Bodily Synchronicity

“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”
― Nikola Tesla

Science is radtastic.  The most radtastic finding, as of late, is that people’s hearts synchronize when they sing together.  Synchronize. Their hearts somehow come to beat at exactly the same time, even in large groups.

This perplexes me. The scientists of the study speculate that it is because the singers must take breaths at the same time, during breaks between words or sounds, therefore their hearts must beat at the same time.  I’m obviously not a scientist, but I do have a brain and I like to exercise it, so I am thinking that this breath timing mechanism is not the cause.

It just seems to me that people’s hearts are so erratic and different. If I just listen to my own heartbeat, it skips here and there and beats twice in quick succession sometimes.  Are you diagnosing me with a disorder? Don’t worry, I’ve got it covered. I’ve already had this peculiarity monitored and checked out and it’s supposedly fine.  In fact, that’s just my point: we all have slightly off heartbeats.

Not only that, we all have different timing, depth, and patterns to our breathing. Some people can do that crazy circular breathing technique. Some people take short quick breaths.  Some take longer and more drawn out breaths. It seems true that a song will constrict you to taking breaths at certain pauses in vocalization, if you’re not a circular breather, but even then the length of your breath and the amount of air you draw in surely differs from person to person. Right?

I have this unscientific hunch that the mechanism behind this phenomenon is more like how women’s periods can synchronize.  If we spend enough time with one another, we will end up having the exact same timing, every time.  There is no reason for this alignment in the shedding of our unused tissue. There is no known mechanism that I’ve heard of– and please let me know if there is one I can look into, because this subject fascinates me. But if our bodies have ways of monitoring those around us, attuning ourselves to subtle energies or movements in one another, and then adjusting to fit more harmoniously in a group, that is a profound proposition.

What other ways might we attune ourselves, if these synchronizations are actually based on a response to our environment, rather than an accident of breath-timing?

Finally, I am reminded of the metronomes that synchronize themselves when given a moveable platform which they share. Have you seen this? Watch.

The metronomes share a medium, the base on which they stand. What is the medium that humans share with one another to allow us to synchronize?

One more key to the study, in my opinion, was that the synchronization happened more fully with chanting. Chanting is intentionally a religious experience. We already know that religious experiences share a certain energy signature in a certain area of our brains. We can induce these feelings with the right stimulation to the right area of our brains, in fact. I find it interesting, then, that these types of religious songs produce even more alignment with one another.

I love it most when Science begins to find pathways into what we once considered the realm of the spiritual and metaphysical, opening our minds to the possibility that we still don’t know everything and that what we think of now as immaterial might one day be of a substance we can grasp firmly, point at, measure, and say, “But, of course.”