Humanity has so many metaphors for a moment two people just… click. We’re on the same wavelength. We’re in sync. Get out of my brain! As I start my third year as a tutor at DePaul’s Writing Center, I’ve come to realize that my favorite part of tutoring springs out of these moments: the point in an appointment where we’ve built the rapport, we’ve set the agenda, and the conversation shifts. The writer stops saying, “This is what I’ve written,” I stop saying, “Here’s what I’d suggest,” and suddenly we’re both thinking out loud together about what the essay or project is really trying to say.
But at the Writing Center, those clicks don’t only happen in appointments. They also happen between us: at the receptionist desk between appointments, in our Slack channels online, sprawled across the orange couches, or in meetings with the admin who keep this whole place running. Somewhere along these past three years, the people I work with became the people I think with, and the people I think with became my friends.
And since I am the kind of person who needs to assign a why to every phenomenon I observe, I came across some research over my summer break that reveals how neuroscientists can actually measure these moments.
In a 2025 study published in NeuroImage, researchers recruited 77 pairs of learners. First, each person wrote an essay on their own; then, each pair wrote an essay together while both partners’ brain activity was recorded at the same time (Ran et al.). This technique is called hyperscanning, and it helps researchers detect inter-brain synchrony, or the degree to which activity in two people’s brains rises and falls together over time.
[A quick note for my fellow science nerds: the tool these researchers used is called functional near-infrared spectroscopy, or fNIRS. Participants wear a cap that shines harmless near-infrared light through the scalp and measures how much of it comes back. Oxygen-rich blood absorbs that light differently than oxygen-poor blood, so fNIRS can track changes in blood oxygen in the outer layer of the brain, signifying which regions are working the hardest at any given moment (Liu and Ren). In other words, fNIRS isn’t really reading brain waves. “Same wavelength” is, at its heart, just a metaphor—but it turns out to be a pretty good one.]
For most of its history, neuroscience has dedicated its research to studying one brain at a time. However, in 2012, psychologist Uri Hasson and his colleagues pointed out that other people shape so much of how we think as individuals. They called for a “multi-brain frame of reference” instead, arguing that when one person’s brain becomes coupled to another’s through speech, gesture, and facial expression, the pair can produce complex behaviors neither person could have produced alone (Hasson et al. 114).
Hey tutors, does this sound familiar?
Last spring, I wrote a blog post here about what my work as the assessments graduate assistant revealed: tutors carry around real teaching knowledge that they don’t always explicitly name, so metacognitive reflection is a tool we should call on to help us put language to these practices and explain the why behind our tutoring choices. But this reflection mostly happens inside one tutor’s head, and so much of what we know about writing and tutoring at the Writing Center? None of us figured it out alone. We brainstormed, generated ideas, and solved problems by observing seasoned tutors, attending professional development trainings, and engaging in thousands of silly yet powerful conversations with each other.
So with community as this quarter’s professional development theme, I want to turn my initial question—what can we learn when we think, write, and reflect our way through our tutoring choices outward. What do tutors learn when we write and work through writing-based problems together? And what happens between us when we do?
So let’s get back to that 2025 study. In their experiment, the researchers split their pairs into three conditions: pairs who wrote together in person, pairs who wrote together online with their cameras on, and pairs who wrote together online with their cameras off (Ran et al.). In other words, the study almost perfectly simulated the three appointment modalities offered at the Writing Center: Face-to-Face; Online Realtime, where writers can meet with us by video, by chat, or both; and Written Feedback.
Good news: every condition worked! In all three groups, essay partners who wrote together showed considerable learning gains over those who wrote alone, and those improvements were similar across conditions (Ran et al.). Writing together helped, full stop. In person, on camera, or off.
But what was actually happening here? The researchers found that when pairs worked together through a collaborative task, their brains showed comparable synchrony in the middle temporal gyrus, a region associated with processing language and meaning. The more the pairs traded information back and forth, the more synchronized their middle temporal gyri became. Further, the more often pairs combined this collaborative writing with asking each other questions, the bigger their learning gains (Ran et al.). As a self proclaimed question-driven tutor, I felt extremely seen. Asking questions about the work and admitting where you were confused or what you wanted to learn more about actually produced stronger essays.
And then I found the umbrella study—bear with me, I promise this is relevant.
Researchers at Hainan Normal University in China paired 120 university students who had never met and secretly gave each partner an incentive. Some were told they’d win a prize if their team performed well; others were told they’d win a prize for their individual performance. In half the pairs, both partners were given the same incentive. The other half were mixed with one team focused partner and one self-focused partner. Then every pair got ten minutes to brainstorm improvements to an ordinary umbrella while wearing fNIRS caps (Liu and Ren).
Surprisingly, the mixed pairs crushed the assignment. On a five-point scale, raters scored the mixed pairs’ umbrella designs at about a 3.5 for novelty, compared to about a 1.8 for the matched pairs—that’s nearly double! The mixed pairs also scored higher on suitability, completeness, and refinement. And their brains certainly showed it: mixed pairs showed an increase in synchrony in two areas of the prefrontal cortex, and in one of those areas, more synchrony was directly related to more novel ideas. Within these mixed pairs, the authors theorized that the self-focused partners pushed original ideas forward, while the team-focused partners helped weave those ideas into something shared (Liu and Ren).
Now, I have to be a responsible science nerd here, because this seems to be the kind of finding that’s tempting to slap on a motivational Writing Center poster. In this study, the “motivations” were assigned by prizes, not drawn from who the participants are, how they identify, or how they uniquely function within a group. The task was a design challenge, not a collaborative writing practice. And the authors themselves call their interpretation of their results tentative, noting that levels of synchrony can also rise simply because two people are focused on the same task (Liu and Ren). Synchrony isn’t a scientific friendship meter—it’s just one measurable trace of two people coordinating their attention.
But still! Two people who wanted different things, who had to build one thing together, ended up more in sync and more creative than two people who wanted the same thing, and I can’t seem to stop thinking about that.
Writing center scholars have been circling this idea for decades, long before anyone put undergraduates in swim caps full of wires. In 1984, Brooklyn College professor Kenneth Bruffee argued that thought is conversation we’ve internalized, and writing is that conversation turned outward again, which is a big part of why peer tutoring works. By talking through what needs to go in the writing, we can generate ideas and better understand how to organize and argue them in a cohesive paper. In 1991, composition and rhetoric scholar Andrea Lunsford pushed this idea further by calling for what she named Burkean Parlor Centers: writing centers that treat knowledge as socially constructed and place authority not in the tutor, and not in the individual writer, but in the pair negotiating meaning together (8).
But Lunsford was also clear that collaboration isn’t something that just… happens. Building a genuinely collaborative environment is a difficult process, as she wrote, and it must engage everyone, from the writers who visit the center to the peer tutors who provide the service to the professional staff who hold it all together at the top (6). Done carelessly, collaboration can curdle into sameness, flattening ideas into whatever everyone can agree on (Lunsford 7). The centers Lunsford called for value diversity and occasional respectful disagreement, not just consensus (9).
Read Bruffee and Lunsford alongside the umbrella study, and together they offer a powerful way to understand the collaborative community we’ve created—and continue to create—at DePaul’s Writing Center. The tutors here feel like a community because we don’t just work alongside one another to help individual writers, but we learn from one another, think with one another, and build techniques and strategies together that none of us could build alone. Three years ago, I never would have guessed that the relationships I’d made here would become one of the things I treasure most about this job. But they have, and I feel lucky—more than lucky, honestly—that I get to keep building them.
Here at DePaul, our professional development team puts together Tutor Talk, where tutors get together multiple times a quarter to talk about everything tutoring and writing, from linguistic diversity and justice to the emotional labor of providing writing support. While in the moment, these conversations often feel like a temporary vacation from bouncing between appointments, I’m realizing (after a summer of reading about synchronized prefrontal cortices) that these might be one of the most important services we offer tutors.And here’s why: if shared attention takes work, and that work creates synchronized thought, then Tutor Talk is where we do that work as a staff. It’s scheduled synchrony. (Professional development team, please do not put “scheduled synchrony” on a T-shirt. Actually, do.) When tutors puzzle over hierarchies of writing concerns, swap strategies for honoring writers’ agency, or practice how to honor diverse languages, dialects, and ways of knowing under the umbrella of higher education, we’re practicing the exact skills we use in appointments, just with each other: asking questions, trading information, and building on someone else’s half-baked idea until it comes out perfectly done.
Lucky for us, this process of building relationships with each other starts long before a new tutor ever leads an appointment on their own. During tutor training at DePaul, new tutors shadow returning tutors, which is basically a crash course in shared attention: they learn where an experienced tutor directs their focus in a draft, when they pause to allow a writer’s voice to shine, and what questions they ask to keep an appointment moving forward. Then, for their whole first year, each new tutor is paired with a returning tutor to chat about tutoring and learn about the ins and outs of the Writing Center’s practices. On paper, this is a cookie-cutter mentorship program.
But in practice, it’s a dyad, the exact unit those researchers kept strapping fNIRS caps onto. The new tutor brings fresh eyes and the questions the rest of us forgot we, too, should be asking. The returning tutor brings a stockpile of strategies and at least one appointment they still think about in the shower. And if the pairs in the 2025 Ran et al. study learned the most when they combined collaborative writing with asking questions, then a mentorship chat is pretty much the ideal learning situation. No fNIRS cap required.
Further, if the umbrella study is even a little bit right about difference, then the diversity of people sprawled across our Lincoln Park and Loop offices is, at its core, the whole point of what we do. Our staff spans entire worldviews of languages, identities, majors, ages, disciplines, passions, and (let’s be honest) motivations. Some of us are here because we love sentences a frankly concerning amount or consider the use of the Oxford comma a moral issue. Some of us are building toward grad school, or teaching, or a solid resume line. (And yes, Liu and Ren assigned their motivations with prize money, so I’m stretching here. Let me stretch!) The point is, when a biology-major tutor and an English-major tutor read the same paragraph, they don’t see the same paragraph. But the conversation that happens in this gap between reading and seeing is where all the good ideas come alive.
What I’ve learned in three years is that relationships between tutors are built over writing, in the most literal sense. You learn how someone thinks by watching how they read a sentence. You learn to trust this thinking when they’re honest about a draft, including yours. And once that trust exists, everything else gets easier: you know who to ask about APA citations, who to ask about lab reports, and who to text after a long day in the office. Even the finding at the center of my spring blog post didn’t come from me alone—it surfaced through sharing too many energy drinks with my assessments supervisor while reading through survey responses together, sorting them into categories and searching for themes.
These relationships don’t just make the job more fun (though, to be clear, they do). They make us better tutors, because none of us has to know everything when we know each other. The writers feel it, too. A staff that talks, writes, and synchronizes with each other is a staff that shares strategies, catches each other’s blind spots, and walks into appointments carrying more than one person’s knowledge. When we’re in sync with each other, our writers, in a small way, get a piece of all of us in every single appointment.
In the spring, I ended my post by writing that sometimes we know what we’re doing before we know how to name it, and that reflection is how we learn the language. This quarter, I understand that language is never ours to learn alone. Decades before anyone measured inter-brain synchrony, a student in Lunsford’s writing center class wrote to her that “knowing happens with other people” (qtd. in Lunsford 9).
The science is new, but the idea isn’t. And sometimes, for a few minutes on the orange couches, we really are on the same wavelength. Metaphorically. Hemodynamically. You get it.
Works Cited
Bruffee, Kenneth A. “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind.’” College English, vol. 46, no. 7, Nov. 1984, pp. 635–52.
Hasson, Uri, et al. “Brain-to-Brain Coupling: A Mechanism for Creating and Sharing a Social World.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 16, no. 2, Feb. 2012, pp. 114–21, doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2011.12.007.
Liu, Ning, and Sai Nan Ren. “The Influence of Social Motivation Diversity on Group Creativity: Evidence from fNIRS Hyperscanning.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 16, Oct. 2025, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1665583.
Lunsford, Andrea. “Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center.” Writing Center Journal, vol. 12, no. 1, 1991, pp. 3–10, https://doi.org/10.7771/2832-9414.1252.
Ran, Hengyue, et al. “Online and In-Person Collaborative Writing Have Similar Benefits but Different Costs.” NeuroImage, vol. 324, Dec. 2025, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2025.121629
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