Judge Your Friendship With TV Channel Surfing: Fresh Study Reveals

If you especially like Joey and Chandler from the cult series “Friends”, well, then you can relate to what their favourite pastime was- watching TV together. And somehow they just showed a great compatibility. Recent psychiatry research did a remarkable study on watching TV. One can actually know who their BFFs are, by surfing through TV channels.

According to the researchers, people with similar thought process respond equally to a stimulus like surfing on TV. Carolyn Parkinson, assistant professor of psychology said that, “Neural responses to watching videos can give a deep insight into people’s unconstrained and spontaneous thoughts.”

What is The Study All About?

It is believed that the brain activity of two people who have a similar thought process resembles each other to a surprisingly great extent. Often two strangers who click together spontaneously have similar mind streams. Demographic issues like age, gender, culture and place do contribute to making two people get along, but their compatibility can be judged by one such stimulus controlled behaviour that is, watching TV. Friends tend to respond in a parallel way in their brain work while surfing through channels. This could be in the form of laughing together, watching attentively or getting bored.

The Survey

The researchers took an online survey on a group of students with their friends and friends of friends, and the whole social network, an approximate of 279 students, and found quite a close-knit network among them. Another study known as the MRI was framed among 42 of them. A series of unfamiliar videos of different moods and genres were shown to them of 90 seconds to 4 minutes each in a fashion similar to watching when someone else is surfing the channels. Resultantly, a remarkable similarity was found among the close friends. A comparable brain activity could be drawn among them. Close friends showed similar reactions to common videos and same kind of emotions. The study also concluded the contradicting side which was finding out the amount of distance among few of the samples.

Researchers also found that watching TV has a great number of effects on social relationships. “It’s a great bonding tool among friends”, publishes Marie Claire. Whether it is laughing out loud moments by a comic movie or scaring to death by a horror flick, TV is an awesome social build up.

Conclusively, man is a social entity, he lives a life connected to each other. A great deal of influence happens in the brain activity when people socialise. Doing different kinds of stuff together improves the relationships among people. There are a number of stimuli controlled behaviours according to psychiatrists and, response to TV surfing is one of them. Researchers have also found out that in order to understand a brain activity of the individual, one needs to work on two brains so that a comparison can be made. One thing that needs pondering is that, if people tend to change according to their friends or if they choose those friends with whom they don’t need to change and streamline their perceptions. Quite a task, isn’t it?