[HN Gopher] When listeners pay attention to stories, their heart...
___________________________________________________________________
When listeners pay attention to stories, their heart rates rise and
fall in sync
Author : pseudolus
Score : 176 points
Date : 2021-09-29 12:09 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.pnas.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.pnas.org)
| dougmwne wrote:
| A silly study? But think of the use cases! The Wristband monitors
| everyone's heat rate and knows the correct response to each media
| input. "It seems you have stopped paying attention to your
| targeted advertising. Shall I replay your ads now?"
| teddyh wrote:
| Please drink a verification can.
| warent wrote:
| This sounds like something straight out of Futurama
| teddyh wrote:
| It's a famous so-called "greentext":
|
| https://imgur.com/dgGvgKF
| raesene9 wrote:
| I honestly will not be surprised when this comment gets turned
| into a start-up that gets funded...
|
| either this or the other obvious dystopian application,
| monitoring employees attention in meetings.
| dougmwne wrote:
| I would be so screwed. They might as well start applying the
| electric shocks.
| withinboredom wrote:
| So would I. My heart rate rarely goes above 60 when
| sitting.
| imutemyteam wrote:
| You Kinky.
| wongarsu wrote:
| We are getting to the point where we can infer pulse rate
| from sufficiently good video [1]. Same for breathing. Eye
| tracking is well studied. So just combine all that into a
| single device, an AttentionScanner(tm) for your meeting room.
| This device could mark infractions to help in the yearly
| performance review, or help employees stay alert directly by
| delivering small electroshocks via their smart bracelet [2].
| Contact our sales department now (/s)
|
| 1: https://spectrum.ieee.org/smartphone-camera-senses-
| patients-...
|
| 2: https://pavlok.com/
| mjoin wrote:
| That's black mirror shit up there
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| Listen to joona linna series by Lars Kepler and see your
| wristband explode. Same for keeper of lost causes department Q.
| dang wrote:
| How about biofeedback for developing (and training) connection
| between people? I'd give that a try for sure.
| cheschire wrote:
| Or lie detectors. Especially when employed to monitor entire
| rooms at once.
|
| "Your response during the two-minutes hate did not show wide
| enough variation in response to scenes of our enemy Oceania and
| images of Big Brother. Please report for conditioning."
|
| Sure, it may not be at the government level except at certain
| agencies, however imagine when this sort of mentality is used
| to measure corporate culture. Your subconscious responses
| during your annual reviews and corporate pep rallies may take
| on a whole new dynamic.
| [deleted]
| tartoran wrote:
| When people have a common shared experience they have similar
| responses, who would have thought!!!
| teddyh wrote:
| Fake headline. This is not the usual meaning of the word
| "synchronize". As many other commenters here point out, this
| makes the story a non-story. Strictly speaking, the headline is
| true in that the heart _rates_ "synchronize", but not the heart
| _beats_ , which I would think that most people would mis-read the
| headline as.
| Symmetry wrote:
| An alien visiting from another planet might not be aware that
| there's a correlation among humans in what they find exciting
| and that changes in heart rate correlate with excitement.
| dang wrote:
| Ok you guys, I didn't think the title was so bad, but I've put
| "in sync" up there to accommodate you. Let's discuss the more
| interesting stuff now?
| teddyh wrote:
| That's perfectly adequate, yes. It also makes the story a
| completely obvious "Well, duh!", as it should be.
| 0x000000001 wrote:
| Yeah the title had me very curious about how that would work
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| There's some synchronization effects in metronomes and in
| industrial equipment. If you have several things that can
| oscillate, perhaps not at precisely the same rate but close,
| and the motions reinforce each other when they do achieve the
| same rate, you can get surprising synchronization.
|
| For an intuitive example, see this Veritasium video, starting
| at around 4:50: https://youtu.be/t-_VPRCtiUg?t=292.
|
| This happens in crowds of people, for an example, the London
| Millenium pedestrian bridge wobble: https://en.wikipedia.org/
| wiki/Millennium_Bridge,_London#Reso....
|
| I was initially curious how this could happen with a heart
| rate; I could imagine some shared feedback mechanism for
| walking, or breathing, but a shared feedback for heart rate
| was surprising. Perhaps if they were touching, and there was
| some electrical or pressure-sensitive pulse? Disappointing
| that it's merely the delta between exciting and dull parts of
| the stories.
| jb1991 wrote:
| And even then, the actual rate itself is unlikely to
| synchronize, only the delta on the rate over time. You don't
| put a bunch of people in a room, tell them all a story, and
| they all suddenly have 65 bpm rates.
| beeforpork wrote:
| Shoot. Just as I was just constructing the perfect murder
| story.
| [deleted]
| PH01 wrote:
| Agreed. The headline is fascinating the content is appalling.
|
| PNAS reporting the shocking news that peoples heart rates tend
| to increase during the exciting part of a story and that an
| increased rate leads to higher correlation between subjects.
|
| Edit: Without naming any author in particular - does anyone
| else spot a pattern whereby certain researchers consistently
| hype their findings to the point of borderline dishonesty?
| agarsev wrote:
| In academia, you're often evaluated on "impact". So you have
| an incentive to be impactful, not truthful, and while many
| (most?) try to be honest in the content, hyping the title is
| an easy way to increase your metric (impact) while not having
| a very bad conscience because "everyone does it" and "the
| truth is in the contents, actually"
| kryz wrote:
| The actual phrase here is "synchronization of HR fluctuations"
| londons_explore wrote:
| I would not be surprised if under certain very specific
| conditions heart beats couldn't be made to synchronise.
|
| For example doing a dance to music where muscles in the chest
| might 'nudge' heartbeat phases of otherwise very similar
| individuals into synchronisation.
|
| It is after all pretty hard to make an oscillator which isn't
| affected by any environmental effects, and there is no reason
| to believe nature has managed it, especially when there is no
| real biological need to.
| conjectures wrote:
| Not sure we can fault them if it is a justified true headline
| but we expect that 'other people' can't read.
|
| Per the Wason selection task this is a great experiment to run,
| because if it _isn 't true_ then that's strong evidence many
| more complex theories relating to sync are likely to be false.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| I agree with OP's point: the word synchronize implies that
| two things begin to share some common value. In this case,
| the heart rates share similar behavior (not ~exact BPMs), but
| I think most folks wouldn't choose the words used to describe
| this.
|
| A more apt title might say "the changes in their heart rates
| synchronize".
| kindle-dev wrote:
| Fake comment. The headline uses the word rates not beats. Not
| everything can be perfectly unambiguous all the time.
| tuxone wrote:
| Well, still it's not the rates that are synchronized but the
| rate rises and falls are.
| wongarsu wrote:
| "Their heart rates change in unison" seems like a perfectly
| fine interpretation of "their heart rates are synchronized"
| that matches the observations. It is in fact what I
| expected when I read the headline. Maybe the headline could
| have been even more explicit, but I don't think it's
| intentionally deceiving.
| sethammons wrote:
| I find your two quoted lines as vastly different. The
| first is accurate and the second is not. Synchronized
| means to happen at the same time. For a rate to be
| synchronized, I expect the same rate value at the same
| time (each person at say 65bpm). If the rate change is in
| sync, I expect the same rate of change value for each
| person (everyone is slowing their heart rate at 2bpm per
| minute). In unison means at the same time (but not the
| same value).
|
| One headline means we are excited at the same time, the
| other says we mysteriously communicate the state of our
| heart to our neighbors.
|
| Edit; a concrete example. Let's synchronize watches, you
| move yours forward quickly and I'll move mine forward
| quickly. Even though we moved in unison, we are not
| synchronized and showing the same time together.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| To put it more simply, one reading implies special heart
| --to-heart telepathy and the other implies normal
| physiological responses in a shared space.
| manwe150 wrote:
| I assume the 'mysterious communication' would be the
| cadence of the reader, which could have been a remarkable
| feat. Can we influence heart beats externally
| (indirectly), say with sound, and nudge it into holding a
| rhythm? The story can increase/relax it, so perhaps
| individualized broadcasts could theoretically be used to
| synchronize the beats precisely (in the second sense)?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It's the same difference as if two cars were told to
| "synchronise speeds" (rates) and instead they
| synchronised accelerations (rates of change).
| Jensson wrote:
| A headline which gives people the wrong impression is
| still misinformation. It makes the world less informed
| than before, as people rarely read articles after reading
| the headlines.
|
| Edit: And it is super important to point out this
| misinformation in the top comment to an article, so that
| we can correct as many people as possible. So stating
| that this is misinformation isn't just some pedantic
| complaining, it helps correct the view of a lot of people
| and maybe will help make more people think a bit before
| writing headlines.
| [deleted]
| d88 wrote:
| As the list of ways to trigger and activate the chimp brain gets
| refined, how long before we end up with something like a Laser
| for society?
|
| The echo chambers on social media and reinforcement/amplification
| they produce seems to be very similar to the mechanism to
| generate coherent light. Does analogy break somehow?
|
| Instead of syncing waves or particles just button press and sync
| a bunch of humans brains.
|
| I guess armies and religion and politics and sports have been
| doing that (unsuprisingly through stories) but to achieve it
| instantly seems very possible the way things are going.
|
| I mean the Speed at which ppl on social media or news media or
| the russians (sorry russians! I just mean whoever is motivated
| enough) can get the herd to stampede in a partucular direction,
| seems to be increasing.
|
| How long before its instant? After all, its just chemicals being
| activated at the end of the day.
| playpause wrote:
| > something like a Laser for society
|
| What does that mean?
| nxbso wrote:
| In a laser you are basically getting photons to behave
| exactly the same way. Trillions of them.
|
| To do that two things are required, keep a bunch of atoms
| continually excited by heat, electricity, whatever. And
| secondly, an echo chamber (think a tube with mirrors where
| photons fly back and forth). This sets up chain reactions.
| Each photon that flies thro an excited atom produces another
| photon which mysteriously has the exact same speed, color,
| phase as the original. Then you get a cascade as they bump
| into other excited atoms.
|
| The comment is saying, replace atoms with humans, photons
| with human action?, social media/news media/russians as
| source of excitation and amplification and you probably can
| get a whole bunch of humans in sync.
|
| Should point out no one really knew what to do with lasers
| for a long time after they were discovered.
| mistermann wrote:
| It's a stretched analogy, but humans do kind of exhibit the
| ability to behave either as individual "particles", but also in
| waves, kind of analogous to a large body of water when calm vs
| in storm conditions.
| SimeVidas wrote:
| I don't know why, but whenever I check my heart rate with a
| stopwatch, my heart beats synchronize with the watch ticks almost
| immediately (my normal pulse is 60 bpm). You'd think the
| likelihood of that happening is fairly low, but it happens almost
| every time.
| Cerium wrote:
| Have you tried it against something you can control the
| frequency of, such as a strobe light? If you slowly turn the
| frequency down or up will your heart follow?
| pjerem wrote:
| Why bother doing cardio exercising when you can just turn up
| the strobe light button ?
| ramblenode wrote:
| > This correlation of heart rates, described this month in Cell
| Reports, could one day lead to new tools for measuring
| attentiveness, both in the classroom and the clinic.
|
| Shame such interesting science inspires such dystopian
| machinations.
|
| "People synchronize their bodies when absorbed in attention." -->
| "How can schools use this to make sure students are paying
| attention?"
|
| Please don't.
| peterburkimsher wrote:
| Synchronising happens all the time! Not only with people, even
| with animals, and even pendulum clocks on rollers.
|
| We clap along together to the beat of songs, and the physical
| movement causes our heartbeat to change and therefore
| synchronise. Sharing that experience is a good thing!
|
| When walking around the local supermarket, I noticed that
| everyone was walking in-step. Then I took off my headphones,
| and noticed that they were following the beat of the piped
| music in the background. It was much easier to navigate the
| store without conflict or bumping into people, because we had
| that shared clock signal.
|
| Could background music, or even something more simple like a
| ticking clock, make people more synchronised with each other? I
| think it could be a good thing.
| ptr2voidStar wrote:
| Faith in humanity restored. I came here to make the very point
| you so eloquently made.
| pugworthy wrote:
| Another way to phrase it would be "How can schools know if they
| are engaging with their students?"
|
| Or, "How can teachers better understand what engages students
| and what doesn't engage them?"
|
| That said, a good storyteller or teacher knows if they are
| engaging their audience (or failing to) and can adjust for
| better engagement. Bad ones don't know this, or even if they
| do, don't necessarily know what to do about it.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| The immediate concern is that, if a metric indicates a
| problem, who will be forced to change? The student or the
| teacher? If Mrs. Smith realizes little Timmy isn't paying
| attention, is she going to accept and consider the
| possibility she is boring, or just punish Timmy? For
| perspective, consider how often children are currently
| drugged when they are found not to be paying attention in
| school.
|
| Privacy may play a useful role here in directing us toward
| the good futures rather than the bad. For example, maybe
| schools are allowed to use heart rate attention monitors, but
| the data must be aggregated and anonimized. It's okay for
| Mrs. Smith to learn that 74% of her X (where X is greater
| than 50) students pay attention when she speaks and this puts
| her at Y percentile of teachers across the country in her
| subject. It's not okay for her to know the attentiveness of
| individual students.
|
| Of course, in reality I have zero hope that this would be
| used in a positive way.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| I'm reminded of Snow Crash:
|
| _Y.T. 's mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and
| starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes.
| Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup,
| sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the
| name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent
| reading this memo..._
|
| _Y.T. 's mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen
| minutes reading the memo. It's better for younger workers to
| spend too long, to show that they're careful, not cocky. It's
| better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good
| management potential. She's pushing forty. She scans through
| the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular
| intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread
| some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this.
| It approves of rereading. It's a small thing, but over a decade
| or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary._
|
| (Text copied from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17067951
| . Neat that googling for the quote brought me right back to
| HN.)
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Exactly my thought. Instead of saying "hey, isn't this a really
| interesting finding and maybe we could use it to help people
| get over anxiety" or something like that, they go the dystopian
| route.
|
| But I do wonder if they go that direction because they're
| interested in corporate funding for their research and that
| could be a way to get it.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| It doesn't have to be so dystopian.
|
| It could be used as a way to detect when your audience loses
| attention and needs a break.
| [deleted]
| LuisMondragon wrote:
| They turned something beautiful and poetic into a Black Mirror
| prompt.
| hosh wrote:
| Oddball question: I wonder if that syncing happens with people
| who are not neurotypical -- examples, ADHD, Autism, etc.
|
| Are the syncing happening because of following along the
| narrative structure and character emotions? What about use of
| music scores, visual cues, etc.?
|
| To what extent of this syncing happens with personality types or
| emotional states? For example, do extroverts tend to sync more
| than introverts? If someone is relaxed and attentive vs. someone
| is anxious and distracted, how much would that change?
| motohagiography wrote:
| Am following this topic from another thread on HN today about
| soundscapes and binaural beats, and what is the theoretical
| framework behind it, or is it just sympathetic magic?
|
| I was in a meeting yesterday about the truth and reconciliation
| stuff going on in Canada right now, and the first hour of the
| meeting was given to people who were sharing their experiences of
| residential schools by telling stories about them. The
| storytellers were fantastic, and one of them had a mesmerising
| and hypnotic effect that I was trying to isolate as a technique.
| I could see others attempting it as well. I had seen a similar
| story telling technique used by top professional stage actors in
| the past. When you watch the documentary, "Wild Wild Country,"
| which is about charismatic spiritual leadership, they use a
| similar verbal mesmerism technique that can give people "chills,"
| which are also physiological response, just not a cardiogram
| effect.
|
| Working in tech, one encounters improbable clusters of
| professors, behavioral economics readers, intelligence
| operatives, ad-tech designers, political campaign operatives,
| magicians, hypnotists, practitioners of so-called NLP, "pick up
| artists," con artists, and other people who practice and apply
| systematized methods of persuasion. My interest in it is mainly
| for experimenting with music, but my own practice of a simlar
| dynamic would be exercising craft as a writer.
|
| Of what is this synchronization and mesmerism the effect?
| carapace wrote:
| It seems to be a very general phenomenon, first noticed by
| Christiaan Huygens.
|
| E.g. "32 Metronome Synchronization"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v5eBf2KwF8
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiaan_Huygens
|
| See also "entrainment":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainwave_entrainment
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrainment_(biomusicology)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrainment_(chronobiology)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrainment_(physics) etc.
|
| There also seems (to some people) to be some form of
| "energetic" aspect to mesmerism/charisma but this has been
| contested going right back to Mesmer and Ben Franklin (in the
| West.) It's been rediscovered (and "debunked") several times in
| the last couple of centuries, for example Baron Von
| Reichenbach's "Odic force" and Wilhelm Reich's "Orgone". I
| should not fail to mention "chi" or "qi" in this context.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_magnetism
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odic_force
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgone
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi
|
| Gurdjieff called it "being-Hanbledzoin" and said:
|
| > "Hanbledzoin is nothing else than the 'blood' of the Kesdjan
| body of the being; just as the cosmic substances called in
| totality blood serve for nourishing and renewing the planetary
| body of the being, so also Hanbledzoin serves in the same way
| for nourishing and perfecting the body Kesdjan.
|
| https://gurdjieff.work/ae/terms/en50/0238.htm
|
| To the scientific skeptic this is all nonsense, of course.
| warent wrote:
| I remember studies that showed brainwaves also synchronize
| between people who are interacting, especially intimately, and
| close romantic partners who have been together for many years
| often maintain a synchronization even when apart.
|
| Maybe related to that? In any case the human body and mind are
| wonderfully mysterious
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hyperscans-show-h...
| mcbuilder wrote:
| I'm not an expert on this exact subject, but my PhD was in
| computational neuroscience, specifically spiking neural
| networks, and I became a bit interested in the area of binaural
| beats. On exposure to binaural beats, neural networks in the
| brain can to synchronize in patterns that can be observed in
| EEG recordings (eg, Theta or Beta oscillations). So, while the
| science is conflicting and not settled there is plenty of
| actual research into this area. See
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00426-018-1066-8 for
| a recent meta-analysis.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| I once read that this effect with binaural beats only works
| with traditional electromagnetic headphones and doesn't
| appear when the kind of acoustic headphones used in MRI
| machines are used, but I can't for the life of me find a
| source on that. Any idea if this is true?
| mistermann wrote:
| > The storytellers were fantastic, and one of them had a
| mesmerising and hypnotic effect that I was trying to isolate as
| a technique. I could see others attempting it as well.
|
| Complete wild guess here, but I wonder if the indigenous
| speaking style might have developed from story telling during
| sweat lodge ceremonies?
|
| > My interest in it is mainly for experimenting with music, but
| my own practice of a simlar dynamic would be exercising craft
| as a writer.
|
| I've never been to one, but from anecdotal stories I've read,
| EDM concerts (especially when combined with psychedelics, which
| is pretty common) are often described as if they have a
| religious ritual element to them. Whatever it is, psychedelics
| + EDM music certainly does something very strange to the mind,
| and group chanting rituals can be found all over the place in
| different cultures throughout history.
| Lidbob wrote:
| Quantum Phase Coherence. Sustaining it requires a lot of energy
| though.
| anotheryou wrote:
| So basically: story telling works; the exciting parts of stories
| are exciting to more than one person at a time when told in
| public. %)
| aaron695 wrote:
| The headline is a lie, of course.
|
| The idea is interesting.
|
| If the second derivative of heart beats is linked strongly to
| media and comprehension then your Fitbit like device can help
| with learning.
|
| As a startup your data is free. You could see the pattern of
| comprehension quickly on any media from user data, get the base
| line and use that to help others.
|
| In reality I'd bet the data is so weak you would not be able to
| use it for much. They found it statistically better than random.
| That's not enough to make calls off.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| > [...] could one day lead to new tools for measuring
| attentiveness, both in the classroom and the clinic.
|
| The day they will finally get me.
| prox wrote:
| Yeah, this really sounds sucky to use this in a classroom.
| Slacking is a basic human right!
|
| "Oh no, everything is not optimized 100% for efficiency!"
| sounds a lot like the Borg from Star Trek.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| Note that this doesn't mean their hearts beat in sync, only that
| their heart rate tends to rise or fall in sync.
| rusk wrote:
| In fairness were it the meaning of _synchronous_ that engineers
| are familiar with now that would be truly astounding.
|
| I'm happy to accept the more liberal interpretation of the term
| as not all knowledge of merit need be readily appreciated by
| the technical eye.
| causi wrote:
| I'm not seeing what about this isn't obvious. If you stimulate a
| crowd of people by firing a gun into the air they all react at
| the same time. If you stimulate a group of people with a stimulus
| it's possible to ignore like a story only the ones not ignoring
| it will react.
| B-Con wrote:
| While interesting, not too surprising, right? Their heart rates
| will be low during the calm parts, high during the tense parts,
| etc.
| johnswas wrote:
| It depends though. If it's your mom talking, there won't be any
| heart rates at all.
| corobo wrote:
| s/synchronize/rise and fall in sync/
|
| Maybe I'm being a bit of a jerk but.. yeah?
|
| The suspenseful parts of the story raise your heart rate and the
| relaxed parts go t'other way
|
| I'd be interested in knowing if this could be used for diagnosing
| mental disorder things such as sociopathy maybe
| wongarsu wrote:
| It's effectively measuring emotional response to fictional
| events, which sounds like a plausible way to diagnose a huge
| range of mental disorders. But if the subject wants to be
| diagnosed, why not just ask them how something made them feel?
| And if they don't want to be diagnosed (like you would expect
| for some sociopaths, pedophiles etc.) this won't help. If a
| full polygraph can't be proven to work against unwilling
| suspects, then one fourth of a polygraph won't work either.
| corobo wrote:
| > just ask them how something made them feel
|
| Fair point. I was trying to throw the study a bone instead of
| declare it completely useless
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I think it'll be good for developing a Voight-Kampff
| prototype.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| I've always been bad at telling stories. Listeners would more
| likely fall asleep in sync than have their hearts racing.
|
| HN have any tips, tricks, books or blogs to help with story
| telling skills?
| conductr wrote:
| I'm bad as well. But if I were to set out to improve, I'd just
| listen to more deliberate storytelling. Then practice, write,
| edit, tell, and tell again. The craft of stand up comedy has
| always interested me and you can find some nuggets by listening
| to popular comedians talk about how they develop a skit or
| entire performance.
| corobo wrote:
| Circle around a punchline until you're done with your story or
| the audience is bored
|
| It doesn't matter if you were boring or not if you end on a
| laugh, people remember the laugh
|
| You're also allowed to write and rehearse your stories in
| advance :)
| lupire wrote:
| TL;DR: People respond similarly to same stimulus. Heart rate
| response to excitement isn't primarily a function of who you are.
|
| Thanks for the verification research, but this is ancient common
| knowledge.
| toss1 wrote:
| OK, so it is everyone speeding up or slowing down heart rates at
| similar parts of the story, not all the listeners synchronizing
| heartbeats with each other so all heartbeats are simultaneous
| (when I read the headline, I thought it was talking about a
| phenomena like synchronizing metronomes [1])
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T58lGKREubo
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-09-30 23:02 UTC)