你和你的好朋友有無數共同點,連腦電波都相似
A friend will help you move, goes an old saying, while a good friend will help you move a body. And why not? Moral qualms aside, that good friend would most likely agree the victim was an intolerable jerk who had it coming and, jeez, you shouldn’t have done this but where do you keep the shovel?
有句老話說，朋友願幫你搬家，而好朋友願幫你搬屍體。怎麼會不願呢？撇去道德方面的顧慮不說，這位好朋友也很有可能認爲這個受害者是個令人難以容忍的混蛋，罪有應得，那麼，天吶，你不該這麼做的，不過你把鐵鏟放哪了？New research suggests the roots of friendship extend even deeper than previously suspected. Scientists have found that the brains of close friends respond in remarkably similar ways as they view a series of short videos: the same ebbs and swells of attention and distraction, the same peaking of reward processing here, boredom alerts there.
新的研究表明，友誼的根基比我們猜想的還要深。科學家們發現，親密的朋友在觀看一系列短片時，他們的大腦會以非常相似的方式做出反應：注意力的集中與分散有着相同的起落，時而出現相同的獎勵反應高峯，時而又有相同的厭倦警示。The neural response patterns evoked by the videos — on subjects as diverse as the dangers of college football, the behavior of water in outer space, and Liam Neeson trying his hand at improv comedy — proved so congruent among friends, compared with patterns seen among people who were not friends, that the researchers could predict the strength of two people’s social bond based on their brain scans alone.
視頻的內容多種多樣，有大學足球的危險、外太空裏水的特性、連姆·尼森(Liam Neeson)嘗試即興喜劇表演。與不是朋友的人相比，視頻在朋友之間引發的神經反應模式是如此的一致，以至於研究人員甚至可以單憑兩個人的大腦掃描推測出他們社會關係的親疏。
“I was struck by the exceptional magnitude of similarity among friends,” said Carolyn Parkinson, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. The results “were more persuasive than I would have thought.” Parkinson and her colleagues, Thalia Wheatley and Adam M. Kleinbaum of Dartmouth College, reported their results in Nature Communications.
“朋友之間這種相似程度讓我震驚，”加州大學洛杉磯分校(University of California, Los Angeles)的認知學家卡洛琳·帕金森(Carolyn Parkinson)說。結果“比我設想的更有說服力”。帕金森和來自達特茅斯學院(Dartmouth College)的同事塔利婭·惠特利(Thalia Wheatley)、亞當·M·克萊伯恩(Adam M. Kleinbaum)在《自然通訊》(Nature Communications)上報告了他們的研究結果。“I think it’s an incredibly ingenious paper,” said Nicholas Christakis, author of “Connected: The Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our World” and a biosociologist at Yale University. “It suggests that friends resemble each other not just superficially, but in the very structures of their brains.”
“我認爲這是一篇非常有獨創性的論文，”耶魯大學生物社會學家、《互聯——社會網絡的力量以及它如何改變了我們的世界》(Connected: The Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our World)一書的作者古樂朋(Nicholas Christakis)說。“這表明，朋友之間的彼此相似不只在表面，還存在於他們的大腦結構中。”The findings offer tantalizing evidence for the vague sense we have that friendship is more than shared interests or checking off the right boxes on a Facebook profile. It’s about something we call good chemistry.
我們能夠隱約感覺到，友誼不只是擁有共同的興趣或是在Facebook個人資料中勾選過多少相應的選項。他們的調查結果給出了我們期待的證明。這與我們所說的“化學反應”有關。“Our results suggest that friends might be similar in how they pay attention to and process the world around them,” Parkinson said. “That shared processing could make people click more easily and have the sort of seamless social interaction that can feel so rewarding.”
“我們的研究結果表明，朋友在如何關注和處理周圍世界的方面可能是相似的，”帕金森說。“這種共同的處理方式會讓人更容易成爲朋友，擁有令人感到滿足的、彼此契合的社會交往。”Kevin N. Ochsner, a cognitive neuroscientist at Columbia University who studies social networks, said the new report is “cool,” “provocative” and “raises more questions than it answers.” It could well be picking up traces of “an ineffable shared reality” between friends.
哥倫比亞大學(Columbia University)研究社交網絡的認知神經學家凱文·N·奧克斯納(Kevin N. Ochsner)稱，這份新的研究“很酷”、“令人激動”，且“提出的問題多於回答”。這項研究很可能發現了朋友之間“無法言喻的共有現實”的蹤跡。Ochsner offered his own story as evidence of the primacy of chemistry over mere biography. “My wife-to-be and I were both neuroscientists in the field, we were on dating websites, but we were never matched up,” he said.
奧克斯納說出了自己的故事，以證明化學反應勝於單單一份個人傳記。“我和未婚妻都是這個領域的神經科學家，我們都在用約會網站，但從未被匹配在一起，”他說。“Then we happened to meet as colleagues and in two minutes we knew we had the kind of chemistry that breeds a relationship.”
“然後我們偶然以同事身份相遇，不出兩分鐘我們就知道，我們有種能培養出一段感情的默契。”Parkinson — who is 31, wears large horn-rimmed glasses and has the wholesome look of a young Sally Field — described herself as introverted but said, “I’ve been fortunate with my friends.”
31歲的帕金森戴着大大的角質框架眼鏡，有種莎莉·菲爾德(Sally Field)年輕時的朝氣。她形容自己性格內向，但也說“很幸運能擁有我的朋友”。The new study is part of a surge of scientific interest in the nature, structure and evolution of friendship. Behind the enthusiasm is a virtual Kilimanjaro of demographic evidence that friendlessness can be poisonous, exacting a physical and emotional toll comparable to that of more familiar risk factors like obesity, high blood pressure, unemployment, lack of exercise, smoking cigarettes.
近來科學對友誼的性質、結構和演變過程的興趣激增，此次研究就屬其一。在這種熱情背後，大量人口統計學數據證明缺乏友誼可能是有害的，造成的身體和情感傷害堪比肥胖、高血壓、失業、缺乏鍛鍊、吸菸等人們更爲熟知的風險因素。Scientists want to know what, exactly, makes friendship so healthy and social isolation so harmful, and they’re gathering provocative, if not yet definitive, clues.
科學家們想要知道，到底是什麼讓友誼如此有益健康，而社會孤立又如此有害，而他們正在收集的雖然並非決定性線索，但也令人興奮。Christakis and his co-workers recently demonstrated that people with strong social ties had comparatively low concentrations of fibrinogen, a protein associated with the kind of chronic inflammation thought to be the source of many diseases. Why sociability might help block inflammation remains unclear.
古樂朋和同事不久前證明，社會聯繫強大的人有着相對較低的纖維蛋白原濃度，這是一種與慢性炎症有關的蛋白質，通常被視爲許多疾病來源。爲什麼社交能力能阻止炎症目前尚不清楚。Parkinson and her co-workers previously had shown that people are keenly and automatically aware of how all the players in their social sphere fit together, and the scientists wanted to know why some players in a given network are close friends and others mere nodding acquaintances.
帕金森和她的同事此前曾經證明，人們對自己社交領域的所有參與者如何互相配合有着敏銳而自覺的意識，而科學家們想知道，爲什麼在一個既定的社交網絡中，一些人能成爲親密好友，而另一些人只是點頭之交。Inspired by the research of Uri Hasson of Princeton, they decided to explore subjects’ neural reactions to everyday, naturalistic stimuli — which these days means watching videos.
受普林斯頓大學尤里·哈森(Uri Hasson)的研究啓發，科學家們決定研究實驗對象在日常自然刺激下的神經反應——現在這意味着觀看視頻。The researchers started with a defined social network: an entire class of 279 graduate students at an unnamed university widely known among neuroscientists to have been Dartmouth’s school of business.
研究人員從一個既定社交網絡下手：一所未透露校名的大學內的某一屆研究生，共279人。神經學家普遍知道是達特茅斯的商學院。The students, who all knew one another and in many cases lived in dorms together, were asked to fill out questionnaires. Which of their fellow students did they socialize with — share meals and go to a movie with, invite into their homes? From that survey the researchers mapped out a social network of varying degrees of connectivity: friends, friends of friends, third-degree friends, friends of Kevin Bacon.
這些學生都相互認識，有些還同住一個宿舍，他們被要求填寫了調查問卷。他們與哪些同學交往——一起吃飯、看電影，或是邀請回家？根據調查，研究人員繪製出了連接程度不同的社交網絡：朋友、朋友的朋友、三度朋友，凱文·貝肯(Kevin Bacon)的朋友。The students were then asked to participate in a brain scanning study and 42 agreed. As an fMRI device tracked blood flow in their brains, the students watched a series of video clips of varying lengths, an experience that Parkinson likened to channel surfing with somebody else in control of the remote.
隨後，學生被邀請參與腦部掃描研究，其中42人同意參加。在學生觀看一系列有長有短的視頻片段的同時，一臺fMRI設備會追蹤他們大腦的血液流動情況。帕金森將這一體驗比作與掌握遙控器的另一個人一起搜索電視頻道。Analyzing the scans of the students, Parkinson and her colleagues found strong concordance between blood flow patterns — a measure of neural activity — and the degree of friendship among the various participants, even after controlling for other factors that might explain similarities in neural responses, like ethnicity, religion or family income.
通過對學生掃描的分析，帕金森和同事們發現，血液流動的模式——神經活動的一種衡量方式——與不同參與者之間的友誼程度存在高度一致性，甚至在控制了種族、宗教或家庭收入等其他可以解釋神經反應相似性的因素後依然如此。
The researchers identified particularly revealing regions of pattern concordance among friends, notably in the nucleus accumbens, in the lower forebrain, which is key to reward processing, and in the superior parietal lobule, located toward the top and the back of the brain — roughly at the position of a man bun — where the brain decides how to allocate attention to the external environment.
研究人員找出了那些特別能顯示朋友間模式一致性的區域，尤其是下前腦負責獎勵處理的伏隔核，以及位於大腦頂部和後部的頂上小葉——大概就在男士丸子頭的位置——這個區域決定大腦如何分配對外部環境的注意力。Using the results, the researchers were able to train a computer algorithm to predict, at a rate well above chance, the social distance between two people based on the relative similarity of their neural response patterns.
利用這些結果，研究人員能夠通過計算機算法根據兩個人的神經反應模式的相對相似度來預測他們的社交關係親密程度。Parkinson emphasized that the study was a “first pass, a proof of concept,” and that she and her colleagues still don’t know what the neural response patterns mean: what attitudes, opinions, impulses or mental thumb-twiddling the scans may be detecting.
帕金森強調，這項研究是“第一關，它證明了一個概念”，她和同事們依然不知道神經反應模式的含義：掃描可以探測到哪些態度、意見、衝動或神經活動。They plan next to try the experiment in reverse: to scan incoming students who don’t yet know one another and see whether those with the most congruent neural patterns end up becoming good friends.
接下來，他們打算進行相反的試驗：掃描那些相互還不認識的新生，看看那些神經模式最一致的學生最終是否會成爲好朋友。
