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Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.

Plenty of us would find it difficult to compose a new piece of music under any circumstances, even in the prime of our lives. But experimental composer Alvin Lucier is making music from beyond the grave—at least in a manner of speaking.

In a museum in Australia, a recent exhibition allowed visitors to hear sounds generated by neurons grown using the late artist’s blood. The exhibit raised questions about both consciousness and creativity and teased at what becomes possible when art meets cutting-edge neuroscience.

Here to tell us more about this musically prolific petri dish is Scientific American associate editor Allison Parshall.

Allison, so great to have you back with us.

Allison Parshall: Thank you for having me.

Feltman: So what are we gonna talk about today?

Parshall: Today, we’re going to talk about some experimental music. What do you know about experimental music? What do you think of when you think about it?

Feltman: I definitely think of John Cage first. I’m probably—I, I wouldn’t say I’m an experimental-music fan, but between having a sister who’s an opera singer and having done a little bit of modern dance in college with a teacher who loved Merce Cunningham, I guess [laughs] I probably know a little bit more than average. But yeah, I feel like John Cage is, like, the guy.

Parshall: Tell me a little bit about what you think about with John Cage.

Feltman: I mean, it’s hard not to think of 4’33” first, his piece that is simply the ambient silence of a room with an orchestra in it not playing.

Parshall: Peak experimental.

Feltman: Yeah, peak experimental. And also I feel like there’s been some great discourse and argument over, like, what constitutes a valid performance of 4’33” [laughs] and, like, what pollutes it. The sound of somebody texting—is that an okay thing to have [laughs] in a performance of 4’33”? That’s what comes to mind, for sure.

Parshall: So, like, the most experimental you can get: There is no music, or is that music …

Feltman: Right, yeah.

Parshall: Even if there is nothing? Yeah, I definitely think about 4’33”, also, the most, and he premiered that in 1952. And it was around that era that some experimental musicians were starting to probe into, like, the very nature of sound itself and what counts as music. And there was this one composer—not John Cage—whose work was so methodical it was almost scientific. He actually used his brain to make music back in the 1960s, and I have been utterly fascinated by this story for the past few months, so I’m very excited to get to tell you about it.

Feltman: I’m excited to hear about it.

Parshall: So let me set the scene for you: In Perth, Australia, there’s an art museum with a haunting musical exhibit. You start at the mouth of this dark, narrow hallway. It curves in front of you, getting wider as it goes, like the cochlea structure in your inner ear. The hallway is lined with these square-shaped brass plates that periodically vibrate with sound. The sound is a little bit different in every place that you stand in the room because the sound waves are coming from the plates and interacting with each other differently throughout the space.

No moment is the same as the last, and sitting at the center of the room is a brass plinth under a spotlight. At the top of the plinth, there’s a clear window, and you walk over, and you look down, and you see a small dish with a blob that’s just a few millimeters across.

These are brain cells, and they come from the legendary experimental composer Alvin Lucier. He’s dead; he passed away in 2021. But you’re surrounded by music that originates from this little organlike structure. It’s called an organoid.

The process of making this started with Alvin’s own blood cells, which were transformed into stem cells, which were then turned into neuronal cells like those in the brain. Those brain cells fire, sending electrical impulses that cause hammers behind each of the brass plates to strike. Microphones then pick up that sound—and any sound that you might be making while you’re in the exhibit—and feed that information as electrical signals back into Alvin’s brain organoid.

This exhibit is called Revivification for what it attempts to do: revivify Alvin—or at least some part of him.

Feltman: Wow, that’s very weird and kind of spooky, and I feel like probably has led to a lot of debate over how it fits into his portfolio as an experimental composer. I guess the first piece of information to know to get into that debate is: Did he know this was gonna happen? Did he plan for this? Did he …

Parshall: Yeah.

Feltman: Compose the situation?

Parshall: He was super aware that this was happening. In fact, it was his idea, or at least in part his idea, according to his collaborators on the project.

So I spoke with the other artists and the neuroscientists who were involved in the exhibit, as well as one of Alvin’s former colleagues. I also spoke with his daughter, Amanda Lucier; she’s a photojournalist based in Portland. And here’s what she had to say on the subject.

Amanda Lucier: There was something about the way that he was that made him think and made you think that he was never gonna die. That makes me smile, thinking about how he pulled off continuing to work and continuing to be a part of the world of experimental music quite literally after his death. I mean, if anyone was gonna pull off immortality, it was him.

Parshall: The story of Revivification, in many ways, actually starts a whole century ago with the invention of the EEG, or the electroencephalogram.

Feltman: I had one of those once. It was kind of anticlimactic because the process of preparing for it is so dramatic: you get the cap with all the electrodes, and they, like, use this weird paste to stick it to your head. Then the actual test is just you kind of sitting there existing while a computer does something that you can’t see—though I do remember that the goop does stay in your hair, so that’s a fun thing that happens [laughs].

Parshall: I imagine that’s no fun to wash out, but I’ve never had one before. But they seem kind of cool, if you said anticlimactic.

An EEG, what it does is measures the electrical activity from the brain from outside the skull, and it’s using, like you mentioned, those electrodes that are placed all over the head. And what it’s so good at is capturing real-time information from the brain. So it can capture waves of activity as networks of neurons fire in concert with one another. Those waves of activity, they travel at different speeds. So gamma waves are the fastest. They happen when you’re really focused or thinking about something. Delta are the slowest, and those happen when you’re in, like, a dreamless sleep. And alpha waves, they happen when you’re in a relaxed but awake state, like during meditation.

So when EEG was first invented, roughly a hundred years ago, it allowed for the very first recordings of the live human brain, like, living brain activity. And so, of course, neuroscientists were all over it as a tool for unpacking what is actually going on in the brain as we do different activities. Before, they just kinda had to wait for you to die, and then look what it looked like.

In the 1960s, it caught the attention of Alvin, who was then a composer on the faculty at Brandeis University. He was feeling uninspired in his work at the time, but he was totally taken by this technology.

Alpha brain waves are too low in frequency to be heard by the human ear. We can hear down to, like, 20 hertz, or 20 waves per second. And these waves, alpha brain waves, are generally, like, 10 hertz. But Alvin’s colleagues wanted him to record the waves and then manipulate them into something that humans could hear and then use that audio to create a composition. But he was not interested in that at all. What he wanted to do was far more interesting and experimental.

Parshall: He developed a piece called “Music for Solo Performer.” Alvin would sit in a chair with EEG electrodes on, in front of an audience, and try to meditate. If he was successful, the low-frequency alpha brain waves would be picked up by the electrodes, amplified and then played through speakers that are positioned throughout the room. The waves would still be inaudible, but directly in front of the speakers would be percussion instruments—such as gongs and cymbals, bass drums, timpanis—and the sound waves would cause them to vibrate along with the speakers, producing audible noise that the audience could hear.

There was something really scientific about the way that Alvin approached composition. Here’s Susan Leigh Foster. She’s a close colleague and friend of Alvin and his family. A dance professor for years, she taught with Alvin at Wesleyan University, where he spent most of his career.

Susan Leigh Foster: This would be maybe the most important thing I could say about Alvin [laughs]: he liked setting up conditions, or forces, that would then produce sound. In that way, he really bears a lot of similarity to the way that scientific work is done. Like, you have a hypothesis. You set up the experiment. You conduct the experiment.

You know, what if you take a sound and send it down a long wire and then amplify that and then watch as it changes over the hours as the room temperature keeps changing and as people come into the room and as air currents change, or what if you bury speakers underground, which is a project he did at Dartmouth.

Parshall: Alvin was always listening and observing. Here’s his daughter again.

Lucier: I remember being mortified as a middle-school student going into a Pier 1 Imports with some friends, and there was a vacuum going, and he would match the tone of the vacuum to see if he could create beading patterns. So he’d be in the corner there, going, like: [hums note]. And now, in retrospect, I think, “Oh, wow, that was really cool for me to have that experience.” And at the time, I was like, “Oh, my God, Dad, even in the Pier 1 Imports.” [Laughs.]

Parshall: Over the course of his career, Alvin became a well-known and respected experimental composer. Guy Ben-Ary, one of the artists responsible for Revivification, admired him greatly.

Guy Ben-Ary: I mean, Alvin was one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. He was not part of kind of popular culture and not part of the group of classical composers that, you know, [were] very famous. They say that he was the composer’s composer.

Parshall: When Guy first encountered Alvin’s work in the late 2000s, it inspired him to bring sound into his artwork. So then he embarked on creating what he called a sort of unconventional, quote, “self-portrait.”

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Jack Mitchell/Getty Images; Illustration by Scientific American

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The House hasn’t been seen in weeks. The Senate is at a standstill. Bipartisan negotiations are nonexistent. And the White House seems more interested in making punitive threats against its own federal workforce than in trying to get them back to work.

This is the bleak state of Republican-controlled government under President Donald Trump on the eighth day of a government shutdown that has disrupted federal services, left thousands of federal employees on furlough, and caused ground stops at some airports due to shortages of air traffic controllers. The deepening impasse has many lawmakers in a pessimistic mood, raising fears of a protracted and painful battle that could go on for several more weeks.

“The first couple of days I was pretty sanguine about prospects of coming out of it, but it’s just gotten worse and worse and worse, and I think we’re going to be dug in for a while,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) told HuffPost when asked about the state of play on Capitol Hill.

What makes this standoff over spending different from previous shutdowns — in 2019, 2018, and 2013 — is how dug in both parties are to their respective positions, how little urgency there is to reach a compromise, and how angry Democrats are about Trump’s abuse of executive powers to rescind or withhold money approved by Congress.

Democrats Are Fed Up

In March, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) faced widespread intraparty backlash after he helped pass a Republican spending bill to avert a shutdown. Since then, the Trump administration has frozen billions of dollars in federal funding, shuttered several executive agencies, deployed military troops to major U.S. cities, weaponized the Justice Department against his critics, bullied law firms and universities, and launched a widespread national crackdown on undocumented immigrants.

Democrats are now demanding that, at the least, the Trump administration agree to stop freezing or rescinding more federal funds if they vote for a bill reopening the government. What reason, Democratic lawmakers ask, do they have to support a spending bill that in effect supports Trump’s lawlessness and puts no guardrails on the executive branch?

Moreover, Democrats want to address enhanced Affordable Care Act health insurance subsidies that are due to expire at the end of the year. If Congress doesn’t act, and soon, premiums will more than double on average for over 20 million people enrolled in the health care program. Four million people are estimated to lose their insurance entirely.

A recent poll found three-quarters of the public, including a majority of Trump’s MAGA supporters, say they want Congress to extend the subsidies, stiffening Democrats’ resolve this time around.

“We need to get serious about fixing the problems here at home, starting with health care,” Schumer said in a Senate floor speech on Tuesday. “And Democrats’ position has not changed: We want the same thing that a majority, an overwhelming majority, of Americans want, which is to end this shutdown and halt the health care crisis that will send premiums spiking for tens of millions of people.”

Republicans maintain there’s nothing to negotiate until Senate Democrats vote to reopen the government, accusing them of holding hostage government funding over unrelated policy demands — a tactic the GOP also employed in previous shutdown fights. They maintain that they are willing to discuss the enhanced ACA subsidies, which Democrats passed during the pandemic, but the issue has sharply divided GOP lawmakers in both the House and Senate, and it is unclear whether they’d be willing to take it up or pass a fix by the end of the year.

“The Democrats want to have a conversation about the COVID tax credit cliff that they created, and at some point we’re happy to have that conversation, but not until the government opens up,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) told reporters on Tuesday.

Negotiations? What Negotiations?

During previous shutdowns, the president of the United States — including Trump himself — hosted congressional leaders multiple times at the White House to discuss a way to reopen the government. Bipartisan Senate groups took matters into their own hands to help move things along, holding private talks that eventually yielded a compromise.

This time around, Trump convened one meeting with all four congressional leaders at the White House, but he didn’t do so until the eve of the funding deadline of Sept. 30. It went nowhere.

n the Senate, meanwhile, there’s been no formation of a group or committee tasked with coming up with a deal. Rank-and-file members have instead held informal discussions on the floor that have made little progress. The House isn’t even in session at all and isn’t expected to return until Tuesday — three weeks after it last held votes.

“There is, you know, conglomerations of different people and groups, but it’s been very informal,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). “The basic dichotomy here is [Speaker Mike] Johnson and Trump and [Senate GOP leader John] Thune won’t give us a vote before the shutdown is ended. It’s hard to negotiate when Johnson isn’t even having his members come back before Oct. 14.”

“They simply will not talk, which seems different from past years,” he added. “We want to sit down with Trump. We want to sit down with Johnson. They’re basically saying, vote for the bill, and then we’ll talk.”

A big reason lawmakers have struggled to reach a deal is the deep lack of trust in Washington in recent years. The Trump administration has repeatedly ripped up prior bipartisan spending agreements, controversial moves that have poisoned the well with Democrats and made it harder for them to accept a short-term funding bill, as even some Republicans have acknowledged.

“There has to be enough trust that a deal can be made,” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) told HuffPost.

He then pondered, hopefully: “Is there some condition that can be achieved, that you can have a trustless society in the sense where we can still go forward, but not necessarily trust each other?”

‘Intimidation Tactics’

In an effort to cow Democrats into submission, the White House Office of Management and Budget has threatened several punitive measures against its own government, including enacting mass firings of furloughed employees and suggesting that those on furlough won’t necessarily get paid back when the government eventually reopens.

This isn’t what happened under Trump’s first presidency after the government shut down in 2019, the longest shutdown in history, when he demanded Democrats agree to fund construction of his border wall. Trump actually signed a bill into law codifying what had been a bipartisan tradition of authorizing back pay for furloughed federal workers after government shutdowns.

But the White House threats backfired on Capitol Hill as Democrats vowed to stand firm in their demands, and even some Republican lawmakers voiced their disagreement.

“These intimidation tactics are making it clear that they are not acting in any good faith,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said. “So for people who think you’re going to cut a deal with these guys and they’re going to live up to the deal, they’re showing you every single day that they’re only interested in dirty politics.”

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), a retiring moderate Democrat who has been involved in bipartisan discussions about a deal to reopen the government and address the expiring health care insurance subsidies, was even more blunt about OMB Director Russ Vought.

“It would be a lot easier to resolve the situation if Russ Vought would stop talking,” she told HuffPost.

It wasn’t just Democrats crying foul, either. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) called the threats from the White House “bad strategy.”

“I think that if you’re talking about my staff and other staff, that’s probably not a good message to send right now to people who are not being paid,” Tillis told reporters. “I’m not an attorney, but I think it’s bad strategy to even say that sort of stuff.”

Trump’s Muddled Messaging

Prior government shutdowns garnered much more national attention than the current standoff. Part of this is because shutdowns and drama over government funding used to be rare in Washington. Nowadays, the institution is consumed with political gridlock, and it seems like the lawmakers are constantly dealing with threats of shutdown. Often, the most they can do is kick the can down the road by passing a “continuing resolution” to keep funding going at current spending levels.

n the last few weeks, however, Trump has been anything but focused on the government funding fight playing out in Washington. He’s been far more busy drawing all sorts of headlines on other fronts, including making attacks against late night TV show hosts and other nations at the United Nations General Assembly, announcing new domestic policies, launching strikes against suspected Venezuelan drug cartels, sending National Guard troops into Illinois and Oregon despite opposition from those states’ governors, and calling for Chicago’s mayor and the governor of Illinois to be jailed. On Wednesday, he’s set to hold a roundtable on antifa, a loose movement opposed to fascism.When he has addressed the situation on Capitol Hill, he has often contradicted GOP leadership, undercutting their positions by saying he is open and willing to speak to Democrats and that he’d like to pay furloughed federal workers.

Polls show most Americans don’t expect to be personally affected by the shutdown. Only 11% said they expected to be personally affected, according to a YouGov survey conducted last week. That could change as the pain of a government shutdown becomes more acute and more people are affected by airport staffing shortages. Federal workers will also begin missing paychecks on Oct. 10, and military families on Oct. 15. During the 2019 shutdown, the Pentagon was one of the few departments that was funded, which is one of the reasons it lasted so long.

“It’s a factor,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said of the coming soft deadlines. “I mean, we don’t like any of this. We just want them to fix the problem that they made, that’s going to cause Virginians to have to pay so much more for health care or lose health insurance. So that’s what we’re focused on.”

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Joan Kennedy, who married into one of America’s foremost political dynasties and spent much of her life wrestling with alcoholism while caught up in the tragedies and tempests that plagued the Kennedy family, died on Wednesday at her home in Boston. She was 89.

Her death was confirmed by Steve Kerrigan, the chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party. He did not cite a cause, saying only that she had died in her sleep.

The former wife of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, known as Ted, Ms. Kennedy was shy and reserved compared with her competitive, athletic, and often boisterous in-laws. Ill-prepared for life in the reflected glare of Kennedy klieg lights, and haunted by her own family history of alcoholism, she found herself caught up in high-stakes politics, a faithless marriage, and an on-again, off-again struggle with her own drinking.

For stretches at a time, however, she registered numerous triumphs. An accomplished pianist, she gave a recital with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1970 that won standing ovations and stellar reviews. Under the baton of Arthur Fiedler, she narrated stories, like Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf,” accompanied by the Boston Pops. She published a book, “The Joy of Classical Music: A Guide for You and Your Family” (1992), edited by her sister-in-law, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. And she devoted her later years to raising money for nonprofit organizations and charities in Boston.

But she was never interested in politics, the Kennedy family business. Her introduction to it came when her husband campaigned for and won a special election to the Senate in 1962, when he was just 30 and she was 27. By then, his brother John was president, and his brother Robert was attorney general.

Within a few years, though, with the assassinations of John and Robert, pressure built on Senator Kennedy to take up their mantle despite his family’s concern for his safety. He became less discreet about his infidelities and excessive drinking, and Joan, too, turned increasingly to alcohol.

She stood by her husband through considerable drama, most notably in 1969, when he drove off a one-lane bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, in Massachusetts, in an accident that killed his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, a 28-year-old former secretary to Robert F. Kennedy when he was a senator from New York.

Ms. Kennedy, who was pregnant at the time, had already endured two miscarriages and was on strict bed rest. With the Chappaquiddick drama threatening her husband’s political future, she accompanied him to Ms. Kopechne’s funeral and to court, where he pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident.

Shortly afterward, she miscarried again. By then, she said, she had begun drinking heavily as the family rallied around Senator Kennedy.

“For a few months, everyone had to put on this show, and then I just didn’t care anymore,” Ms. Kennedy told Laurence Leamer, the author of “The Kennedy Women” (1994). “That’s when I truly became an alcoholic.”

Her drinking eventually became public, with repeated arrests on charges of drunken driving, starting in 1974, and orders to enter rehabilitation programs.

She and Mr. Kennedy had effectively separated before he ran for president unsuccessfully in 1980, but they kept up a united front during his campaign for the Democratic nomination; after he dropped out, the marriage officially dissolved.

A Part-Time Model

Virginia Joan Bennett was born on Sept. 2, 1936, in New York City. She and her younger sister, Candace, were raised in upper-middle-class suburban Bronxville, N.Y., by their mother, Virginia Joan (Stead) Bennett, an amateur seamstress who made most of their clothes, and their father, Harry Wiggin Bennett Jr., an advertising executive whose ancestors had arrived in Massachusetts in the 1600s.

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Joan Kennedy, with her husband at the time, Edward M. Kennedy, in Boston in 1979, when he announced his campaign for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination. Their children, Kara Ann and Patrick, joined them for the event.  Credit…George Tames/The New York Times

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A White House official said that Mr. Trump had disputed the argument by responding that everyone would make their own case to the public as to who was at fault.

The exchange helps explain why Democrats believe they have the political upper hand in the shutdown fight, and why they are refusing to back down from their demands, at least for now. They believe that Mr. Trump, who has long been sensitive to the political perils of health care issues for Republicans, could be the key to winning a commitment on the expiring subsidies that could end the crisis.

Democrats are keenly aware that Republicans in Congress are divided on extending the subsidies, with some of them, including those from competitive states and districts, sounding the alarm about the coming premium increases.

“I made the point that the damage that’s being done to the health care of everyday Americans is hurting people who voted for him, and that is the reality,” Mr. Jeffries recently told reporters as he described the case he had made to Mr. Trump in the Oval Office that day. “It’s hurting everybody, but it’s certainly hurting people who voted for him.”

Data backs up his point. According to KFF, a health policy research group, more than half of all people receiving insurance through the Affordable Care Act live in congressional districts represented by Republicans, with particularly high concentrations in southern states such as Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina, all of which have not expanded Medicaid under the 2010 law.

And Mr. Trump’s longtime pollster, John McLaughlin, warned this summer in an op-ed that circulated widely among Republicans in Washington that a potential tax hike on more than 24 million working-class Americans could spell “potential political catastrophe for the G.O.P.”

Still, despite Mr. Trump’s professed openness to a deal, and that of some rank-and-file Republicans, there is little appetite among G.O.P. leaders to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits, which Democrats enacted in 2021 during the coronavirus pandemic as a temporary measure to allow more Americans to obtain health coverage.

Speaker Mike Johnson and Senator John Thune, the South Dakota Republican and majority leader, have both said that significant changes would need to be made to how they are distributed before any extension could be brought to the floor.

It is possible that the renewed subsidies could be approved in the House and Senate by Democrats and a minority of Republicans, but that is a scenario that both leaders would be eager to avoid.

The Republican leaders have also insisted that they would not negotiate with Democrats until they vote to reopen government, creating the stubborn impasse. Democrats say they need a commitment on health care well beyond a promise of future negotiations, and they say Republicans have so far offered nothing close to that in informal discussions, let alone any formal talks.

With Republicans on Capitol Hill resisting, Democrats see Mr. Trump and his natural inclination to cut a deal as providing a potential off-ramp as the shutdown drags on.

“I’d like to see a deal made for great health care,” Mr. Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday. “I’m a Republican, but I want to see health care much more so than the Democrats.”

The remarks made Republicans on Capitol Hill nervous, and Mr. Trump quickly walked them back on Tuesday after speaking with Mr. Johnson.

“I think Schumer is incapable of making a deal,” Mr. Trump said. “They are a mess. They’re a party that has no leadership — and they have no policy.”

But Democrats are mostly holding firm, a sign of confidence that they are on the right side of the shutdown politics. As of Tuesday, not a single additional Democrat had crossed over to support Republicans’ stopgap bill to reopen the government, aside from the three aligned with Democrats who did so last week.

Republicans had built their strategy for resolving the shutdown around the idea that they could break off anxious Democrats as the closure took a toll on federal services, and eventually push the spending bill through to passage.

Instead, Senator Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with Democrats and broke ranks last week to back the G.O.P. bill, openly mused on Monday about withdrawing that support.

“The best they’ve been able to tell us so far is that they’re open to conversations about solving the A.C.A. problem,” Mr. King said of Republicans. “That doesn’t cut it.”

Mr. Thune on Tuesday said that Senate Democrats were being “bludgeoned” by the left to hold the line, and that he still held out hope that more would join Republicans.

“They’re under enormous pressure from their leadership, but there are going to have to be some brave souls who are courageous enough to come out and deliver the votes to open up the government,” he said.

In the House, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Republican from Georgia, chimed in with an improbable plug for Democrats’ position, saying that while she opposed the Affordable Care Act, she had learned that her “own adult children’s insurance premiums for 2026 are going to DOUBLE” if Congress failed to act.

But even Republicans who would back an extension of the subsidies say that they would only consider talks once the government is reopened.

Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and the chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, said she had been privately circulating her own multipart proposal for ending the shutdown, but that negotiations centered on the Obamacare subsidies could begin only after the government were reopened.

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Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, with other Democratic senators at the Capitol on Tuesday. Credit…Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times

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With each turn of the news cycle, you may wonder how anyone in their right mind, seeing what they’re seeing, could still hold differing political views from your own. I wrestle with some of these feelings myself. When I talk with people on the other side of a debate, I’m often tempted to push them to see things how I do. Or I may stay close to issues where I know we agree, so we can have a conversation that feels safe and easy.

But there is a third option for navigating these conversations: curious exploration. My and my colleagues’ research into the ways brain activity across people aligns or diverges as they converse suggests that seeking to persuade may not be the most fruitful way to approach a conversation. Instead, an open attitude, allowing ourselves to traverse a range of ideas and to learn from other people’s experiences, may be both more enjoyable and productive.

In recent years, neuroscientists have identified an important phenomenon: brain synchrony, in which brain activation in two or more people increases and decreases in similar regions at similar times. When people’s brain activity is in sync, it seems to indicate a common interpretation and understanding of what they are experiencing. For example, when one person tells a story, and another understands it in the same way, the listener’s brain aligns with the speaker’s and even begins to anticipate what will come next. On the other hand, when people interpret the same story in markedly different ways, perhaps because they’ve been given different background information, their brain activity is less synchronized than people who are given the same background facts and therefore share the same assumptions coming in.

These insights apply not only to hearing stories or watching movies but also to responding to news media and political content. Strong political speeches can bring people’s brains into sync with one another, for instance. But people get their news from politically polarized sources, which means that they encounter news coverage of different events and receive diverging analyses of the same events. This shapes their views of those issues and creates conflicting background assumptions when they encounter new political stories. In parallel, studies show divergence in brain responses when people with different political views engage with the news, as though they were making sense of different stories altogether. In research initiated by the late Emile Bruneau at the University of Pennsylvania, who died in 2020, and carried forward by Nir Jacoby, now at Dartmouth College, our team scanned the brains of participants who identified as Democrats or Republicans while they watched video clips of people talking about policies. We found that participants’ brain activation in social and emotional processing systems was more aligned with people from their own party than it was with those from the opposing party.

All of this work hints that our interactions might be more harmonious if we were more in sync with one another. But evidence from a new technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) hyperscanning, which can track brain activity during real conversations, complicates that idea. This method is exciting because it allows researchers to observe two brains in action at the same time. With hyperscanning, we can see how people’s brains respond to one another during real-time conversation. My collaborators and I have been using it to understand the dynamics of good conversations—exchanges where people enjoy themselves, reach consensus on how to solve hard problems or help each other navigate emotional challenges. We’ve discovered that even if one’s goal is to simply enjoy the conversation, sticking to safe topics where everyone is on the same page might not be the best solution. In a hyperscanning study, our team, including psychologists Lily Tsoi of Caldwell University, Shannon Burns of Pomona College, Sebastian Speer, and Diana Tamir, both at Princeton University, gave friends and strangers instructions to get to know each other better. We found that the conversations participants enjoyed the most were not those where their brain activity stayed perfectly in sync the whole time.

Strangers, on average, gradually increased their neural synchrony over the course of a conversation, whereas friends typically started out more in sync with one another early on. Then something interesting happened: after starting off more in sync, friends’ patterns of brain activity in regions that process social interactions began to diverge. They covered more topics and explored wider ground than strangers and, on average, enjoyed the conversations more. Strangers explored fewer topics and had less enjoyable conversations. But some pairs of strangers showed a pattern more like friends. These pairs seemed to use synchrony as a jumping-off point for exploring more ideas rather than an end. In turn, these pairs of strangers, whose brain activity diverged as the discussion unfolded, also rated their conversations as more enjoyable.

And in conversations where people needed to discuss their differences of opinion, we encountered a similarly intriguing finding. In still unpublished work, our team studied what happened as people discussed policy issues, such as the future of higher education and environmental concerns. We coached these participants to enter these conversations in one of two ways: with a goal to compromise or a goal to persuade. When people came into the conversation looking to compromise, we found, this led to more expansive exploration (for example, covering more topics, mental states, and brain patterns). Ultimately, this more expansive exploration led to greater consensus about how to solve large societal problems. On the other hand, the people who came in trying to persuade their partner explored less in their conversations and were ultimately less successful in achieving a shared vision for a path forward.

Recently, I tried to put these findings into practice while speaking with a colleague who held different views than I did and learned how events that had unfolded in his job and community had shaped his opinions and decisions. Although the conversation was tiring and did not end in complete agreement, it renewed our connection to each other and left me open to talking more.

To be sure, individual conversations in isolation can’t fix society’s polarization. Institutions—including media, industry, and government—play a major role in shaping culture, assumptions, and divides. Still, these institutions are also composed of people, and conversations are a key tool for reimagining the world we want together. Our findings suggest one set of possibilities for people navigating conversations with those across divides. We can be more open, curious, and exploratory when speaking with others, rather than avoid controversies or start off pushing our viewpoint.

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