The use of the Zoom application has increased significantly over the past three years, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced many to work from home. However, scientists have uncovered new information regarding the impact of this application on our brains and how they function, discovering something intriguing about it.
A new study published in the journal "Imaging Neuroscience" has shown that our brains do not operate in the same natural way when we talk to someone via Zoom, as reported by the British newspaper "The Independent." The study found that neural signals are significantly lower when chatting with someone through a video call compared to having a face-to-face conversation.
When researchers observed the brain of a person speaking in real life, they found a detailed and complex system of neural activity, but this was markedly less on Zoom. This indicates that there is something fundamental missing when it comes to conversing with someone online. The researchers suggested that people's faces fail to stimulate our brains in the same way.
Surprisingly, current models suggested that the brain should process people's faces in the same manner, whether on Zoom or in real life, since their features are the same. However, the new study revealed that there is indeed something fundamentally different between the two contexts.
Joy Hirsch, a professor at Yale University and the lead author of the study, stated that "the social systems of the human brain are more active during in-person meetings compared to Zoom." She added that "the dynamic and natural social interactions that happen spontaneously during face-to-face interactions are less apparent or absent during Zoom meetings."
