Best friends’ brains light up the same way

PARIS: Dating sites would be well-advised to add “brain activity” as a compatability criterion, according to a study released Tuesday showing that close friends have eerily comparable neural responses to life experiences.

“Our results suggest that friends process the world around them in exceptionally similar ways,” said lead author Carolyn Parkinson, director of the Computational Social Neuroscience Lab at the University of California in Los Angeles.

Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to compare which regions of the brain lit up as 42 volunteers watched short clips from news reports, music videos, comedy skits and documentaries, researchers were able to identify who among them were friends. The closer the relationship, the more alike the neural patterns in parts of the brain governing emotional response, high-level reasoning, and the capacity to focus one’s attention.

“Friends had the most similar neural activity patterns, followed by friends-of-friends,” the authors said in a statement. “You can predict who people are friends with just by looking at how their brains respond to the video clips.”