Crowdsourcing neuroscience: Inter-brain coupling during face-to-face interactions outside the laboratory.

When we feel connected or engaged during social behavior, are our brains in fact "in sync" in a formal, quantifiable sense? Most studies addressing this question use highly controlled tasks with homogenous subject pools. In an effort to take a more naturalistic approach, we collaborated with art institutions to crowdsource neuroscience data: Over the course of 5 years, we collected electroencephalogram (EEG) data from thousands of museum and festival visitors who volunteered to engage in a 10-min face-to-face interaction. Pairs of participants with various levels of familiarity sat inside the Mutual Wave Machine-an artistic neurofeedback installation that translates real-time correlations of each pair's EEG activity into light patterns.