PRESENCE BEFORE THE RELATIONSHIP
- drissboussaoud
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
What presence changes in our experience
We can immediately tell the difference between being alone and being silent with someone. In an elevator, a waiting room, or a train, the mere presence of another person is often enough to transform our experience. No words have been spoken yet. No conversation has begun. And yet, something has already changed. This article explores a simple question: what happens when the presence of another person alters our attention, emotions, and behavior even before the interaction begins?
We can immediately tell the difference between being alone and being silent with someone. In an elevator, a waiting room, or a train, the mere presence of another person is often enough to transform our experience. No words have been spoken yet. No conversation has begun. And yet, something has already changed.
This experience is so familiar that it usually goes unnoticed. We go through it every day without really giving it a second thought. Yet, it could reveal something fundamental about how the human brain works.
Before it was a scientific concept, presence was first and foremost a lived experience. We have all felt it. We enter a room alone to work, read, or reflect. Then we become aware that another person is there—sometimes even before we've seen them, based on a still uncertain clue. Our attention shifts slightly. Self-awareness becomes more acute. Our gestures change. Our body becomes a little more alert or, conversely, a little more relaxed. As if the brain suddenly ceased to be entirely alone with itself.
This change is often subtle. Nevertheless, it is real. And it appears well before any explicit interaction.
Before the interaction
For several decades, social neuroscience has sought to understand how human beings interact with each other. It studies communication, cooperation, understanding the intentions of others, and the construction of social relationships.
One of the most influential ideas to emerge from this research is that of the social brain. According to this hypothesis, certain brain architectures have evolved to allow us to process social information, understand others, and live within complex groups.
This perspective has profoundly renewed our understanding of the human brain. It has made it possible to identify numerous mechanisms involved in social interactions and has shown the extent to which our mental functioning is shaped by relationships.
But it also leads to a more fundamental question:
Does sociality truly begin with interaction?
Our daily experience suggests a different possibility. Long before any conversation, before any exchanged glances, sometimes even before any clear awareness of the other person, the mere presence of another seems to already alter our way of being in the world. As if the brain were responding to an even more fundamental question: Is anyone there? A question rarely answered definitively from the outset—more often than not, an estimate, more or less certain, that becomes clearer as new clues appear.
We don't think in exactly the same way when we're alone. We don't feel exactly the same things when someone is present. We don't inhabit space in the same way. Presence already seems to transform the conditions in which our experience unfolds.
Shared silence is not the silence of solitude
This idea becomes particularly clear in situations where no interaction has yet begun. An elevator. A waiting room. A train. A meeting room before a meeting starts. No one speaks. Sometimes no one looks at anyone. Yet, the silence is no longer the same as when we are alone.
Something has already become social.
This observation could explain why we sometimes feel the need to "fill the silence." Not because speech creates social interaction, but because social interaction is already present. Speech often responds to a reality that has become social even before it is expressed.
An early discovery in psychology
At the end of the 19th century, psychologist Norman Triplett observed a phenomenon that would become one of the first experimental demonstrations of the influence of the presence of others on behavior.
He noticed that cyclists often performed better when riding with other cyclists than when riding alone.
This observation gave rise to a vast research program that would continue for over a century. Since then, hundreds of studies have shown that the mere presence of other people can alter our performance, attention, decisions, and behavior.
This phenomenon is now known as social facilitation. The essential lesson of this research is simple: the presence of others already modifies what we do, even when no particular interaction is taking place.
The brain isn't quite the same when someone is there.
For a long time, these phenomena were mainly studied at the behavioral level. But more recent research suggests that their effects could extend much deeper into the organization of the brain.
Certain neuronal populations modify their activity depending on whether the individual is alone or in the presence of another individual. Other studies suggest that mere social presence influences the functional organization of networks involved in attention, vigilance, or learning.
In other words, presence doesn't just seem to change what we do. It could also change the way the brain mobilizes its resources.
This idea resonates with an intuition many will recognize. Some people immediately foster reflection, creativity, or learning. Others make concentration more difficult. Some spontaneously increase feelings of security. Others silently maintain the nervous system in a state of alertness.
Often without conflict. Without words. Without any particular interaction.
Sometimes simply by their presence.
Some presences soothe us, others mobilize us
This dimension of experience is particularly visible in everyday life. Some people seem to immediately alter our inner state. Their presence reduces the effort required to feel safe. It lowers our alertness. It facilitates thought. It sometimes makes the world more habitable.
Other presences produce the opposite effect. Without explicit threat or visible hostility, something in the nervous system remains mobilized. As if the brain were discreetly continuing to monitor its environment.
These phenomena are part of ordinary human experience. Yet, they remain relatively difficult to describe using the classical language of neuroscience. They lie at the intersection of attention, emotion, the body, perception, and relationships.
Presence as a condition of experience
The question then becomes more profound. Is presence merely one element among others in our environment? Or does it already participate in the way that experience itself is structured?
Perhaps presence doesn't simply alter our behavior. Perhaps it participates in how we perceive the world, direct our attention, experience safety or threat, and organize our internal states. From this perspective, presence ceases to be a mere context. It becomes one of the ongoing conditions that organize experience itself.
Perhaps presence doesn't simply change our behavior. Perhaps it plays a role in how we perceive the world, direct our attention, feel safe or threatened, and organize our internal states.
What this changes
From this perspective, presence ceases to be a mere context. It becomes one of the conditions that organize the experience itself.
Perhaps we always perceive, think, learn and feel from a brain already sensitive to the presence of others.
If this hypothesis is correct, then understanding presence could lead to a better understanding not only of the social brain, but also of some of the deepest foundations of human experience.
Because before development, before the clinic, before societies and their technologies, there is perhaps a more immediate reality: the very experience of presence.
The social brain helps us understand how we interact with others.
The Brain of Presence explores a complementary question: What happens in the brain even before the interaction begins?
Articles and links to explore
General presentation of the project and the question that constitutes its starting point.
How social neuroscience has transformed our understanding of the brain, and why the question of presence could complement this theoretical framework.
Why certain ordinary experiences — shared silence, feeling watched, soothing or threatening presence — can help us understand the role of presence in human experience.
In an elevator, a waiting room or a train, the mere presence of another person is often enough to transform our experience.
How attachment theory can be reinterpreted in light of presence.
Videos, reflections and explorations around the neuroscience of presence, attachment, development and psychotherapy.
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