Both social and engineering factors must be further explored and scrutinized across the globe—as should notions of justice related to flooding impacts and responses.
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Communicated by Charles G. Gross, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, June 18, 2010 (received for review April 30, 2010)
↵1G.J.S. and L.J.S. contributed equally to this work.
Abstract
Verbal communication is a joint activity; however, speech production and comprehension have primarily been analyzed as independent processes within the boundaries of individual brains. Here, we applied fMRI to record brain activity from both speakers and listeners during natural verbal communication. We used the speaker's spatiotemporal brain activity to model listeners’ brain activity and found that the speaker's activity is spatially and temporally coupled with the listener's activity. This coupling vanishes when participants fail to communicate. Moreover, though on average the listener's brain activity mirrors the speaker's activity with a delay, we also find areas that exhibit predictive anticipatory responses. We connected the extent of neural coupling to a quantitative measure of story comprehension and find that the greater the anticipatory speaker–listener coupling, the greater the understanding. We argue that the observed alignment of production- and comprehension-based processes serves as a mechanism by which brains convey information.
Footnotes
- 2To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: hasson{at}princeton.edu.
Author contributions: G.J.S., L.J.S., and U.H. designed research, performed research, contributed new reagents/analytic tools, analyzed data, and wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1008662107/-/DCSupplemental.
Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.
Speaker–listener neural coupling underlies successful communication
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