Good communication is a matter of getting “in sync” with others, as you’ve probably noticed when you’ve seen people match their steps perfectly as they walk, and imitate each other’s gestures as they talk, and use each other’s phrases and grammar. Last week, this paper reported  this kind of coordination in the most important place of all: When people converse, it reports, regions of their brains synchronize their activity. “Neural coupling,” they argue, is a key part of communication.

Uri Hasson, Lauren Silbert and Greg Stephens recorded Silbert telling a 15-minute story while an MRI scanner recorded changes in activity levels in various regions of her brain. The researchers then played the recording to 11 volunteers while their brains were MRI-ed. As they listened, the paper reports, their brains’ patterns of activity matched Silbert’s.

The work is a nice departure from models that look for activity in “thebrain,”…