Searching for the Metaverse: Neuroscience of Physical and Digital Communities

What distinguishes real-world communities from their online counterparts? Social and cognitive neuroscience research on social networks and collective intentionality will be used in the article to answer this question. Physical communities are born in places. And places engage ‘‘we-mode’’ neurobiological and cognitive processes as behavioral synchrony, shared attention, deliberate attunement, interbrain synchronization, and so on, which create coherent social networks of very different individuals who are supported by a ‘‘wisdom of crowd.’’ Digital technologies remove physical boundaries, giving people more freedom to choose their activities and groups. At the same time, however, the lack of physical co-presence of community members significantly reduces their possibility of activating ‘‘we-mode’’ cognitive processes and social motivation. Because of this, unlike physical communities that allow interaction between people from varied origins and stories, digital communities are always made up of people who have the same interests and knowledge (communities of practice). This new situation disrupts the ‘‘wisdom of crowd,’’ making the community more radical and less accurate (polarization effect), allowing influential users to wield disproportionate influence over the group’s beliefs, and producing inequalities in the distribution of social capital. However, a new emergent technology—the Metaverse—has the potential to reverse this trend. Several studies have revealed that virtual and augmented reality—the major technologies underlying the Metaverse—can engage the same neurobiological and cognitive ‘‘we-mode’’ processes as real-world environments. If the many flaws in this technology are fixed, it might encourage people to engage in more meaningful and constructive interactions in online communities.