Some of my favorite conversations—both in writing this book and life—have occurred with Andy Ward, my editor. He is a gifted, demanding, and farsighted wordsmith, and a dedicated friend. In the U.K., Nigel Wilcockson offered wonderful suggestions and support, and in Brooklyn, Scott Moyers was an invaluable early sounding board. Similarly, I was lucky enough to work with Gina Centrello, who made Random House a haven for writers, as well as Tom Perry, Maria Braeckel, Greg Kubie, Sanyu Dillon, Ayelet Durantt, Windy Dorresteyn, Azraf Khan, and Joe Perez. I owe a huge debt to the amazing Random House sales force.

  Andrew Wylie, as all who know him are aware, has made the world immeasurably better for writers, and his colleague James Pullen, also of the Wylie Agency, does valiant battle overseas. I previously worked at The New York Times, where I had many wonderful colleagues, and now write for The New Yorker, where David Remnick and Daniel Zalewski prove, each day, that kindness, intelligence, and the highest standards in journalism are natural companions. And, a special thanks to David Kortava, who provided fact-checking for the book, Asha Smith and Olivia Boone, my assistants, and Richard Rampell, who always offers sage advice.

  The book’s graphics are by Darren Booth, a wonderful illustrator. Most of this book was written in Santa Cruz, California, which has welcomed my family.

  Finally, my deepest thanks are to my sons, Oli and Harry, and, of course, my wife, Liz, whose constant love, support, guidance, intelligence, and friendship made this book possible.

  —July 2023

  A NOTE ON SOURCES AND METHODS

  The reporting in this book is based on hundreds of interviews and thousands of papers and studies. Many of those sources are detailed in the text itself or the endnotes.

  In most situations, individuals who were major sources of information or who published research that was integral to my reporting were provided with summaries of my reporting and given an opportunity to review facts and offer additional comments, address discrepancies, or register issues with how information was portrayed. Many of those comments influenced the book’s final form and are reproduced in the endnotes. (No source was given access to the book’s text prior to publication, and all comments were based on summaries that I, or a fact-checker, provided.)

  In a very small number of cases, confidentiality was extended to sources who, for a variety of reasons, would not speak on a for-attribution basis. In such cases, and other situations, some identifying characteristics have been withheld or changed to protect anonymity, to conform with privacy laws and ethics, or for other reasons.

  NOTES

  PROLOGUE

  Even if you had nothing in common with Felix: Felix Sigala spoke to me on the condition of anonymity. Details—including Sigala’s name as well as specifics about his career—have been changed to obscure his identity. The FBI was presented with fact-checking inquiries regarding the events described. The Bureau, citing the agency’s press policies, declined to comment beyond confirming general details.

  GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

  “The single biggest problem with communication”: The provenance of this quote, like many great quips, is somewhat murky, but it is widely attributed to George Bernard Shaw.

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  CHAPTER ONE: THE MATCHING PRINCIPLE

  a case officer for the Central Intelligence Agency: Jim Lawler spent twenty-five years as an officer with the Central Intelligence Agency and is still bound by pledges of confidentiality on a number of topics. Though he spent many hours sharing his experiences with me, he did not, at any time, divulge confidential information. As a result, some of the details in his story have been changed, were described to me only in general terms, or were confirmed by other sources. Yasmin is a pseudonym. Lawler did not specify which nation Yasmin came from, saying only that it was “an oil-rich country hostile to the United States.” Lawler also declined to identify the nation where he was stationed, saying only that it was “an alpine nation in Europe.” If you are interested in learning more about Lawler’s experiences, please allow me to recommend his wonderful espionage novels: Living Lies and In the Twinkling of an Eye.

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  “who truly understands him”: Randy Burkett, “An Alternative Framework for Agent Recruitment: From MICE to RASCLS,” Studies in Intelligence 57, no. 1 (2013): 7–17.

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  a flurry of research: Marta Zaraska, “All Together Now,” Scientific American 323 (October 2020): 4, 64–69; Lars Riecke et al., “Neural Entrainment to Speech Modulates Speech Intelligibility,” Current Biology 28, no. 2 (2018): 161–69; Andrea Antal and Christoph S. Herrmann, “Transcranial Alternating Current and Random Noise Stimulation: Possible Mechanisms,” Neural Plasticity 2016 (2016): 3616807; L. Whitsel et al., “Stability of Rapidly Adapting Afferent Entrainment vs. Responsivity,” Somatosensory & Motor Research 17, no. 1 (2000): 13–31; Nina G. Jablonski, Skin: A Natural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

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  “Why people ‘click’ with some people”: Thalia Wheatley et al., “From Mind Perception to Mental Connection: Synchrony as a Mechanism for Social Understanding,” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 6, no. 8 (2012): 589–606.

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  “to connect with each other, against all odds”: Wheatley, here, is quoting the author Michael Dorris.

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  scholars at the Max Planck Institute: Ulman Lindenberger et al., “Brains Swinging in Concert: Cortical Phase Synchronization While Playing Guitar,” BMC Neuroscience 10 (2009): 1–12; Johanna Sänger, Viktor Müller, and Ulman Lindenberger, “Intra- and Interbrain Synchronization and Network Properties When Playing Guitar in Duets,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (2012): 312; Viktor Müller, Johanna Sänger, and Ulman Lindenberger, “Hyperbrain Network Properties of Guitarists Playing in Quartet,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1423, no. 1 (2018): 198–210.

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  the electrical impulses along their skin: Daniel C. Richardson, Rick Dale, and Natasha Z. Kirkham, “The Art of Conversation Is Coordination,” Psychological Science 18, no. 5 (2007): 407–13. In response to fact-checking inquiries, the author of this study, Daniel Richardson, said that while these kinds of physical effects have been documented by scientists, “those are not specifically effects that I have personally proved in my own lab. I have discussed these effects before in review papers, or introductions to my own related experiments (on eye movements or body movement coordination, for example).” Sievers noted that while we do see these kinds of alignments in collaborative activities, researchers are uncertain about the direction of the causality.

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  Sievers found other studies: Ayaka Tsuchiya et al., “Body Movement Synchrony Predicts Degrees of Information Exchange in a Natural Conversation,” Frontiers in Psychology 11 (2020): 817; Scott S. Wiltermuth and Chip Heath, “Synchrony and Cooperation,” Psychological Science 20, no. 1 (2009): 1–5; Michael J. Richardson et al., “Rocking Together: Dynamics of Intentional and Unintentional Interpersonal Coordination,” Human Movement Science 26, no. 6 (2007): 867–91; Naoyuki Osaka et al., “How Two Brains Make One Synchronized Mind in the Inferior Frontal Cortex: fNIRS-Based Hyperscanning During Cooperative Singing,” Frontiers in Psychology 6 (2015): 1811; Alejandro Pérez, Manuel Carreiras, and Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, “Brain-to-Brain Entrainment: EEG Interbrain Synchronization While Speaking and Listening,” Scientific Reports 7, no. 1 (2017): 1–12.

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  a long and convoluted tale about her prom night: Greg J. Stephens, Lauren J. Silbert, and Uri Hasson, “Speaker–Listener Neural Coupling Underlies Successful Communication,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 32 (2010): 14425–30; Lauren J. Silbert et al., “Coupled Neural Systems Underlie the Production and Comprehension of Naturalistic Narrative Speech,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 43 (2014): E4687–96.

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  “extent of speaker-listener neural coupling”: Greg J. Stephens, Lauren J. Silbert, and Uri Hasson, “Speaker–Listener Neural Coupling Underlies Successful Communication,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 32 (2010): 14425–30.

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  we must connect with them: J. M. Ackerman and J. A. Bargh, “Two to Tango: Automatic Social Coordination and the Role of Felt Effort,” in Effortless Attention: A New Perspective in the Cognitive Science of Attention and Action, ed. Brian Bruya (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press Scholarship Online, 2010); Sangtae Ahn et al., “Interbrain Phase Synchronization During Turn-Taking Verbal Interaction—A Hyperscanning Study Using Simultaneous EEG/MEG,” Human Brain Mapping 39, no. 1 (2018): 171–88; Laura Astolfi et al., “Cortical Activity and Functional Hyperconnectivity by Simultaneous EEG Recordings from Interacting Couples of Professional Pilots,” 2012 Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, 4752–55; Jing Jiang et al., “Leader Emergence Through Interpersonal Neural Synchronization,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 14 (2015): 4274–79; Reneeta Mogan, Ronald Fischer, and Joseph A. Bulbulia, “To Be in Synchrony or Not? A Meta-Analysis of Synchrony’s Effects on Behavior, Perception, Cognition and Affect,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 72 (2017): 13–20; Uri Hasson et al., “Brain-to-Brain Coupling: A Mechanism for Creating and Sharing a Social World,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 16, no. 2 (2012): 114–21; Uri Hasson, “I Can Make Your Brain Look Like Mine,” Harvard Business Review 88, no. 12 (2010): 32–33; Maya Rossignac-Milon et al., “Merged Minds: Generalized Shared Reality in Dyadic Relationships,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 120, no. 4 (2021): 882.

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  synchronize as well: In response to fact-checking inquiries, Sievers wrote that while understanding and neural alignment can be accompanied by physiological entrainment of pulse, facial expression, or emotional experience, it is not guaranteed. “It’s possible to listen to someone, understand them, and not become physiologically entrained….Part of what makes both conversation and music meaningful is seeing how people change as they interact, aligning and misaligning, steering each other and being steered.”

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  There is something about neural simultaneity: Laura Menenti, Martin J. Pickering, and Simon C. Garrod, “Toward a Neural Basis of Interactive Alignment in Conversation,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 6 (2012); Sivan Kinreich et al., “Brain-to-Brain Synchrony During Naturalistic Social Interactions,” Scientific Reports 7, no. 1 (2017): 17060; Lyle Kingsbury and Weizhe Hong, “A Multi-Brain Framework for Social Interaction,” Trends in Neurosciences 43, no. 9 (2020): 651–66; Thalia Wheatley et al., “Beyond the Isolated Brain: The Promise and Challenge of Interacting Minds,” Neuron 103, no. 2 (2019): 186–88; Miriam Rennung and Anja S. Göritz, “Prosocial Consequences of Interpersonal Synchrony,” Zeitschrift für Psychologie (2016); Ivana Konvalinka and Andreas Roepstorff, “The Two-Brain Approach: How Can Mutually Interacting Brains Teach Us Something About Social Interaction?” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 6 (2012): 215; Caroline Szymanski et al., “Teams on the Same Wavelength Perform Better: Inter-brain Phase Synchronization Constitutes a Neural Substrate for Social Facilitation,” Neuroimage 152 (2017): 425–36.

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  achieved moments of supercommunication: Sievers wrote that his research is primarily focused on how conversation creates alignment in the future, a distinction from alignment in the moment. Further, his dissertation research was on emotion perception in music and movement. B. Sievers et al., “Music and Movement Share a Dynamic Structure That Supports Universal Expressions of Emotion,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 1 (2012): 70–75; B. Sievers et al., “A Multi-sensory Code for Emotional Arousal,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 286 (2019): 20190513; B. Sievers et al., “Visual and Auditory Brain Areas Share a Representational Structure That Supports Emotion Perception,” Current Biology 31, no. 23 (2021): 5192–203.

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  stage an experiment: In this study, Sievers “was interested in knowing who was better at creating consensus for being convincing,” he wrote. “And I was interested in knowing why and then trying to lay down a scientific and neurobiological foundation for understanding why people might be more or less convincing or create more or less group cohesion…. I wasn’t thinking about, like, supercommunication. [But] I think there are people that are much better at this than other people. And it makes sense to sort of scientifically try and understand why and if we can be better at communication.”

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  difficult to understand: Beau Sievers et al., “How Consensus-Building Conversation Changes Our Minds and Aligns Our Brains,” PsyArXiv, July 12, 2020.

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  When he dominated the conversation: Sievers wrote: “We found that groups with people judged to be high social status showed lower neural alignment, and that high-status people used different conversation strategies, including talking more, giving orders to others, and implicitly rejecting others’ ideas. Subject 4 in Group D was rated as having high social status and this conversation did not produce increased alignment, so this feels like a good example. However, the statistical analysis doesn’t let us ‘zoom in’ on a single person, so we can’t know with certainty whether Subject 4 held his group back; other factors may have been at play.”

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  high centrality participants discussing: The dialogue from study participants throughout this chapter has been edited and condensed, in some places, for brevity and clarity. In the original study, participants are referred to with coded signifiers and are not referred to, in the transcripts, as “high centrality participants.”

  GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

  But the most important difference: Sievers wrote that “the high centrality participants who facilitated consensus, they did not speak more or less than others, and they directed attention to other speakers, and they did so more than the high-status people. They requested clarification more frequently…. They were not rated to be more influential by their group, and they were more susceptible to neural influence…. This ties into a larger literature on the traits that people have called high self-monitoring…a tendency to adapt one’s behavior to the groups that you’re in. And we didn’t measure that trait in our study, but we should have.”

  GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

  “How do you think this movie will end?”: This transcript, like the previous one, was edited and condensed for brevity and clarity.

  GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

  “likely to adapt their own brain activity”: Sievers, “How Consensus-Building Conversation Changes Our Minds.”

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  Other people turned to them: Sievers made clear that this study did not look at community leadership, and so while that is a “proposed explanation, [it is] not part of the science…. It could be that people become central in their social network and then other people have to talk to them, because they could have become central for some other reason, like they own a yacht or something.”

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  if our mind doesn’t align: Sievers noted that “the localization of brain function—which parts of the brain are responsible for what kinds of behavior or thinking—is one of the most debated topics in neuroscience…. However, generally speaking, it appears that brain areas and networks seem to perform multiple functions (Suárez et al., 2020). This seems to be true across the brain, from neural networks to individual neurons (Rigotti et al., 2013). So, the mindsets identified in this section are likely handled by several brain networks coordinating together over time. Put simply, the brain is very complex, and any claims that just one network or part of the brain is responsible for a certain kind of behavior or thinking—or a particular mindset—is inevitably oversimplified.”

  GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

  we’re attuned to How Do We Feel?: Piercarlo Valdesolo and David DeSteno, “Synchrony and the Social Tuning of Compassion,” Emotion 11, no. 2 (2011): 262.

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  “about other people, oneself, and the relation”: Matthew D. Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). The default mode network incorporates the medial frontoparietal network, or MFPN. Sievers wrote that “some scientists have theorized that the medial frontoparietal network is specific to social stimuli (e.g., Schilbach et al., 2008), but there is also strong evidence that its function may be much more general. The MFPN may be involved in memory retrieval (Buckner & DiNicola, 2019) and creativity (Beaty et al., 2016; Beaty et al., 2021). It may be that the MFPN is involved in generating information internally, when that information is disconnected from immediate sensory input (Buckner & DiNicola, 2019), or integrating that information with sensory information (Yeshurun, Nguyen and Hasson, 2021). Moreover, there are other parts of the brain that likely play a role in social cognition outside of the MFPN, such as the fusiform gyrus for face recognition and the amygdala for recognition of emotion in facial expressions. And so, though a range of social tasks reliably recruit the MFPN, activation of the MFPN does not always imply social cognition.”