Top Highlights

• The impressive kind of sync is persistent. When two things keep happening simultaneously for an extended period of time, the synchrony is probably not an accident. Such persistent sync comes easily to us human beings, and, for some reason, it often gives us pleasure.
• Two or more oscillators are said to be coupled if some physical or chemical process allows them to influence one another.
• These observations suggested that the fireflies must somehow be adjusting their rhythms in response to the flashes of others.
• They found that an individual firefly will shift the timing of its subsequent flashes in a consistent, predictable manner, and that the size and direction of the shift depend on when in the cycle the stimulus was received.
• In a congregation of flashing fireflies, every one is continually sending and receiving signals, shifting the rhythms of others and being shifted by them in turn. Out of the hubbub, sync somehow emerges spontaneously.