The Art of Asynchrony

Reflections after Nicolás' & Mahault's podcasts with Andrea

Life swirls in turbulence. Each moment spills into the next through recursive curls amid cascades of experience. Cybernetics captures this beautifully: 

“Big whirls have little whirls, that feed on their velocity; and little whirls have lesser whirls, and so on to viscosity.”¹

Husserl, too, knew this rhythm. For him, consciousness was not a flat stream of points in the now but a shimmering surface of retentions and anticipations; to be alive is to be out of sync.

Brains synchronize in laboratories, notwithstanding. Two people wear headsets, and their neural rhythms line up into clean, symmetrical patterns. It feels satisfying. Surely this must mean rapport, intimacy, understanding. However, does harmony alone make a relationship? Or does it merely trace the outline, possibly missing the depth within?

Neuroscience has come to treat synchrony as a shorthand for connection ever since Crick and Koch ascribed a mysterious quality to 40Hz neural oscillations that should make them relevant to the emergence of consciousness². Nowadays, simultaneous recording of multiple brains holds the promise of being a window into shared thought: when neural signals align, the story goes, so do minds. Nevertheless, this smooth logic conceals a conceptual flaw. Synchrony, as currently understood, is too coherent to capture the mess of being with others. It resembles understanding but lacks its struggle and is efficacious in completing solely what was expected. This neural self-coherence, a system folding back into itself rather than reaching toward another, humbles at the inherent asynchrony of consciousness, as it amounts to a performance of closure, not an opening to relation. 

Yet, this is precisely where emotion enters. Emotion is not reducible to rhythm or phase-locking; it is the organism’s register of how well it navigates the world. As affective feedback, it guides self-coherence by signaling success, failure, or ambiguity in ongoing engagements. In this sense, emotions function as markers of orientation: they tell us not simply that we are aligned, but whether that alignment is meaningful, adaptive, or fragile. A purely synchronous model neglects this granularity. It captures the surface resemblance of coordination but misses the predictive and motivational dimensions through which emotions shape the anticipation of another’s actions and the effort of relating. Without emotion, synchrony risks becoming a static mirror of similarity; with emotion, it can become a dynamic compass for coordination, tension, and transformation, provided that emotions themselves are not mere reflections of the current moment. So how do emotions factor in this picture, and what is required to make it all more dynamic?

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Temporal Aiming & Scales of Awareness

What is needed, instead, is a model with a temporal aim: a capacity to appraise the unfolding of interaction across time, to track not just who aligns when, but how agents anticipate, lag, recover, and recalibrate³. Temporal aim allows interaction to be understood not merely as co-activation, but as co-construction, anchored in past ruptures, attuned to future resolutions. Through this diachronic sensitivity, synchrony becomes meaningful, not just measurable.

Temporal aiming refers to an emotion’s time-oriented focus, or whether the agent’s affective state is anchored in the past, present, or future. This concept adds a directionality vector to emotional granularity, positing that the texture of an emotion is partly determined by where it points in time. For example, an anger episode may be future-oriented, arising from the anticipation of disrupted plans or thwarted goals (a prospective frustration of policy in active inference terms). In contrast, shame often feels backward-facing, involving anxiety over a past action under the lens of others’ judgment, essentially a socially modulated retrospective angst. By identifying an emotion’s temporal anchor (past, present, or future), we gain finer granularity beyond traditional descriptors, such as valence (positive/negative) and arousal (activation level). The question is: does this notion of temporal directionality have grounding in neuroscience and psychology? Emerging evidence suggests yes – theory and data across active inference models, affective science, and even philosophy converge on the idea that emotions inherently carry a temporal orientation.

Dengsø⁴ advances a conceptual framework where temporality and affectivity are not separate, but co-constitutive. This invites us to consider synchrony as an unfolding emotional-temporal process. Emotion modulates how synchrony holds, shifts, or dissolves over time, inviting both coherence and rupture. Thus, a genuine relational connection is not a static rhythm. It emerges from emotionally rich temporal interweaving.

Experience, Husserl argued, is never entirely given. It leans backward and forward, shaped by memory and projection. We meet one another not in mirrored now-points, but in misalignments, delays, misunderstandings, and hesitations. These are not defects in interaction but its condition. A teacher waits through a student’s silence. A friend stumbles before finding the right words. This is how presence stretches to accommodate another, although it is commonly understood as failure to sync.

We can expand this and suggest that emotions do not simply mirror synchrony or its absence, but register how experience aligns with our expectations of value and surprise. In this sense, affect is temporally extended: future-oriented emotions anticipate whether valued outcomes are likely, while retrospective emotions assess whether past expectations were fulfilled or violated. In the present, and relative to the past, emotions provide a sense of trajectory, whether we are moving toward or away from states that matter to us. Thus, emotions tie synchrony to significance, situating rhythm within a lived narrative of anticipation, evaluation, and adaptation.

To be with someone is not to match them, but to endure their difference without needing it to resolve. Human relationships, like turbulent weather systems, are constantly in flux. They dip and stall, convect and dissipate. Moreover, meaning is not made in the eye of the storm, but in the irregular spirals and ellipses around it.

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Information Geometry & Shared Intelligence

“If you want to understand what a science is…look at what the practitioners of it do.”

Recent techniques in network geometry offer a way forward. Rather than measuring alignment alone, they allow us to trace how neural signals deform and reorganize. In other words, how relational space flexes in moments of instability. Curvature does not smooth over chaos; it draws its contours. These phase shifts in connectivity, often occurring when synchrony falters, reflect not breakdown but transformation. They echo Husserl: what matters is not simultaneity, but the shape of the interval.

Hyperscanning is a probe of relation rather than a scoreboard for alignment. Recording two or more brains in live exchange reveals spikes of inter-brain coupling during shared attention, effective turn-taking, and empathic engagement. The decisive events are the lead–lag dynamics, the ruptures and repairs, the moments when one partner predicts and the other resists or revises. Geometric hyperscanning⁵ links neural coupling to directed information flow and cross‑brain prediction error, models communication as multi‑agent active inference, integrates behavior and language, and treats emotion as the control parameter that tunes precision, delay, and willingness to update. This reframes intervention: train flexible coupling rather than sameness, scaffold tolerable misalignment, and build capacities to aim across time together.

Synchrony is neither wrong nor unnecessary, but certainly insufficient. It is the residue of what has already stabilized, not the signature of what is yet to become. Like AI that completes but cannot contradict, synchrony gives us the grammar of relation without its genesis. A genuine theory of connection would not ask when brains align, but how minds stretch across delay.

We must invert the claim. Synchrony is not the signature of connection but a perpetual prison of perfectly mirrored presence. Noise, which precedes or trails behind that which is merely synchronic, enables interaction to scaffold into existence. Genuine connection is not about staying in step, but about holding open the space where steps can differ. All ellipses need to be accounted for, not just the perfect circle of synchrony. 

The art of asynchrony is this: to hold the gap open. To let the moment breathe. It is to recognize that it is not sameness but stretch, not simultaneity but the interval, that gives relation its weight. In the end, that is where we meet; not in the mirror, but in the difference that makes us reach.

1. Richardson, L. F. (1992). Weather Prediction by Numerical Processes. Cambridge University Press.

2. Crick, F. & Koch, C. (1990). Toward a neurobiological theory of consciousness. Seminars in the Neurosciences 2:263-275.

3. Hinrichs, N., Albarracin, M., Bolis, D., Jiang, Y., Christov-Moore, L., & Schilbach, L. (2025). Geometric Hyperscanning of Affect under Active Inference. Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Active Inference. doi:10.48550/arXiv.2506.08599

4. Dengsø, M. (2023). The temporal and affective structure of living systems: A thermodynamic perspective. Adaptive Behavior. 32(1):17-31. doi:10.1177/10597123231176346

5. Hinrichs, N., Guzmán, N., & Weber, M. (2025). On a Geometry of Interbrain Networks. 4th NeurIPS Workshop on Symmetry and Geometry in Neural Representations. doi:10.48550/arXiv.2509.10650