How Video Calls Are Changing Our Brains, Reveals Study

Participating in work video calls, a common post-COVID experience, often introduces stressors like muted microphones, unstable internet, and awkward silences. A recent study in Imaging Neuroscience reveals that these video interactions impact not only social cues but also affect the way our brains process these interactions, suggesting a significant influence of the contact medium on our cognitive processes.

The results of the study conducted at Yale University underscore the significance of face-to-face communication in shaping our natural interactions with others.

"The social systems of the human brain are more active during real, live, in-person encounters than on Zoom," says neuroscientist Joy Hirsch, senior author of the published paper.

"Online representations of faces, at least with current technology, do not have the same 'privileged access' to social neural circuitry in the brain that is typical of the real thing."

"In this study, we find that the social systems of the human brain are more active during real, live, in-person encounters than on Zoom. Zoom appears to be an impoverished social communication system relative to in-person conditions," said Mr Hirsch.

As per a release by Yale, social interactions are the cornerstone of all human societies, and our brains are finely tuned to process dynamic facial cues (a primary source of social information) during real in-person encounters, researchers say. While most previous research using imaging tools to track brain activity during these interactions has involved single individuals, Hirsch's lab developed a unique suite of neuroimaging technologies that allows them to study, in real time, interactions between two people in natural settings.

For the new study, Hirsch's team recorded the neural system responses in individuals engaged in live, two-person interactions and in those involved in two-person conversations on Zoom, the popular video conferencing platform now used by millions of Americans daily.

They found that the strength of neural signalling was dramatically reduced on Zoom relative to "in-person" conversations. Increased activity among those participating in face-to-face conversations was associated with increased gaze time and increased pupil diameters, suggesting increased arousal in the two brains. Increased EEG activity during in-person interactions was characteristic of enhanced face processing ability, researchers said.