We spend our lives conversing with one other. The effectiveness of verbal communication has important social, economic, and educational consequences. It is essential to many important activities, including student–teacher and patient–clinician interactions. The two main constitutive parts of verbal communication are speech production and speech perception. Typically, they have been studied separately and with isolated individuals. Nevertheless, a speaker producing perfectly intelligible speech and a listener being able to decode it, are necessary but not sufficient elements for successful communication. We have all experienced failed conversations in which no clear understanding could be drawn from the information conveyed. Recently, some scholars have applied a ‘two-person neuroscience’ (2PN) framework to investigate the specific neural mechanisms underpinning speaker–listener interactions. This framework involves collecting simultaneous neural recordings from more than one person, a technique referred as hyperscanning. The results have revealed that effective verbal communication is associated with a pattern of inter-brain coupling. In other words, the brains of people having an effective conversation are literally ‘on the same wavelength.’ However, the role played by the inter-brain coupling of oscillatory activity, for the two persons to understand each other is still unknown. We propose a research agenda that aims at discovering the interplay between different aspects of verbal interaction and brain-to-brain coupling.
