About ten years ago, a friend of mine suggested that I join our local town’s chorale. Singing with other people is deeply pleasurable, she told me. So I joined the chorale and discovered exactly what she meant. As we sang, I felt a bond with the other singers – and with the conductor too. When the conductor looked at us, gestured, and waved his baton, we began to sing. We connected and made music together. Oliver Sacks writes about the communal experience of music in his book Musicophilia, suggesting that, in some sense, shared music seems to create a binding together of nervous systems.
Is a similar connection formed during face-to-face conversation, that is, during exchanges when we look at one another, smile, frown, gesture, and take turns talking?   The fact that we have a special area of our brain devoted to recognizing faces and facial expressions suggests that face-to-face dialog is important. And a recent paper in the Journal of Neuroscience indicates that this is indeed the case.Â
