Eurovision week. What spectacle does to the nervous system.

I am a biologist who studies development, but this week I want to write about something that I usually study from the outside: the biology of collective excitement. What happens to the nervous system when you watch something enormous with other people.

Eurovision 2024 is in Malmö. Victor wrote last week about what the voting patterns teach children about European geography. I want to write about something different: what the spectacle itself does.

Eurovision is one of the largest shared cultural events on earth. In 2023, 160 million people watched it. Many millions more watched with other people in rooms and bars and community spaces. The experience of watching it is not equivalent to watching any other programme because of this: the knowledge that 160 million other people are watching at the same time changes the nature of the watching.

This is a real biological effect. Synchronised shared experiences — watching the same thing, at the same time, knowing others are watching — activate what researchers call 'neural synchrony'. Brain activity aligns between people who are having shared experiences. This alignment is associated with increased trust, increased cohesion, and increased emotional responsiveness.

Collective experience — shared attention, shared emotional response — is associated with increased trust and cohesion. Eurovision at scale is a collective experience. That is not nothing.

Collective experience — shared attention, shared emotional response — is associated with increased trust and cohesion. Eurovision at scale is a collective experience. That is not nothing.

Eurovision at scale is a collective experience. That is not nothing.

Children feel this without knowing what it is. The experience of watching something enormous with other people — the World Cup, the Olympics, Eurovision — produces a specific emotional state that doesn't arise from watching alone. There is a word for it from anthropology: communitas. The particular feeling of being part of a temporary community gathered around a shared experience.

This feeling is different from friendship, different from family affection. It arises between strangers and between people who would otherwise have nothing in common, because the sharing of the experience is the common thing. The Eurovision viewer in Vienna and the Eurovision viewer in Lisbon are feeling the same thing at the same moment, and this creates, however briefly, a form of connection.

The developmental relevance of this is that children who experience communitas regularly — through sport, through ceremony, through shared cultural events — develop different social capacities than children who don't. They have a felt understanding of what it means to be part of something larger than themselves. This felt understanding is different from the intellectual understanding and is significantly more durable.

Eurovision is many things. It is kitsch and it is earnest and it is politics and it is music and it is Europe performing itself for itself. But it is also 160 million nervous systems briefly synchronised around the same moment. That is not nothing. That is, in its small way, what community is.

That is not nothing. That is, in its small way, what community is. Nervous systems briefly synchronised around the same moment. Worth noting once a year.

That is not nothing. That is, in its small way, what community is. Nervous systems briefly synchronised around the same moment. Worth noting once a year.

Nervous systems briefly synchronised around the same moment. Worth noting once a year.

The Eurovision final is the largest single live broadcast audience in the world in most years. More people watch it together, at the same moment, than any other non-sporting event. What that produces — in living rooms across forty countries — is a collective experience that the algorithmic feed cannot replicate. The feed is personal. The broadcast is shared. The difference, when you feel it, is significant.

Worth noting, once a year.

When did your child last experience communitas — the specific feeling of sharing something large with others in real time?

And: what events in your family's life produce this regularly — if any? And what does its absence look like?

What shared experiences are you building into the year that have this quality of simultaneous largeness?

This week: name the feeling. When your child has just watched something big with others — Eurovision, a sporting event, a film they loved — ask: what is that feeling called, when you feel something big with other people at the same time? Give them the word communitas. The word makes the experience nameable, and nameable things can be sought.

I watched the London semifinal from my sofa in London with my children and my neighbour's children and my neighbour and a quantity of snacks that was, in retrospect, slightly excessive. The collective experiencing of something terrible in the first act and something wonderful in the second was exactly what I described above. I was also studying it, because I cannot help it. This is a professional hazard that my children find both amusing and slightly annoying.

Names of people and brands in these editions are changed. Whoever was there and reads this knows what we are talking about.

Alex adds, from New York: I grew up in a city where spectacle is normal — fireworks, parades, public gatherings of every kind. What I've noticed as a parent is that spectacle works on children at the neurological level: the synchrony of shared experience — the same sound, the same image, the same emotional response at the same time — produces a felt sense of belonging that nothing else replicates at that scale. Eurovision is one of the few things that still does this for families at home. It is worth protecting. — Alex