We all know those people who after being together for a long time they start to look alike, complete each other’s sentences and know what the other is thinking just by looking into their eyes. It’s like they share a brain. And now science says they kind of do.
Studies have found out that people who are in long term and happy relationships develop a co-depend way of thinking. They do not literally share a brain, but they do assign certain cognitive tasks to their partner.
A team of researchers from by Macquarie University in Australia have found out that long term partners rely on each other to fill in particular memory gaps. The study focused on the way they collaborate to carry out memory related tasks.
The research shows that remembering things, from shared experiences to the shopping list, is something that the brain can do more efficiently if the work load is shared between two intimate individuals.
It’s a compensation mechanism that the brain adopts in order to save important information. This kind of collaborative memory has 3 forms:
- Partners give each other cues so that they remember together what they both forgot.
- A recalled experience becomes more detailed and complex when is recreated by both partners.
- One partner describing one shared experience makes the other see things in another, more complex perspective.
The older we get, the more difficult it becomes to remember the details of our own lives. But this is exactly where recalling together pays off. Remembering certain events and episodes becomes a shared responsibility and therefore an easier thing to do.
There’s nothing like having somebody on whom you can count, even if it’s only to give you that fleeing piece of information when you need it. Stay connected, stay sharp! Please share this!
