Searching for the Metaverse: Neuroscience of Physical and Digital Communities

The paper addresses how and why social experience differs between 'we/us' and 'they/them' dynamics, and how communities differ from mere groups. It frames social networks as more than collections of people: they shape social identity and generate social capital (bonding, bridging, linking), enriching individual experience, competence and goal attainment, collective agency, and sense of community. Historically, communities were place-based; with the rise of the internet and social media, communities often form digitally, decoupled from physical neighborhoods. There is debate: some argue digital networks extend reach and specialization; others contend they erode community life tied to real places. Building on Tuomela’s theory, the authors distinguish I-mode (private, individual aims even in group contexts) from we-mode (acting together for shared group purposes under collective commitments). The article proposes that the essence of community is we-mode and uses recent social and cognitive neuroscience to explore its neurobiological bases and how the shift from physical to digital contexts alters we-mode processes.

Neuroscience of physical communities and places: Places, defined by boundaries, afford resources and constrain action, fostering interaction and community. Neuroscience shows self and social identity are anchored in relation to places: hippocampal place cells encode location and scaffold episodic and autobiographical memory; spatial context plays a primary role in neural representation of events. Place attachment arises via autobiographical memory and confers continuity, security, and goal support; oxytocin contributes to environment preference when repeatedly associated with affectively significant contexts. Collective behaviors and social identity: Collective action involves accepting shared frames, shared knowledge of goals, and joint action. Empathy and perceived needs drive collective behaviors but entail emotional costs (aversive arousal, distress vs empathic concern). Oxytocin modulates social salience, approach/avoidance, and bio-behavioral synchrony; physical touch and social vocalizations release oxytocin, enhancing collective engagement. Interpersonal synchrony aligns physiological signals (heart rate, neural oscillations), increases social affiliation and joint agency, and supports 'we-representations' that enable prediction and correction of partners’ contributions to shared goals. Hyperscanning studies show interbrain synchrony indexes and supports team performance, engagement, social closeness, and joint attention. Shared narratives and collective memory: Communities cohere through shared narratives that transform autobiographical memories of collective actions into collective memories, building a 'we-space' of action and meaning. Sharing biographical information induces cross-brain synchrony; identical narrative stimuli synchronize heart rate and neural activity across individuals (EEG, MEG, fNIRS), engaging mechanisms overlapping with episodic memory. Narratives help encode social beliefs as causal sequences connecting agents, places, and events, underpinning social categorization, identification, and comparison, and enabling 'wisdom of crowds' by aggregating diverse information and minimizing individual errors. Neuroscience of digital communities: Digital media remove place constraints, increasing behavioral freedom and enabling maintenance of more ties and specialized interactions, which can maximize bridging social capital and facilitate social movements. However, lacking a physical setting weakens direct links between autobiographical memory and experience; passive use promotes negative social comparison, lower social connection, and higher stress, whereas active sharing can aid rehearsal and memory retention. The absence of co-presence disrupts we-mode processes (synchrony, joint attention, intentional attunement), reducing social motivation and impairing empathy-driven extended affectivity. Emotional contagion operates at scale (e.g., Facebook experiment with 689,003 users), and quantifiable social endorsement (likes) engages reward and social-cognitive neural circuits, shaping behavior and peer influence. Social media platforms, optimized for engagement and monetization, can diminish social motivation and alter grounding in communities of practice, amplifying fearfulness and reputation incentives; influential users express intense emotions (fear, anger) that drive influence. Resulting structures become centralized, with unequal social capital distribution, polarization, and diminished accuracy of collective judgments. Metaverse and XR: Drawing on predictive processing, VR/AR can align with the mind’s simulations to induce presence and social presence, potentially reinstating we-mode online. Animal studies show VR can elicit hippocampal place-cell activity; meta-analytic evidence (43 studies) indicates VR can enhance emotional empathy; VR contexts can elevate oxytocin associated with perceived intimacy; interbrain synchrony can be achieved in VR with roles for eye gaze and perspective. Nonetheless, privacy, security, fraud, dependence, and other risks must be addressed for beneficial deployment.

Narrative and integrative review/theoretical synthesis. The authors collate and interpret findings from social and cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and communication studies, including work on place cells and episodic memory, oxytocin and social salience, interpersonal synchrony and hyperscanning, narrative processing, social media effects (large-scale field experiments and neuroimaging), and XR studies on presence, empathy, and interbrain synchrony. No primary data collection, experimental protocol, or systematic review methods (e.g., predefined inclusion/exclusion, risk of bias) are reported.

• Physical communities are place-based and engage we-mode processes (behavioral synchrony, joint attention, intentional attunement, interbrain synchrony) that bind diverse individuals, strengthen social identity, and support bonding social capital and wisdom of crowds.
• Place and spatial context scaffold autobiographical and episodic memory via hippocampal systems; place attachment confers psychological benefits. Oxytocin modulates social salience and synchrony, facilitating collective action and empathetic responding.
• Interpersonal and interbrain synchrony (measured via EEG/fNIRS/MEG) increases perceived affiliation, joint agency, engagement, social closeness, and predicts team performance; joint attention and mutual gaze help drive synchrony.
• Shared narratives convert autobiographical memories of collective actions into collective memories, generating a shared 'we-space' and enabling social categorization/identification/comparison; narrative-driven correlations across hearts and brains facilitate shared emotions and crowd wisdom.
• Digital communities, lacking physical co-presence, reduce activation of we-mode processes and social motivation. They tend to form as communities of practice among like-minded individuals, maximizing bridging social capital but often at the cost of bonding and extended affectivity.
• Social media dynamics (emotional contagion at massive scale; N=689,003 Facebook users study) and quantifiable social endorsement (likes) shape neural reward and social cognition responses, centralize influence, increase polarization, and yield unequal social capital distribution; passive use relates to negative comparison and well-being, active use can aid memory.
• Grounding in digital communities is influenced by fear-related emotions and reputation incentives, amplifying influencer power and undermining the accuracy of collective beliefs (disrupting crowd wisdom).
• The Metaverse (VR/AR) can, in principle, restore aspects of we-mode online: VR elicits place-cell activity; meta-analysis across 43 studies shows VR can enhance emotional empathy; VR contexts can elevate oxytocin associated with perceived social intimacy; interbrain synchrony is achievable in VR, particularly via eye-gaze and perspective cues.
• Realizing these benefits requires addressing technological shortcomings and risks (privacy, security, fraud, dependence).

The review addresses the central question—what distinguishes physical from digital communities—by showing that place-based co-presence uniquely engages neurobiological and cognitive mechanisms that constitute we-mode: synchrony across bodies and brains, joint attention, shared narratives, and oxytocin-mediated social salience. These mechanisms lower psychological distance, bind heterogeneous members, build social identity, and enable accurate aggregation of distributed knowledge (crowd wisdom) while generating bonding social capital. Digital communities, though expansive and effective at bridging ties and mobilization, often lack these mechanisms due to absent co-presence and platform incentives, leading to weakened empathy and extended affectivity, centralized influence, polarization, and unequal social capital. The Metaverse, through immersive presence and social presence, has the potential to reintroduce key we-mode processes in digital contexts, thereby improving the quality of online social interaction and collective cognition. This suggests design implications for online platforms: support for synchronous co-presence, mutual gaze, joint attention, shared embodied activities, and narrative co-construction may foster healthier, more constructive digital communities. However, governance, safety, and ethical frameworks are essential to mitigate risks inherent to immersive technologies and platform economies.

Communities are defined by we-mode—acting together for collective purposes under shared commitments. Historically place-based, communities leverage boundaries and co-presence to activate synchrony, joint attention, intentional attunement, and interbrain coupling, which, together with shared narratives, forge social identity, cohesion, and bonding social capital across diverse members. Digital communities, liberated from spatial constraints, maximize bridging social capital but often suppress we-mode processes and social motivation, leading to like-minded communities of practice marked by fear- and reputation-driven grounding, polarization, influencer dominance, and unequal social capital. The Metaverse (VR/AR) could counter these deficits by enabling presence and engaging we-mode neurocognitive processes online, provided significant technological and ethical risks are addressed. Overall, the migration of community formation from places to platforms challenges human we-mode capabilities; future work should refine immersive technologies and platform designs to promote constructive, empathic, and equitable online communal life while ensuring privacy, security, and well-being.

• Conceptual/narrative review without systematic search, inclusion criteria, or risk-of-bias assessment; conclusions rely on selective synthesis of existing studies and may be subject to publication bias.
• Heterogeneity across cited methods (animal studies, lab hyperscanning, field studies, neuroimaging, social media experiments) limits direct comparability and causal inference about complex community phenomena.
• Limited direct empirical testing of proposed mechanisms linking specific we-mode neurocognitive processes to real-world community outcomes at scale.
• Generalizability to diverse cultural, socioeconomic, and platform contexts is uncertain.
• Metaverse-related claims are prospective; benefits depend on technological maturity and overcoming risks (privacy, security, fraud, addiction), which are acknowledged but not empirically resolved in this work.