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Your heartbeat might help you cooperate. When we make a movement, even a small one, it is most likely to end exactly in the middle of each heartbeat 鈥� and this synchronisation happens when we watch someone else do the same thing. This could be how our bodies help us align our actions with others.

鈥淲e don鈥檛 yet know if the heartbeat is guiding the action or responding to it,鈥� says Eleanor Palser at the University of California, San Francisco. She and her colleagues聽examined how heartbeats sync with actions using electrocardiograms (ECGs), which measure the electrical activity of the heart.

Previous work has shown that heartbeats sync with walking speed, but this test measured heart activity while using fine motor skills. The team asked 26 people to sit in pairs across from each other at a table equipped with four touch-sensitive pads and a marble. The pairs took turns moving the marble from pad to pad after memorising a sequence on a screen.

The team found that the end of each movement was more likely to occur between heartbeats than during a heartbeat. They also found that the heartbeats of people who were watching their partner move the marble lined up with the action in the same way.

Palser says these findings suggest that our bodies may help us sync with others to perform a task. Some hypotheses suggest the synchronisation may be driven by a feedback loop between the heart and the brain, which involves cells called baroreceptors that signal the brain when the heart muscle contracts.

It may also have to do with the nature of the task. 鈥淓ver seen biathletes shoot?鈥� says Konrad Kording at the University of Pennsylvania, referring to the sport in which athletes ski and then fire a rifle at a target. 鈥淭hey spend a couple of seconds bringing down their heartbeat. I presume that matters because their heartbeat is 鈥榳iggling鈥� their body a bit, making their shots less precise. Synchronising to the heartbeat minimises that effect,鈥� he says. A similar thing may be going on here.

The task in this study wasn鈥檛 physically demanding, but the participants said they found it hard to hold the memorised sequence in mind. 鈥淚t鈥檚 like a cognitive target,鈥� Palser says.