The team used data obtained from three fMRI tasks with 14 graduate students who had known each other for at least two years. 'The surprising part of our findings was that the shared information about personally familiar faces also extends to areas that are non-visual and important for social processing, suggesting that there is shared social information across brains.'įor the study, the research team applied a method called hyperalignment, which creates a common representational space for understanding how brain activity is similar between participants.

'Within visual processing areas, we found that information about personally familiar and visually familiar faces is shared across the brains of people who have the same friends and acquaintances,' says first author Matteo Visconti di Oleggio Castello, Guarini '18, who conducted this research as a graduate student in psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth and is now a neuroscience post-doctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.

The long dark codes