Good Friday.

Interbrain synchrony.

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1. The daily edition of News Items is off-line for the Easter break. We will return on Monday. There are, however, three quick items to share.

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2. Marta Zaraska:

Dozens of recent experiments studying the brain activity of people performing and working together — duetting pianists, card players, teachers and students, jigsaw puzzlers and others — show that their brain waves can align in a phenomenon known as interpersonal neural synchronization, also known as interbrain synchrony.

“There’s now a lot of research that shows that people interacting together display coordinated neural activities,” said Giacomo Novembre, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Italian Institute of Technology in Rome, who published a key paper on interpersonal neural synchronization last summer. The studies have come out at an increasing clip over the past few years — one as recently as last week — as new tools and improved techniques have honed the science and theory.

They’re finding that synchrony between brains has benefits. It’s linked to better problem-solving, learning and cooperation, and even with behaviors that help others at a personal cost. What’s more, recent studies in which brains were stimulated with an electric current hint that synchrony itself might cause the improved performance observed by scientists.

“Cognition is something that happens not just in the skull but in connection with the environment and with other people,” said Guillaume Dumas, a professor of computational psychiatry at the University of Montreal. Understanding when and how our brains synchronize could help us communicate more efficiently, design better classrooms and help teams cooperate. (Source: quantamagazine.org)

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3. A.E. Housman’s ‘Easter Hymn’:

If in that Syrian garden, ages slain,
You sleep, and know not you are dead in vain,
Nor even in dreams behold how dark and bright
Ascends in smoke and fire by day and night
The hate you died to quench and could but fan,
Sleep well and see no morning, son of man.

But if, the grave rent and the stone rolled by,
At the right hand of majesty on high
You sit, and sitting so remember yet
Your tears, your agony and bloody sweat,
Your cross and passion and the life you gave,
Bow hither out of heaven and see and save. (Source: allpoetry.com)

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4. Laure’s Weekend Movie Pick:

More baseball ⚾️ because it’s the first baseball movie I ever saw with my father in the theater AND because it’s Redford:

“The Natural” (1984) - directed by Barry Levinson and produced by Mark Johnson. Cast of stars includes Robert Redford, Glenn Close, and Kim Basinger. The film details the life of baseball player Roy Hobbs and his unconventional path to fame. (Sources: imdb.com, Laure Sudreau)

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See you Monday.