Uri Hasson

Educator/Teacher, Filmmaker, Idea generator, Scientist

Uri Hasson grew up in Jerusalem. As an undergrad he studied philosophy and cognitive sciences at the Hebrew University. He completed his Ph.D. in Neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute in Israel and was a postdoctoral fellow at NYU before moving to Princeton. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Psychology Department and the Neuroscience Institute at Princeton University. His research program aims to understand how the brain processes real-life complex information and interacts with the environment; with a focus on integration of complex information over time and the interaction between two individuals and two brains during natural communication.

In everyday life, we spend most of our time interacting with other individuals. We measured the interaction between two brains in the course of natural verbal communication, and found that during successful communication the speaker’s mange to transmit her brain patterns into the listener’s brain, so the neural responses exhibit joint, temporally coupled, response patterns across brains. The more similar the listener’s brain to the speaker’s brain the better the communication.

Face to Face, Brain to Brain: Exploring the Mechanisms of Dyadic Social Interactions