It's official: Human minds do meet

The old adage that when two people 'click' in conversation, they have a meeting of minds, has now got scientific backing.

A team at Princeton University has based its findings on an analysis of brain scans of 11 people as they listened to a woman recounting a story, the New Scientist reported.

The scans showed that the listeners' brain patterns tracked those of the storyteller almost exactly, though trailed one to three seconds behind. But in some listeners, brain patterns even preceded those of the storyteller.

"We found that the participants' brains became intimately coupled during the course of the 'conversation', with the responses in the listener's brain mirroring those in the speaker's," said team leader Uri Hasson.

Hasson's team monitored the strength of this coupling by measuring the extent of the pattern overlap.

Listeners with the best overlap were also judged to be the best at retelling the tale. He said: "The more similar our brain patterns during a conversation, the better we understand each other".

There was no match between the brain patterns of the storyteller and the listeners, however, when they heard the same story in Russian, which they could not understand. The findings have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.