Group Neurodynamics: Conceptual and Experimental Framework

Our multidisciplinary research challenges few essential and actual problems in the area of social neuroscience, i.e. (i) fundamental lack of understanding what is individual and collective consciousness, (ii) how to bridge group neurodynamics data to the behavioral social phenomena, and (iii) technological challenges addressing simultaneous measurements of brain EM activations and analyses in terms of spatial/temporal synchronizations and spectral coherence for the group of people. Our basic assumptions follow field theoretic consciousness interpretation approach and precede it assuming, that mutually entangled individual mind states create coherent social networks and behavior as well. The latter supposes that collective consciousness can be empirically investigated in a form of simultaneous group-wide coherent brain activations (e.g. using EEG measured delta, theta, alfa and beta oscillations). For the experimental validation of the proposed paradigm we have designed a three level experimental and simulation research framework, which starts from the modeling and benchmark estimates of correlations for the individual mind states, proceeds with estimates of the coherence and synchronicity measures for the group-wide neurodynamics and ends up with construction of oscillations based multi-agent social system simulation model.