When two people interact, their brain activity becomes synchronized, but it was unclear until now to what extent this “brain-to-brain coupling” is due to linguistic information or other factors, such as body language or tone of voice.

Researchers report August 2 in the journal Neuron that brain-to-brain coupling during conversation can be modeled by considering the words used during that conversation, and the context in which they are used.

“We can see linguistic content emerge word-by-word in the speaker’s brain before they actually articulate what they’re trying to say, and the same linguistic content rapidly reemerges in the listener’s brain after they hear it,” says first author and neuroscientist Zaid Zada of Princeton University.

For generations, researchers have been pondering the question of how and where consciousness is formed in the brain. Professor Ekrem Dere from Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, proposes a new approach to researching conscious cognitive information processing. He advocates defining phases of conscious cognitive processes on the basis of behavioral observations and learning curves.

“Learning is often not a gradual process, but takes place in leaps and bounds; you could say that humans and animals experience sudden epiphanies every now and then,” he says. “It’s likely that these experiences are preceded by conscious processes.”

Dere outlines his new approach, which might apply to both humans and animals, in an article published in the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.

Your mind’s eye exists somewhere on a sprawling continuum.

Neuroscience research into people with aphantasia, who don’t experience mental imagery, is revealing how imagination works and demonstrating the sweeping variety in our subjective experiences.