Rather than purging real-world complexity from his experiments, Uri Hasson and his Princeton lab collaborators use messy, real-life stimuli to study how our brains communicate with other brains.

Using fMRI to peer into his subjects’ brain activity, Hasson has discovered that a great storyteller literally causes the neurons of an audience to closely sync with the storyteller’s brain -- a finding that has far-reaching implications for communicators, teachers, performers, and scientists alike.