Science starts to catch up

Recently, scientists have begun to validate the reciprocal importance of collective and individual consciousness.

Dr Hannah Critchlow, named as one of Cambridge University’s “Rising Stars in Biological Sciences” by Nature magazine, has concluded that what she terms “collective intelligence” is more mportant than IQ.

She elaborates on this concept in her book Joined-Up Thinking: “The Science of Collective Intelligence and its Power to Change our Lives” and recently in a March 2023 presentation at the Cambridge Festival sponsored by Cambridge University in the UK.

This collective intelligence, or “C-factor”, as neuroscientists call it, refers to how well groups of people can learn and solve problems together.

Dr Critchlow, in a video interview on BBC, explained: “So how does communal thinking or collaboration affect our individual brains? If you and I were working together and we both had our brains hooked up to an EEG machine so that we were analyzing electrical activity within our brains, if we were working together well and really solving puzzles and thinking in unison, then actually our brain waves would start to synchronize. They’d start to become in step with each other.”

“And that degree of brain synchronicity can actually be used to predict how well a group is working together. If we look people in the eye directly, then that increases the chance that we’ll get brain synchronicity. If we sing together or exercise together, that also seems to boost brain synchronicity. And there are even studies that show that brain health relies on this ability to synchronize with other people’s brains, so that it helps to protect us against longer term illnesses of the brain like dementia or Alzheimer’s.” (Watch the interview here: https://www.bbc.com/ reel/video/p0gb61p0/the-science-of-synchronising-two-brains)