Last year ended with an important experiment out of Finland, though few recognized its significance.

Human pairs played a car racing video game together and their brains went into a state called Synchrony — an observable scientific fact where people begin to unconsciously coordinate facial expressions, body movements, respiration, and even brain activity.

“Inter-brain synchronization occurs without physical co-presence during cooperative online gaming”

Sounds reasonable, people are good mimics.

Except these pairs were separated, each person in a different room, unable to see or hear one another, no text or VOIP, all communication cut off other than the digital act of playing — one steering and one driving — and their brains synced anyway.

This might seem like a mundane event, of interest only to a committed neuroscientist, but in the digital age the importance of this development touches us all.

In the last few years, the march of exponential technologies has also advanced the field of hyperscanning, a neuroimaging technique that involves simultaneously recording the brain activity of two or more people while they engage in social activity allowing insight into neural mechanisms under cooperation, social cognition, group flow, and an endless range of social interactions.

Until Finland, it was believed that you needed to be in the same place, or at least on zoom, to sync, but this belief is now shattered, and with it limits on what’s possible for humans in the digital age when the assumption that human biology can’t coordinate, sight-unseen, across exponential technologies is no longer true.

I wonder…

What do our communities look like when we amplify this human ability?

How would a biologically connected humanity match up to artificial intelligence?

What other natural abilities will technology allow us to witness and then cultivate?