We all know the iconic four fingers on the face and chant "My mind, to your mind. Your thoughts, to my thoughts", other wise known as the Vulcan Mind Meld. Spock has used it numerous times to get the Enterprise and her crew out of immediate peril. Heck, he even used it to on Kim Catrall, but unfortunately her brain was empty. Apparently, scientists are now showing that good conversations can cause brain coupling and "may shed light on the mechanisms by which our brains interact and bind to form societies." Sounds like a Vulcan mind meld, right? Well, sort of.

In a new journal study by the National Academy of Sciences, participant's brain scans show similar firing neurons during "successful communication" and sometimes even show mirrored firing neurons. Some say that this mirroring effect is the starting point for empathy in the human brain.

"The findings shown here indicate that during successful communication, speakers' and listeners' brains exhibit joint, temporally coupled, response patterns. Such neural coupling substantially diminishes in the absence of communication, such as when listening to an unintelligible foreign language. Moreover, more extensive speaker–listener neural couplings result in more successful communication. We further show that on average the listener's brain activity mirrors the speaker's brain activity with temporal (time) delays. Such delays are in agreement with the flow of information across communicators and imply a causal relationship by which the speaker's production-based processes induce and shape the neural responses in the listener's brain."

But can these brain scans tell you who's conspiring to kill the President of the Federation? I didn't think so.

(info source USA Today)