title: Intersubject synchronization of cortical activity during natural vision.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel.
authors.forename: Uri
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Hasson
authors.forename: Yuval
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Nir
authors.forename: Ifat
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Levy
authors.forename: Galit
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Fuhrmann
authors.forename: Rafael
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Malach
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D001303:Auditory Cortex / Q000502:physiology; D001931:Brain Mapping; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D004644:Emotions; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009040:Motion Pictures; D009778:Occipital Lobe / Q000502:physiology; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D013702:Temporal Lobe / Q000502:physiology; D014785:Vision, Ocular; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception