There are moments when statistics give way to neurology and the mass transforms into a living organism. The gathering of 250 thousand people in Tor Vergata for the Ultimo concert was not only a record-breaking event, but a monumental open-air psychosocial experiment.
A collective ritual, according to Piero Barbanti, director of the Headache and Pain Unit of the Irccs San Raffaele in Rome and professor of Neurology at the San Raffaele University, who analyzes the event with the lens of the science of the soul and reveals its truth: «Under that stage the young people were not looking for a high, but a desperate, salvific and collective admission of fragility».
The “emotional synchronization”
According to Barbanti, society is experiencing a dramatic evolutionary misunderstanding: «We believe that being happy means isolating oneself in one’s comfort zone, but it is an illusion. True biological and psychological happiness arises only from experiencing common and simultaneous emotions, that is, from “emotional synchronization”.
A feeling that «was once created at school or during military service, but which today is ignited almost exclusively in football stadiums and at large concerts. Why do 250 thousand people feel good going to the concert and not listening to the album on headphones at home? Because they need to get in sync with those around them. It is the search for a fraternal union that we no longer find even on New Year’s Eve”, says the neurologist.
«We live obsessed with performance»
Barbanti’s analysis photographs the daily life that precedes the event, defining us as people obsessed with performance and the future: «We confuse planning with the meaning of life. In corporate open spaces people live like battery chickens, emotion is removed to work driven only by mental algorithms.”
Precisely in this «cage of rationality» the healing short circuit of the concert is triggered: «In front of music we rediscover the creative part, which coincides exactly with our fragile and insecure part. In a crowd, people stop playing a role, they go back to being like children, they synchronize with the person nearby and that feeling of shared vulnerability becomes, paradoxically, heartening.”