So THIS Is What Video Calls Are Doing To Our Brains

Young pregnant businesswoman using laptop in an office podIf you’ve ever been on a work video call (and after COVID, it’s safe to say lots of us have), then you’ll probably know the particular stressors the medium can bring. There’s the person who’s accidentally muted themselves. There are the patchy internet connections. There’s the awkward, crossed-mic silences when the person leading the call asks a group questions (martyrs, IMO). And now, a paper published in Imaging Neuroscience has found that video calling people affects more than just social cues; it suggests that the contact method can have a pretty noticeable effect on how our brains process the interaction. “Separable Processes for Live ‘In-Person’ and Live ‘Zoom-like” Faces’,” a study led by Yale professor Joy Hirsch, found that “the social systems of the human brain are more active during real live in-person encounters than on Zoom.“People who we see on video calls “do not have the same ‘privileged access’ to social neural