Do satisfied couples have synchronized brains?

September 23, 2023

Neuroscience keeps marching on, informing couples therapy, and creating a “Golden Age” of effective science-based couples therapy.

For example, recent research has revealed that the brains of the happiest couples are active in the same areas at the same time.

The potential for, and reality of, marital happiness for any given couple can now be seen in the brain. Couples who are more satisfied with their marriages have greater synchronization in their brains.

I can see neuroscience entrepreneurs eventually developing devices to inform serious couples on how well their brains will develop over a lifetime. This is inevitable, because one of the big take-aways from this research is the suggestion that brain scans could be predictive of whether a couple is “well matched.”

Not so fast, you neuro-capitalists!

Here’s the rub. How do we know if we’ve discovered humans whose brains work similarly (and therefore choose one another)…or was neural synchrony a hard won skill set, developed over time?

The data is fuzzy, but the researchers were confident that it was a bit of both. So expect some sort of brainy love products or services coming to a town near you.

Professor Vinod Menon, study co-author, said:

“We don’t know whether there are selection-based behaviors arising from similar brain activity in a relationship, or whether couples evolve over time to develop similar anticipatory and predictive brain representations.”

How the study was conducted

• 35 straight couples were recruited for this study. They were all given personality tests, as well as brain scans, and they were asked about their level of marital satisfaction.

• The study subjects were asked to simply watch videos of other humans discussing their own marriages, the brains of the happier couples were concurrently active in the same areas of the brain.

Professor Menon emphasized that the personality tests were not predictive of compatibility:

“The literature has been actually quite mixed about how personality affects compatibility, and that turned out to be the case in our study.

We found that the links between marital happiness and behavioral measures, like personality tests, were quite weak.”

In fact, it struck me as odd that they found no links between ages, duration of the marriage, personality traits, or their reported degree of marital satisfaction.

However, there was one thing the brain scans could reliably identify… the happiest couples

Professor Menon summed the important findings:

“Married couples overall, compared with random couples, had more similar brain activity independent of levels of satisfaction.

On top of that, you get additional synchronization in those who self-report to be more satisfied in their marriage.”

What is the default mode network in the brain?

• Synchronization in the brain was particularly strong between satisfied couples in an area known as the default mode network.

Professor Menon explained the default mode network, and it’s importance:

“This is the system that your brain defaults to when you’re at rest, and is suppressed when you’re engaged in a challenging cognitive task like remembering a long string of numbers or solving a math problem.”

The default mode network is also active in social communication, in tasks like anticipating where the conversation is heading next.

Final thoughts on the synchronized brains

I admire this research, but I feel it’s greatest potential is being obscured by the sensationally romantic notions, which I feel are a bit of a sideshow.

The real value here might be for neurodiverse couples to acquire a more granular knowledge of how to manage both subtle and gross mind differences.

This will also lead to the alleviation of the suffering of neuro diverse children, as better brain scans might lead to more effective interventions.

Be well, Stay kind, and Godspeed.

RESEARCH:

Neural synchronization predicts marital satisfaction

Lei Li, Xinyue Huang, Jinming Xiao, +6, and Xujun Duan duanxujun@uestc.edu.cnAuthors Info & Affiliations

Edited by Meghan Meyer, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; received February 14, 2022; accepted July 19, 2022 by Editorial Board Member Michael S. Gazzaniga

August 18, 2022

119 (34) e2202515119

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.220251511

The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Li et al., 2022).