One study demonstrated this phenomenon using Heider and Simmel's[37] classic paradigm, where simple shapes move around the screen in a way that causes people to imbue the shapes with stories and social meaning.[38] Participants who interpreted the movement of shapes in similar ways showed greater neural synchrony in cortical brain regions. This connection between neural synchrony and similarity in comprehension reliably occurs across other types of narratives, including listening to stories and free viewing of visual content,[39][40][5] and it persists throughout different stages of the narrative, such as consuming the story, recalling the story, and listening to another person recall the story. Together, these findings highlight neural synchrony as a reliable neural mechanism for the convergence of people's hierarchical narrative processing, suggesting that synchrony plays a critical role in how, if, and why we see meaning in the world similarly.[41][42]