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Science 12 March 2004:
Vol. 303. no. 5664, pp. 1634 - 1640
DOI: 10.1126/science.1089506
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Research Articles

Intersubject Synchronization of Cortical Activity During Natural Vision

Uri Hasson,1* Yuval Nir,2 Ifat Levy,1,3 Galit Fuhrmann,1 Rafael Malach1{dagger}

To what extent do all brains work alike during natural conditions? We explored this question by letting five subjects freely view half an hour of a popular movie while undergoing functional brain imaging. Applying an unbiased analysis in which spatiotemporal activity patterns in one brain were used to "model" activity in another brain, we found a striking level of voxel-by-voxel synchronization between individuals, not only in primary and secondary visual and auditory areas but also in association cortices. The results reveal a surprising tendency of individual brains to "tick collectively" during natural vision. The intersubject synchronization consisted of a widespread cortical activation pattern correlated with emotionally arousing scenes and regionally selective components. The characteristics of these activations were revealed with the use of an open-ended "reverse-correlation" approach, which inverts the conventional analysis by letting the brain signals themselves "pick up" the optimal stimuli for each specialized cortical area.

1 Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel.
2 Department of Computer Science, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 61390, Israel.
3 Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computation, Hebrew University, Jerusalem 91904, Israel.


* Present address: Center for Neural Science, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USA.

{dagger} To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: rafi.malach{at}weizmann.ac.il

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)