When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing(48)
What’s true for French lunch makers is equally true for Indian lunch deliverers.
Touch
Some choirs extend their synchronization to their fingertips. When they sing, they hold hands—to connect to one another and improve the quality of their sound. The dabbawalas don’t hold hands. But they do show the physical ease of people who know one another well. They drape an arm around a colleague or pat him on the back. They can communicate with those beyond hearing distance by pointing and using other gestures. And on train rides, in a luggage compartment that lacks discrete seats, they often lean against one another, one wala napping on another’s shoulder.
Touch is another bolster for belongingness. For example, a few years ago University of California-Berkeley researchers tried to predict the success of NBA basketball teams by examining their use of this tactile language. They watched every team play an early-season game and counted how often the players touched one another—a list that included “fist bumps, high fives, chest bumps, leaping shoulder bumps, chest punches, head slaps, head grabs, low fives, high tens, full hugs, half hugs, and team huddles.” Then they monitored team performance over the rest of the season.
Even after controlling for the obvious factors that affect basketball outcomes—for example, the quality of players—they found that touch predicted both individual and team performance. “Touch is the most highly developed sense at birth, and preceded language in hominid evolution,” they write. “[T]ouch increases cooperative behavior within groups, which in turn enables better group performance.” Touching is a form of synching, a primal way to indicate where you are and where you’re going. “Basketball has evolved its own language of touch,” they write. “High fives and fist bumps, seemingly small dramatic demonstrations during group interactions, have a lot to say about the cooperative workings of a team, and whether the team wins or loses.”13
Group timing requires belongingness, which is enabled by codes, garb, and touch. Once groups synch to the tribe, they’re ready to synch at the next, and final, level.
EFFORT AND ECSTASY: SYNCHING TO THE HEART
Intermission has ended. The Congressional Chorus singers climb the four risers for act two of Road Trip! For the next seventy minutes, they’ll sing another dozen songs, including a gorgeous twenty-four-person a cappella rendition of “Baby, What a Big Surprise.”
The choristers’ voices are in synch, of course. Anyone can hear that. But what’s going on inside their bodies, though not audible, is important and intriguing. During this performance, the hearts of this diverse set of amateur singers are likely beating at the same pace.14
Synching to the heart is the third principle of group timing. Synchronizing makes us feel good—and feeling good helps a group’s wheels turn more smoothly. Coordinating with others also makes us do good—and doing good enhances synchronization.
Exercise is one of the few activities in life that is indisputably good for us—an undertaking that extends enormous benefits but extracts few costs. Exercise helps us live longer. It fends off heart disease and diabetes. It reduces our weight and improves our strength. And its psychological value is enormous. For people suffering from depression, it can be just as effective as medication. For healthy people, it’s an instant and long-lasting mood booster.15 Anyone who examines the science on exercise reaches the same conclusion: People would be silly not to do it.
Choral singing might be the new exercise.
The research on the benefits of singing in groups is stunning. Choral singing calms heart rates and boosts endorphin levels.16 It improves lung function.17 It increases pain thresholds and reduces the need for pain medication.18 It even alleviates symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome.19 Group singing—not just performances but also practices—increases the production of immunoglobulin, making it easier to fight infections.20 In fact, cancer patients who sing in choirs show an improved immune response after just one rehearsal.21
And while the physiological payoffs are many, the psychological ones might be even greater. Several studies demonstrate that choral singing delivers a significant boost to positive mood.22 It also lifts self-esteem while reducing feelings of stress and symptoms of depression.23 It enhances one’s sense of purpose and meaning, and increases sensitivity toward others.24 And these effects come not from singing per se but from singing in a group. For example, people who sing in choirs report far higher well-being than those who sing solo.25
The consequence is a virtuous circle of good feeling and improved coordination. Feeling good promotes social cohesion, which makes it easier to synchronize. Synchronizing with others feels good, which deepens attachment and improves synchronization further still.
Choral groups are the most robust expression of this phenomenon, but other activities in which participants find a way to operate in synch also create similar good feelings. Researchers at the University of Oxford have found that group dancing—“a ubiquitous human activity that involves exertive synchronized movement to music”—raises the pain threshold of people who participate.26 The same is true for rowing, an endeavor lathered in agony. Other Oxford research, conducted on members of the university’s crew team, found elevated pain thresholds when people rowed together but less elevated ones when individuals rowed alone. They even call this state of mind, in which synchronized participants become less susceptible to pain, “rowers’ high.”27