due from us. It's so subtle...a trace of energy departing here, a trace of impulse missing there. You find yourself as you have always been, square in the middle of the metamorphosis, constantly living and dying: becoming weaker in your strength, finally. Perhaps you notice the soil, the rocks, or the river, taking back some of that which it has loaned to you; or perhaps you see the regeneration occurring in your daughter, if you have one, as she walks around, growing stonger. And you feel for the fir time a sweet absence...

It’s hard to blame Representative Petri for missing the point. The value of studying fireflies is endlessly surprising. For example, before 1994, Internet engineers were vexed by spontaneous pulsations in the traffic between computers called routers, until they realized that the machines were behaving like fireflies, exchanging periodic messages that were inadvertently synchronizing them. Once the cause was identified, it became clear how to relieve the congestion. Electrical engineers devised a decentralized architecture for clocking computer circuits more efficiently, by mimicking the fireflies’ strategy for achieving synchrony at low cost and high reliability.

What we are talking about is a kind of super-reflex, a fundamental physiological ability of which we are barely aware. And like all specialized human traits, some people have much more mastery over this reflex than others. Part of what it means to have a powerful or persuasive personality, then, is that you can draw others into your own rhythms and dictate the terms of the interaction. In some studies, students who have a high degree of synchrony with their teachers are happier, more enthused, interested, and easygoing. What I felt with Gau was that I was being seduced, not in the sexual sense, of course, but in a global way, that our conversation was being conducted on his terms, not mine. I felt I was becoming synchronized with him. "Skilled musicians know this, and good speakers," says Joseph Cappella, who teaches at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. "They know when the crowds are with them, literally in synchrony with them, in movements and nods and stillness in moments of attention." It is a strange thing to admit, because I didn't want to be drawn in. I was on guard against it. But the essence of Salesmen is that, on some level, they cannot be resisted. "Tom can build a level of trust and rapport in five to ten minutes that most people will take half an hour to do," Moine says to Gau.

In real brains neural networks do not exist in isolation. They communicate with other networks by way of synaptic transmission. For example, in order to see an apple, instead of a roundish, reddish blob, the various features of the stimulus, each processed by different visual subsystems, have to be integrated. As we saw in Chapter 7, the problem of understanding the manner in which this occurs is called the binding problem. One popular solution to this problem is based on the notion of neuronal synchrony. Synchronous (simultaneous) firing, and thus binding, has been proposed as an explanation of consciousness (chap. 7), but our interest here is more in the ability of synchronous firing between cells in different interconnected regions to coordinate plasticity across the regions.

And as they did so, a calm began to creep into my bones. Who knew how many women, right at that moment, were struggling to do as I did? All of us straining and grunting to bear our babies to safety. I pictured them in my mind as each wave squeezed my belly. Instead of floundering, I tried to ride each wave to its end and catch my breath in the moments of quiet between. I saw the women of the world—on wide, soft couches in golden palaces, in shaded tents on desert sands, in huts built of mud or stone, in lands that ranged to the ends of the earth—and as I braced upon my hands and knees, I felt that we surged in synchrony with one another. Like a vast constellation of stars pinpricking the night sky, I could feel us all strive together to each bring new sparks of light into the universe. I thought I could feel their support, their hands upon my back and their words of encouragement spilling into my ears as, with a final, mighty effort, my son was born.

What we are talking about is a kind of super-reflex, a fundamental physiological ability of which we are barely aware. And like all specialized human trains, some people have much more mastery over this reflex than others. Part of what it means to have a powerful or persuasive personality, then, is that you can draw others into your own rhythms and dictate the terms of the interaction. In some studies, students who have a high degree of synchrony with their teachers are happier, more enthused, interested, and easygoing. What I felt with Gau was that I was being seduced, not in the sexual sense, of course, but in a global way, that our conversation was being conducted on his terms, not mine. I felt I was becoming synchronized with him. "Skilled musicians know this, and good speakers," says Joseph Cappella, who teaches at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. "They know when the crowds are with them, literally in synchrony with them, in movements and nods and stillness in moments of attention." It is a strange thing to admit, because I didn't want to be drawn in. I was on guard against it. But the essence of Salesmen is that, on some level, they cannot be resisted. "Tom can build a level of trust and rapport in five to ten minutes that most people will take half an hour to do," Moine says to Gau.

We must consider what we mean when we say that the spiking activity of a neuron 'encodes' information. We normally think of a code as something that conveys information from a sender to a recipient, and this requires that the recipient 'understands' the code. But the spiking activity of every neuron seems to encode information in a slightly different way, a way that depends on that neuron's intrinsic properties. So what sense can a recipient make of the combined input from many neurons that all use different codes? It seems that what matters must be the 'population code' - not the code that is used by single cells, but the average or aggregate signal from a population of neurons. In a now classic paper, Shadlen and Newsome considered how information is communicated among neurons of the cortex - neurons that typically receive between 3,000 and 10,000 synaptic inputs.They argued that, although some neural structures in the brain may convey information in the timing of successive spikes, when many inputs converge on a neuron the information present in the precise timing of spikes is irretrievably lost, and only the information present in the average input rate can be used. They concluded that 'the search for information in temporal patterns, synchrony and specially labeled spikes is unlikely to succeed' and that 'the fundamental signaling units of cortext may be pools on the order of 100 neurons in size.' The phasic firing of vasopressin cells is an extreme demonstration of the implausibility of spike patterning as a way of encoding usable information, but the key message - that the only behaviorally relevant information is that which is collectively encoded by the aggregate activity of a population - may be generally true.

Suppose you entered a boat race. One hundred rowers, each in a separate rowboat, set out on a ten-mile race along a wide and slow-moving river. The first to cross the finish line will win $10,000. Halfway into the race, you’re in the lead. But then, from out of nowhere, you’re passed by a boat with two rowers, each pulling just one oar. No fair! Two rowers joined together into one boat! And then, stranger still, you watch as that rowboat is overtaken by a train of three such rowboats, all tied together to form a single long boat. The rowers are identical septuplets. Six of them row in perfect synchrony while the seventh is the coxswain, steering the boat and calling out the beat for the rowers. But those cheaters are deprived of victory just before they cross the finish line, for they in turn are passed by an enterprising group of twenty-four sisters who rented a motorboat. It turns out that there are no rules in this race about what kinds of vehicles are allowed. That was a metaphorical history of life on Earth. For the first billion years or so of life, the only organisms were prokaryotic cells (such as bacteria). Each was a solo operation, competing with others and reproducing copies of itself. But then, around 2 billion years ago, two bacteria somehow joined together inside a single membrane, which explains why mitochondria have their own DNA, unrelated to the DNA in the nucleus.35 These are the two-person rowboats in my example. Cells that had internal organelles could reap the benefits of cooperation and the division of labor (see Adam Smith). There was no longer any competition between these organelles, for they could reproduce only when the entire cell reproduced, so it was “one for all, all for one.” Life on Earth underwent what biologists call a “major transition.”36 Natural selection went on as it always had, but now there was a radically new kind of creature to be selected. There was a new kind of vehicle by which selfish genes could replicate themselves. Single-celled eukaryotes were wildly successful and spread throughout the oceans.

Once the process of accounting for every available square inch of terrain and every raw material has begun, it is necessary to convince people to want the converted products. On the environmental end of the equation, the goal is to turn raw materials in the ground, or the ground itself, into a commodity. On the personal end of the equation, the goal is to convert the uncharted internal human wilderness into a form that desires to accumulate the commodities. The conversion process within the human is directed at experience, feeling, perception, behavior and desire. These must be catalogued, defined and reshaped. The idea is to get both ends of the equation in synchrony, like standard-gauge railways. The human becomes the terminus of the conversion of plants, animals and minerals into objects. The conversion of natural into artificial, inherent in our economic system, takes place as much inside human feeling and experience as it does in the landscape. The more you smooth out the flow, the better the system functions and, in particular, the more the people who activate the processes benefit. In the end, the human, like the environment, is redesigned into a form that fits the needs of the commercial format. People who take more pleasure in talking with friends than in machines, commodities and spectacles are outrageous to the system. People joining with their neighbors to share housing or cars or appliances are less “productive” than those who live in isolation from each other, obtaining their very own of every object. Any collective act, from sharing washing machines to car-pooling to riding buses, is less productive to the wider system in the end than everyone functioning separately in nuclear family units and private homes. Isolation maximizes production. Human beings who are satisfied with natural experience, from sexuality to breast feeding to cycles of mood, are not as productive as the not-so-satisfied, who seek vaginal sprays, chemical and artificial milk, drugs to smooth out emotional ups and downs, and commodities to substitute for experience.

when people are working together doing the same thing in synchrony with others—e.g., rowing together, dancing together—our bodies release endorphins,

In Parkinson's disease (PD), the results of dopamine deficiency include increased neuronal activity in the subthalamic nucleus (STN) and globus pallidus internus (GPi), with irregular and bursting neuronal firing patterns. Increased synchrony is found among sensorimotor networks, which may contribute to PD motor signs.

you execute with comfortable confidence and synchrony, and you leave with a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment, regardless of the measurable outcome.

Trust me,” a mirror signals to another’s unconscious, “You and I—we’re alike.” Once you’re attuned to the dynamic, you’ll see it everywhere: couples walking on the street with their steps in perfect synchrony; friends in conversation at a park, both nodding their heads and crossing the legs at about the same time. These people are, in a word, connected.

Rituals can be thought of as ensembles of “mind hacks” that exploit the bugs in our mental programs in subtle and diverse ways. Let’s consider three of the most common active ingredients found in communal rituals: synchrony, goal-oriented collaboration, and rhythmic music. Synchrony seems to exploit both our evolved action-representation system and our mentalizing abilities. When moving in step with others, the neurological mechanisms used to represent our own actions and those used for others’ actions overlap in our brains. This is a neurological by-product of how our body’s own representational system is deployed to help model and predict others’ movements—it’s a glitch. The convergence in these representations blurs the distinction between ourselves and others, which leads us to perceive others as more like us and possibly even as extensions of ourselves. For evolutionary reasons, this illusion draws people closer together and creates a feeling of interdependence.

Every time I watch this stunning act of neural synchrony occurring at night in my own research laboratory, I am humbled: sleep is truly an object of awe.

The Little Ice Age lasted in northern Europe from 1350 to 1850, but it had three troughs of cold temperatures, the second and deepest of which began in 1650 and therefore coincided with the end of the plague in northern Europe. The new cold reduced fleas and Y. pestis to extended periods of inactivity. The fact that the third pandemic began after the end of the Little Ice Age and in synchrony with renewed warming after 1850 is suggestive.

didn’t know it at the time, but ten years later I would learn that research from the field of the science of happiness would confirm that the combination of physical synchrony with other humans and being part of something bigger than oneself (and thus losing momentarily a sense of self) leads to a greater sense of happiness, and

Compassionate artificial intelligence and social robots frameworks work based on deep inter-brain synchrony, which couples the human brain with the robot’s physiology and behavior during the moments of social contacts.

experiments carried out in several laboratories have recently demonstrated that external EM fields, of similar strength and structure to those that the brain itself generates, do indeed influence nerve firing.16 In fact, what the field seems to do is to coordinate nerve firing: that is, bring lots of neurons into synchrony so that they all fire together. The findings suggest that the brain’s own EM field, generated by nerve firing, also influences nerve firing, providing a kind of self-referencing loop that many theorists argue is an essential component of consciousness.17

You will decide if you will deliver your online curriculum in synchrony (in real time using a webinar format such as, Adobe Connect, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, & Google Classrooms, etc.) or asynchronous (learners work independently and submit their work to you on a specific day and time).

The Little Ice Age lasted in northern Europe from 1350 to 1850, but it had three troughs of cold temperatures, the second and deepest of which began in 1650 and therefore coincided with the end of the plague in northern Europe. The new cold reduced fleas and Y. pestis to extended periods of inactivity. The fact that the third pandemic began after the end of the Little Ice Age and in synchrony with renewed warming after 1850 is suggestive. A third possibility is changes in hygiene. Improved housing helped prevent rat infestation. One example is the declining use of the thatched roof

...in the tonic chord of G-major there is a significant level of clash between the wave profiles of the notes, but the rate of overlap or synchronisation exceeds the rate of clash, so order succeeds in outweighing complexity. In this one chord is played out the archetypal battle between order and anarchy. What matters is that there is a significant rate of conflict between consonance and dissonance. Harmony incorporates dissonance but synchrony outweighs conflict . This idea goes back at least as far as the medieval scholar Boethius who defined consonance or harmony as ‘a unified concordance of sounds dissimilar in themselves’.

Research from other labs had linked the neural synchrony of high-frequency brain waves to mental processes such as attention, working memory, learning, and conscious perception; the suspicion is that by firing in sync, neurons cause far-flung networks to work together, with the result that cognitive and emotional processes become more integrated and coherent.

Just seeing someone express an emotion can evoke that mood, whether you realize you mimic the facial expression or not. This happens to us all the time—there’s a dance, a synchrony, a transmission of emotions. This mood synchrony determines whether you feel an interaction went well or not.” The

Asymmetries in hedonic and instrumental consequences can also lead to the formation and maintenance of beliefs that can have more serious consequences, such as those that induce marital conflict. Many people claim that their spouses “never” do the chores or tasks they have agreed to do. While the claim is surely justified in some cases, in others it may stem from the fact that the spouse’s failure to wash the dishes, clean the counter, or do the laundry arouses resentment and anger, and can have immediate instrumental consequences such as the need to do the tasks oneself. When the tasks are performed on time, however, the world runs smoothly and there is little to notice. Similar processes operate in the common belief among couples that they are “out of sync”—it seems one always wants to stay home and watch TV when the other needs to socialize, one wants to make love when the other “needs some space,” one is upbeat when the other is morose, etc. Here too, there may be an inherent asymmetry in the salience of relevant events that can make things seem more out of sync than they really are. Wanting to do something when the other does not is frustrating, and it can occupy the contents of one’s mental life for some time. Examples of asynchrony are therefore easily brought to mind. But again, when a couple’s passions, preferences, or moods coincide, things go smoothly and the events can be less noteworthy. Furthermore, even when they do stand out, they tend to do so by virtue of the quality of the events themselves, and not by virtue of the synchrony that produced them. They are categorized and remembered as instances of laughter, passion, or fun, and not as instances of synchrony.

Not surprisingly, the core features of music are RHYTHM, HARMONY, RESONANCE, SYNCHRONY, and DISSONANCE (see glossary for definitions of terms), and those are the same processes the brain uses to coordinate its activities and carry out complex behaviors. This is why music can have such a profound effect on us.

synchronized movement, along with synchronized singing, has been a vastly underappreciated force in world history, fostering cohesion among groups as diverse as the builders of the pyramids, the armies of the Ottoman Empire, and the Japanese office workers who rise from their desks to perform group calisthenics at the start of each workday. Roman generals were among the first to discover that soldiers marching in synchrony could be made to travel for far longer distances before they succumbed to fatigue.

There was general astonishment, therefore, when Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen showed in 1998 that a rubber hand, under the right circumstances, could be mistaken for one’s own. If a subject’s real hand is hidden under a table while the rubber hand is visible before him, and both are stroked in synchrony, then the subject has the convincing illusion, even though he knows better, that the rubber hand is his—and that the sensation of being stroked is located in this inanimate though lifelike object. As I found when I looked through the “eyes” of a robot, knowledge in such a situation does nothing to dispel the illusion. The brain does its best to correlate all the senses, but the visual input here trumps the tactile.

Art's relation to form, to the image, to the monistic fantasy that provoked its defense of its own dividedness is today, as Klein predicted, intermittent and embarrassed. There are modes of art now that resemble activism or protest, pure and simple; modes of art characterized by a refusal to structure themselves around subject-object relations. The visual itself, the image, is questioned as the normative framework of art. Art is often not a product, not a precious trace, not a singularity, but rahter a dynamic, multipular interaction that creates temporary publics who are public to one another. Art does not have to add anything to the world. for technology and entrepreneurship already do that. Art is an irreality opened up inside the world. Art is the refusal of complicity in any form of domination. You are not trapped by the collectivity, but you are not entirely free either, for freedom, even the anarchic mode of the artwork, is suspected to be a mode of evasion of responsibility. Art is a quasi-event: it is not there all the time (like a book), but it is also not there only at an assigned time (like a theatrical play). This has become a comparative advantage of art over the other arts, which have more trouble intervening in reality. Much art today is coordinated with long-term eschatological or emancipatory projects, with projects as such. Art aims at such positive goals as synchrony, participation, inclusion, and sympathy, concepts hard to reconcile with the once-prized, exclusive qualities of art.

What you are actually experiencing during deep NREM sleep is one of the most epic displays of neural collaboration that we know of. Through an astonishing act of self-organization, many thousands of brain cells have all decided to unite and “sing,” or fire, in time. Every time I watch this stunning act of neural synchrony occurring at night in my own research laboratory, I am humbled: sleep is truly an object of awe.

So Disney merely has to stoop down to pick up reality as it is. 'Built-in spectacle', as Guy Debord would say. But we are no longer in the society of the spectacle, which has itself become a spectacular concept. It is no longer the contagion of spectacle which alters reality, it is the contagion of the virtual which obliterates the spectacle. With its diverting, distancing effects, Disneyland still represented spectacle and folklore, but with Disneyworld and its tentacular extension, we are dealing with a generalized metastasis, with a cloning of the world and of our mental universe, not in the imaginary register, but in the viral and the virtual. We are becoming not alienated, passive spectators, but interactive extras, the meek, freeze-dried extras in this immense reality show. This is no longer the spectacular logic of alienation, but a spectral logic of disembodiment; not a fantastic logic of diversion, but a corpuscular logic of transfusion, transubstantiation of each of our cells. An undertaking of radical deterrence of the world, then, but from the inside this time, not from outside, as we saw in what is now the almost nostalgic world of capitalist reality. In virtual reality the extra is no longer either an actor or a spectator; he is off-stage, he is a transparent operator. And Disney wins on yet another level. Not content with obliterating the real by turning it into a 3-D, but depthless, virtual image, it obliterates time by synchronizing all periods, all cultures in the same tracking shot, by setting them alongside each other in the same scenario. In this way, it inaugurates real time — time as a single point, one-dimensional time, a thing which is also without depth: neither present, past nor future, but the immediate synchrony of all places and all times in the same timeless virtuality. The lapsing or collapsing of time: this is the real fourth dimension . The dimension of the virtual, of real time, the dimension which, far from superadding itself to the three dimensions of real space, obliterates them all. So it has been suggested that in a century or a millennium, the old 'swords and sandals' epics will be seen as actual Roman films, dating from the Roman period, as true documentaries on Antiquity; that the Paul Getty Museum at Malibu, a pastiche of a villa from Pompeii, will be confused anachronistically with a villa from the third century B.C. (as will the works inside: Rembrandt and Fra Angelico will all be jumbled together in the same flattening of time); and that the commemoration of the French Revolution at Los Angeles in 1989 will be confused retrospectively with the real event. Disney achieves the de facto realization of this timeless Utopia by producing all events, past or future, on simultaneous screens, remorselessly mixing all the sequences as they would — or will — appear to a civilization other than our own. But this is already our civilization. It is already increasingly difficult for us to imagine the real, to imagine History, the depth of time, three-dimensional space - just as difficult as it once was, starting out from the real world, to imagine the virtual one or the fourth dimension.

We were enveloped in one another—in another dimension, another time. Time itself stood still and sped in synchrony, and I couldn't get a handle on myself, but I grasped every second of it.

Out here, I am half scientist, half disciple. I’ve left the laboratory far behind and, with it, the need to quantify and contain. In its place, I’ve reconnected with the simple act of observation. Watch. Listen. Learn. These were the tenets of the earliest naturalists, the instincts of indigenous people around the globe whose survival depended on knowledge gained from the land. My passion for birds and the natural world also emerged from these basic principles. I fell in love with the image of the sky blocked by kittiwakes flying in perfect synchrony, became intrigued by a chickadee whose beak promised to foretell something about our environment, tuned my ears to the nuances of a warbler’s song. What drew me to research was not the rigor of statistics or the mystery of what lies within an organism’s genetic code. It was the birds themselves.

Glyneth said: ‘You still have not answered me. How do we return to Earth?’ ‘I am so doing! Between Earth and Tanjecterly, the synchrony lasts six to nine days, and as we have seen has just ended. Then it sweeps away, along the radius of the black moon with the centre node. At the next pulse, the gate will open into another place, but none so easy as Tanjecterly. Hidmarth and Skurre are demon-worlds; Underwood is empty save for a moaning sound; Pthopus is a single torpid soul. These were discovered and explored by Twitten the Archmage, and he compiled an almanac, which is of great value.

Expanded Consciousness may be considered in terms of "Nodal Synchrony" [Nodal: intersection pathways. Synchrony: occurring simultaneously] and in most cases considered in terms of harmonics [at a fixed interval, produced by vibration of a string, column of air, etc. in an exact fraction of its length] where they vibrate together using similar carrier waves [a high-frequency electromagnetic wave modulated in amplitude or frequency to convey a signal].

It was fascinating to see how much Sherry benefited from her massage therapy. She felt more relaxed and adventurous in her day-to-day life and she was also more relaxed and open with me. She became truly involved in her therapy and was genuinely curious about her behavior, thoughts, and feelings. She stopped picking at her skin, and when summer came she started to spend evenings sitting outside on her stoop, chatting with her neighbors. She even joined a church choir, a wonderful experience of group synchrony.

love is the momentary upwelling of three tightly interwoven events: first, a sharing of one or more positive emotions between you and another; second, a synchrony between your and the other person's biochemistry and behaviours; and third, a reflected motive to invest in each other's well-being that brings mutual care. My shorthand for this trio is 'positivity resonance'.

My shorthand for this trio is 'positivity resonance'. Within those moments of interpersonal connection that are characterized by this amplifying symphony—of shared positive emotions, biobehavioural synchrony, and mutual care—life-giving positivity resonates between and among people.

The significance of shared arousal was demonstrated in an ingenious experiment designed by researcher Joshua Conrad Jackson and published in the journal Scientific Reports in 2018. Jackson and his colleagues set out “to simulate conditions found in actual marching rituals”—which, they noted, “required the use of a larger venue than a traditional psychology laboratory.” They chose as the setting for their study a professional sports stadium, with a high-definition camera mounted twenty-five meters above the action. After gathering 172 participants in the stadium and dividing them into groups, the experimenters manipulated their experience of both synchrony and arousal: one group was directed to walk with their fellow members in rank formation, while a second group walked in a loose and uncoordinated fashion; a third group speed-walked around the stadium, boosting their physiological arousal, while a fourth group strolled at a leisurely pace. Jackson and his collaborators then had each group engage in the same set of activities, asking them to gather themselves into cliques, to disperse themselves as they wished across the stadium’s playing field, and finally to cooperate in a joint task (collecting five hundred metal washers scattered across the field). The result: when participants had synchronized with one another, and when they had experienced arousal together, they then behaved in a distinctive way—forming more inclusive groups, standing closer to one another, and working together more efficiently (observations made possible by analyzing footage recorded by the roof-mounted camera). The findings suggest that “behavioral synchrony and shared physiological arousal in small groups independently increase social cohesion and cooperation,” the researchers write; they help us understand “why synchrony and arousal often co-occur in rituals around the world.

Someday employers could nip labor organizing in the bud by monitoring employees’ growing brain synchrony. One recent study tracked the EEG signals of high school students over a semester and found that their brain activity became more synchronized as they focused on collective tasks.106 In other words, just by looking at patterns of brain activity across employees, it might be possible to tell who is planning something together like organizing a union. Those who are less engaged with the group can similarly be identified by their lower brain-to-brain synchrony.

became clear that mirror neurons explained many previously unexplainable aspects of the mind, such as empathy, imitation, synchrony, and even the development of language. One writer compared mirror neurons to “neural WiFi”9—we pick up not only another person’s movement but her emotional state and intentions as well. When people are in sync with each other, they tend to stand or sit in similar ways, and their voices take on the same rhythms. But our mirror neurons also make us vulnerable to others’ negativity, so that we respond to their anger with fury or are dragged down by their depression.

We also measured the oscillatory brain potentials and determined their synchrony during the moment when subjects see a picture for the first time and have to recognize it. In normal subjects, this produces a lot of activity in the high-frequency oscillatory gamma range, around forty hertz. But schizophrenic patients don’t show this increase, and they also have difficulties in synchronizing activity in different cortical areas. This may be one of the reasons why they have difficulties in coordinating their thoughts and coherently organizing their behavior (see figure 8). To conclude, if it is true that synchronization of these high-frequency rhythms serves to coordinate the many distributed processes in the brain, then a method of mental training like meditation that enhances synchronization should have profound effects on brain functions. Finding out what these effects are will be the goal of future research. Not all of them may be beneficial. It sometimes may not be good to synchronize things that should stay separated. But developing more synchrony might be highly effective in generating states of consciousness that differ from those we normally have when we act in a disassociated way in our environment.

Musicians rely heavily on synchronous auditory feedback of their own performances—hearing the music they play as they play it. When that synchrony is artificially manipulated through earphones, musicians lose confidence in their abilities and become distracted trying to understand the asynchrony, which then impairs their performance. So, as Majid wrote, presence is “when all your senses agree on one thing at the same time.” Presence manifests as resonant synchrony.

Potential is a treasure inside us. It needs a lot of search and exploration. We really have to work hard to find it. If mind and body are in synchrony, faster will be our search.

THE PRIORITY THAT TRANSFORMS ALL OTHER PRIORITIES That revolution begins with consciousness. Transform your consciousness, direct your attention wisely, and the transformation of your material circumstances immediately begins. According to most traditions, the time when meditation is most potent is in the morning. The delicious state of Bliss Brain is like a broadcast channel. You can decide to tune your awareness to it anytime. When you make this choice first thing in the morning, when your brain is in high alpha and you’re moving from sleep to wakefulness, you align your experience with the energy of this channel as the first act of your day. This is a powerful statement of intention. You are saying to the universe, “My first priority today is to align with you. I choose to live in synchrony with nature and the cosmos the whole of this day, starting now. Nothing is more important to me than this alignment. I surrender my local mind to the greatness of nonlocal mind, and I open the whole of my existence to love, joy, and peace.” Get this priority straight, and all your other priorities line up behind it. By getting in tune with the universe, you step into synchrony with all of nature. You enter a flow state, your life becomes easier, and the challenges you face are placed in the context of the love, joy, and peace found in Bliss Brain.

Big News On the Book Front! My first book , Sherlock Holmes: The Coronet Conspiracy is now available on Kindle. And on the official release date of October 23, the Audio version will be available, along with the hardcover and paperback versions. Also, the second book in the SINISTER HOUSE Series, Sherlock Holmes: The French Conundrum has been given a release date of December 10, 2023. And, currently, the release date for Book Three in the SINISTER HOUSE Series, Sherlock Holmes: The Synchrony Stratagem is scheduled for April, 2024. The Final Book in the SINISTER HOUSE Series, Sherlock Holmes: The Fall of Sinister House is currently scheduled for release in September, 2024.

Convergence is ubiquitous and not limited just to the external appearance or morphology of animals. It is also widely observed and documented in animal behavior and in plants, fungi, and even bacteria. Let’s start with behavior. What do you think these four species—a cobra, a stickleback fish, an octopus, and a spider—share? There is no convergence in body form here, unlike the Caribbean anoles. But a behavior has converged among them that has led to the success of each of their species: the females of the species guard their eggs. One of the best examples of convergent behavior is observed in humans and—hold your breath—ants! And I have witnessed this convergence with my own eyes. When I was on a family vacation in the stunningly beautiful Peruvian Amazon, I stumbled upon the tiny creatures that had beaten our human ancestors to the discovery of agriculture by many millions of years: the leafcutter ants. I had waited years to witness the miracle, and there it was in its full linear glory. A long single column of thousands of large green leaves appeared to be miraculously moving in perfect synchrony of their own volition on the forest floor. Each large leaf was being carried by a single tiny ant, who purposefully disappeared underground to pass on the booty to her specialist sisters. These ants chew the leaves to grow a fungus garden used for food for the entire colony. Not unlike human farmers, these ants produce fertilizers (amino acids and enzymes) to aid the fungal growth, remove contaminants that can hinder the agricultural output, are highly selective in what they grow, and continuously tend to their enormous gardens.8

Initial synchrony led to a feeling of unity, which led to a greater willingness to sacrifice personal gain for the group’s greater good. It is no wonder then that marching in unison is still employed in military training, even though its worth as a battlefield technique disappeared long ago. Its worth as a unity-building technique accounts for its retention.20

BROADCASTING RESONANCE Anchored in nonlocal consciousness, your local life begins to change. As you resonate with the cycles of nature, as your heart’s coherence conditions the energy space around you, as you vibrate to the signal of love and joy in your consciousness, you attract people and conditions that match your states and traits. Without effort, as your magnificent new signal broadcasts out around you, resonating with the music of the universe, you’ll come into synchrony with people and events that bless and delight you. You’ll discover that you’re not alone. As you tune to the great symphony of life each day, you’ll find that you’re tuned to millions of other people who are likewise attuned. With no effort at all, you’ll discover wonderful new friends and companions wherever you travel. As the light shines from your eyes, it meets the light in the eyes of others. When you’re awake, you naturally enjoy others who are awake. 9.3. Coming into synchrony. LOVING THE SLEEPER Not everyone is awake, and that’s fine. Sometimes your friends and family members are tossing in their sleep, suffering unnecessarily. Their plight touches you. You feel their misery. You would love to see them wake up, and shed those beliefs, thoughts, and habits that drag them down. You can’t force them to do so, no matter how much you love them. Everyone makes their own choice. What you can do for people who are suffering is shine brightly yourself. If they’re ready, they’ll wake up. If they don’t, trust the universe. We each wake up when the time is right. Their time might come later; it’s not up to you. You can share this book and other resources with them. You can share your story as I have shared mine, and perhaps these examples will inspire them. If and when each of us wakes up is our choice. UNLOCKING YOUR POTENTIAL As you live in synchrony with the universe, enjoying the community of other Bliss Brainers, you find new possibilities opening up. You start to unlock potential that’s been trapped inside the suffering, selfing self. Increasingly, you’re not just in Bliss Brain during meditation. You’re in the Awakened Mind state with your eyes open, going about your day. All kinds of possibilities that were previously unavailable to you now become available.

This process of merging with another individual in a duo or a larger group of musicians, or with an audience, is the essence of communication. There has to be a willingness to participate that comes from trusting or letting go to the energy and spirit of the music, whether you're a performer or a member of the audience. This communication is made possible by the silent rhythm that connects everyone. This is what allows for spontaneous magic to lift people into a state of perfect synchrony where everyone can perform and experience the music as one.

Il y a un autre raison qui fait dérailler un bon père de famille. À moins d'être d'un cynisme intégral, il sait que son existence, ce joli bagne prédisposant au suicide, est un immense privilège face aux milliards d'affamés. Au moment où ses enfants sont traînés, crochet aux fesses, vers les neiges immaculées des pistes, d'autres enfants, à quelques heures d'avion, sont démembrés par les bombes. Il sait que son séjour de ski est une façon de légitimer cette monde-là, cette synchronie de guerres et de fêtes, de famines et de populations d'obèses. Et, plus désespérant encore : cette milliards de pauvres, une fois repêchés de la misère, se transforment en prédateurs, pressés de rejoindre la « civilization » – celle qui fabrique un homme capable de consacrer sa vie à « la commercialisation des dérivés financiers et de la titrisation des actifs (215).

Ambivalence exists in all human relationships, including parent-child. Anna Freud maintained that a mother could never satisfy her infant's needs because those are infinite, but that eventually child and mother outgrow that dependence...In Torn in Tow, the British psycho analyst Rozsika Parker complains that in our open, modern society, the extent of maternal ambivalence is a dark secret. Most mothers treat their occasional wish to be rid of their children as if it were the equivalent of murder itself. Parker proposes that mothering requires two impulses - the impulse to hold on, and the impulse to push away. To be a successful mother you must nurture and love your child, but cannot smother and cling to your child. Mothering involves sailing between what Parker calls 'the Scylla of intrusiveness and the Charybdis of neglect.' She proposes that the sentimental idea of perfect synchrony between mother and child 'can cast a sort of sadness over motherhood - a constant state of mild regret that a delightful oneness seems always out of reach.' Perfection is a horizon virtue, and our very approach to it reveals its immutable distance. The dark portion of maternal ambivalence toward typical children is posited as crucial to the child's individuation. But severely disabled children who will never become independent will not benefit from their parents' negative feelings, and so their situation demands an impossible state of emotional purity. Asking the parents of severely disabled children to feel less negative emotion than parents of healthy children is ludicrous. My experience of these parents was that they all felt both love and despair. You cannot decide whether to be ambivalent/ All you can decide is what to do with your ambivalence. Most of these parents have chosen to act on one side of the ambivalence they feel, and Julia Hollander chose to act on another side, but I am not persuaded that the ambivalence itself was so different from one of these families to the next. I am enough of a creature of my times to admire most the parents who kept their children and made brave sacrifices for them. I nonetheless esteem Julia Hollander for being honest with herself, and for making what all those other families did look like a choice.

Since 1996, the Kuramoto model has turned up in other physical settings, from arrays of coupled lasers to the hypothesized oscillations of the wispy subatomic particles called neutrinos. We may be catching the first glimpses of a deep unity in the nature of sync. Whether there will be any practical applications remains to be seen. Given how many diseases are related to synchrony and its disruption (epilepsy, cardiac arrhythmias, chronic insomnia) and how many devices rely on synchrony (Josephson and laser arrays, electrical power grids, the global positioning system), it seems safe to say that a deeper understanding of spontaneous sync is bound to find practical benefit.

The widespread occurrence of the Kuramoto model raises the question of why this particular mathematical structure should be so common. To be honest, it probably isn’t all that common. I have focused on it because it is the only case of spontaneous synchrony we understand well. On theoretical grounds, one can show that it arises only whenever four specific conditions are met, and is not expected otherwise. First, the system in question must be built from an enormous number of components, each of which is a self-sustained oscillator. That is already a strong constraint. The individual elements must have extremely simple dynamics: pure rhythmicity along a standard cycle, without chaos or turbulence or anything complicated, just repetitive motion. Second, the oscillators must be weakly coupled, in the sense that the state of each oscillator can be characterized by its phase alone. If the coupling is strong enough to distort any oscillator’s amplitude significantly, the Kuramoto model will not apply. The third condition is the most restrictive: Each oscillator must be coupled equally strongly to all the others. Very few systems in nature are literally like that. Oscillators normally interact most strongly with their neighbors in space, or with a collection of virtual neighbors defined by a network of mutual influence. Finally, the oscillators must be nearly identical, and the amount of dispersion in their properties should be comparable to the weakness of their coupling.

Although synchrony is ubiquitous among living things, its function is not always obvious. Why, for instance, should fireflies flash in unison?

Although scientists are still struggling to understand the neural basis of human thoughts and feelings, it has recently become possible to eavesdrop on the mind as it recognizes a face, remembers a word, or snaps to attention. Neurobiologists have discovered that such acts of cognition are linked to a brief surge of neural synchrony, in which millions of far-flung brain cells suddenly switch on and off in precise lockstep at about 40 times a second, and then just as rapidly unravel to allow the next thought or perception to occur. If this view is right, a flash of insight is literally a burst of electrical synchrony, an instant when separate parts of the brain begin to harmonize.

sex which involves a healthy balance between physical pleasure and emotional bonding might be called ‘synchrony sex’ and reflects a secure tendency. Sex used largely for comfort and as a way to calm doubts or conflicts, which Johnson terms ‘solace sex’, suggests a

How does incoherence give birth to synchrony? It dawned on me one day that there was a straightforward way to frame the question as an exercise in differential equations: I needed to view incoherence as an equilibrium state and then calculate its stability.

lit up together like fireflies flashing in synchrony by whatever masterpiece is currently racing through our brains, bodies, and hearts.

One study found interesting gender differences regarding how pain and synchrony affect social bonding. For women, greater social bonding was reported for painful ritual without synchronized movements. For men, however, synchrony and pain created a greater sense of social bonding. One possible reason for this is that males, more than females, over our evolutionary history were responsible for coordinated violent action against perceived threats, which may have selected them for greater sensitivity to synchrony as a bonding mechanism.

In Ai terms, Nodal Synchrony is how they view expanded consciousness.

Above all, what is our culture, and what has remained of it? Is European culture perhaps nothing more than the technology and trade civilization that has marched triumphantly across the planet? Or is it instead a post-European culture born on the ruins of the ancient European cultures? There is a paradoxical synchrony in these developments. The victory of the post-European techno-secular world and the universalization of its lifestyle and thinking have spread the impression (especially in Asia and Africa) that Europe’s value system, culture, and faith (in other words, the very foundations of its identity) have reached the end of the road and have indeed already disappeared.

The cognitive sophistication of a mammalian species, in fact, is nicely predicted by the extent of the convergence that occurs in its cortex-more is present in humans than in monkeys, and more in monkeys than in rats. When plasticity occurs simultaneously in two regions that fed into a convergence zone, plasticity is also likely to occur in the convergence zone since it will be the recipient of the high level of activity that occurs when plasticity is being established in the individual regions. Obviously, synchrony and modulation also influence convergence zones, further increasing their potential to integrate information across systems.

A subtle urge to synchronize is pervasive in nature. Indeed, it drives the firing of thousands of pacemaker cells in the heart and brings into synchrony the menstrual cycles of women who live together for long periods of time.

happiness would confirm that the combination of physical synchrony with other humans and being part of something bigger than oneself (and thus losing momentarily a sense of self) leads to a greater sense of happiness, and that the rave scene was simply the modern-day version of similar experiences that humans have been having for tens of thousands of years.

Compression in a medium raises its temperature, and rarefaction induces cooling. Thus the distribution of temperature through the plasma patterned itself exactly in synchrony with the sound waves. Slightly warmer and cooler regions formed in space, marking extremes of high and low plasma density. As the universal song extended through time, these regions expanded, and they oscillated in temperature with the beat. Then the song of the plasma ended at the recombination phase of the universe, when matter abruptly thinned and stopped the music. However all of the sounds then playing left a ghostly imprint on the cosmos in the shape of final warm and cool patches in the radiation (photon) field of space. The patches were of varying sizes, depending on each particular acoustic wavelength in the pattern of overtones that existed when the song stopped playing. The largest patches of all were cool and represented the traces of the fundamental wave of the universal sounding board-stretching from earliest compression to final rarefaction at the time of recombination. From this time, the immortal song was recorded in light-temperature (the energy of photons), and even galaxies would eventually dance to its rhythms. This is a milestone in modern cosmological understanding of the universe in its infancy, elucidated during three decades of brilliant research involving numerous scientists from many countries.

It had been often commented upon that Vibe offspring tended to be crazy as bedbugs. ‘Fax’s brother Cragmont had run away with a trapeze girl, then brought her back to New York to get married, the wedding being actually performed on trapezes, groom and best man, dressed in tails and silk opera hats held on with elastic, swinging upside down by their knees in perfect synchrony across the perilous Æther to meet the bride and her father, a carnival “jointee” or concessionaire, in matched excursion from their own side of the ring, bridesmaids observed at every hand up twirling by their chins in billows of spangling, forty feet above the faces of the guests, feathers dyed a deep acid green sweeping and stirring the cigar smoke rising from the crowd. Cragmont Vibe was but thirteen that circus summer he became a husband and began what would become, even for the day, an enormous family. The third brother, Fleetwood, best man at this ceremony, had also got out of the house early, fast-talking his way onto an expedition heading for Africa. He kept as clear of political games as of any real scientific inquiry, preferring to take the title of “Explorer” literally, and do nothing but explore. It did not hurt Fleetwood’s chances that a hefty Vibe trust fund was there to pick up the bills for bespoke pith helmets and meat lozenges and so forth. Kit met him one spring weekend out at the Vibe manor on Long Island. “Say, but you’ve never seen our cottage,” ‘Fax said one day after classes. “What are you doing this weekend? Unless there’s another factory girl or pizza princess or something in the works.” “Do I use that tone of voice about the Seven Sisters material you specialize in?” “I’ve nothing against the newer races,” ‘Fax protested. “But you might like to meet Cousin Dittany anyway.” “The one at Smith.” “Mount Holyoke, actually.” “Can’t wait.” They arrived under a dourly overcast sky. Even in cheerier illumination, the Vibe mansion would have registered as a place best kept clear of—four stories tall, square, unadorned, dark stone facing looking much older than the known date of construction. Despite its aspect of abandonment, an uneasy tenancy was still pursued within, perhaps by some collateral branch of Vibes . . . it was unclear. There was the matter of the second floor. Only the servants were allowed there. It “belonged,” in some way nobody was eager to specify, to previous occupants. “Someone’s living there?” “Someone’s there.” . . . from time to time, a door swinging shut on a glimpse of back stairway, a muffled footfall . . . an ambiguous movement across a distant doorframe . . . a threat of somehow being obliged to perform a daily search through the forbidden level, just at dusk, so detailed that contact with the unseen occupants, in some form, at some unannounced moment, would be inevitable . . . all dustless and tidy, shadows in permanent possession, window-drapes and upholstery in deep hues of green, claret, and indigo, servants who did not speak, who would or could not meet one’s gaze . . . and in the next room, the next instant, waiting . . . “Real nice of you to have me here, folks,” chirped Kit at breakfast. “Fellow sleeps like a top. Well, except . . .” Pause in the orderly gobbling and scarfing. Interest from all around the table. “I mean, who came in the room in the middle of the night like that?” “You’re sure,” said Scarsdale, “it wasn’t just the wind, or the place settling.” “They were walking around, like they were looking for something.” Glances were exchanged, failed to be exchanged, were sent out but not returned. “Kit, you haven’t seen the stables yet,” Cousin Dittany offered at last. “Wouldn’t you like to go riding?

We bend time to make time with one another, and the many temporal distortions we experience are indicators of empathy; the better able I am to envisage myself in your body and your state of mind, and you in mine, the better we can each recognize a threat, an ally, a friend, or someone in need. But empathy is a fairly sophisticated trait, a mark of emotional adulthood; it takes learning and time. As children grow and develop empathy, they gain a better sense of how to navigate the social world. Put another way, it may be that a critical aspect of growing up is learning how to bend our time in step with others. We may be born alone, but childhood ends with a synchrony of clocks, as we lend ourselves fully to the contagion of time.

The waking brain, too, has an appetite for the generative chaos that rules in the dream state. Neurons share information by passing chemicals across the synaptic gap that connects them, but they also communicate via a more indirect channel: they synchronize their firing rates. For reasons that are not entirely understood, large clusters of neurons will regularly fire at the exact same frequency. (Imagine a discordant jazz band, each member following a different time signature and tempo, that suddenly snaps into a waltz at precisely 120 beats per minute.) This is what neuroscientists call phase-locking. There is a kind of beautiful synchrony to phase-locking—millions of neurons pulsing in perfect rhythm. But the brain also seems to require the opposite: regular periods of electrical chaos, where neurons are completely out of sync with each other. If you follow the various frequencies of brain-wave activity with an EEG, the effect is not unlike turning the dial on an AM radio: periods of structured, rhythmic patterns, interrupted by static and noise. The brain’s systems are “tuned” for noise, but only in controlled bursts.

Being correct is like the phase-lock states of the human brain, all the neurons firing in perfect synchrony. We need the phase-lock state for the same reason we need truth: a world of complete error and chaos would be unmanageable, on a social and a neurochemical level. (Not to mention genetic.) But leaving some room for generative error is important, too. Innovative environments thrive on useful mistakes, and suffer when the demands of quality control overwhelm them.

Strong leaders didn't help people align. In fact, groups with a dominant leader had the least amount of neural synchrony.

My mum always told me that when you know, you know. Your gut would zing, your heart would pitter and you’d feel unified in perfect synchrony. I always thought it was a load of crap, a cheap marketing tactic by horoscope spiritualists to tell you who and who not to date, and if you didn’t feel it, gasp! looks like you’re destined to be forever alone. But in that moment, I felt all three.