Journalist Kate Murphy has a compelling conversation with Kelly about her new book “Why We Click: The Emerging Science of Interpersonal Synchrony.” In this conversation, Kelly and Kate find a direct line between improvisational training and the kind of synchrony that leads to better relationships, more effective teams and the superpowers that flow from human to human interaction. 

I just walked you through some examples of improv exercises and I wonder what your response is based on your study of synchrony? 

“Wow! It’s almost like everything that the science has since shown about how we connect and how we interpret one another, improvisation intuited that before there was actually the proof, the scientific proof, whether through all this hyper scanning and neural testing that improvisation that actually made manifest beforehand. That is so interesting.” 

Say more. 

“Well, I think in the past, a lot of people have approached this by saying, it’s about vulnerability, or it’s about sort of a physical connection with another person. But what they have discovered in the last few years through these advances in technology is what we actually do whenever we encounter another person is not only do we start, and this is all subconscious, but every minute little twitch movement behavior, not only do we start to sync up our movements, our gestures, we also uncannily start to sync up our heart rate, our respiration, our pupil dilation, and our hormonal activity. And so, you can kind of think of it as this Spidey sense that helps us distinguish friend from foe, and also sexual compatibility. But it’s kind of like these improvisation exercises that you’ve almost blown it up to  where it’s more visible. And by virtue of that, when you physically start to mirror or mimic someone or just synchronize, whether it’s finger tapping, rowing, running, singing, these things where you’re doing the same thing, tossing the ball back and forth, that aligns you, your neural impulses physically, and that helps you align.” 

Improv felt like magic to me when I first encountered it – and it kind of is – but it’s also something you can practice and skill up on. 

“And there are things that we can do to emphasize it, but it’s really the degree and depth and duration of the synchrony that you have with another person determines the viability and stability of your relationship and whether a relationship develops at all. So, yeah, it’s all kind of a physical reaction. And I love what you said about magic because there is a magic to it. We’ve all felt that where you’ve met someone and just, boom, instant connection. You’re saying things like, yes, exactly. And it’s so affirming, and it’s so wonderful, and you have no idea where it comes from. And it is what we used to call chemistry. It’s actually synchrony. Everything that goes into yourself are all of these twitches and neural oscillations and vibrations that actually find resonance with another person.”