I don’t really know how to start this, so I’m just going to dive in and
see where it takes me.  I’ve noticed something about the social
interaction that goes on when I venture back to my home town.  I
have some great friends from high school who I, unfortunately, only get
to see a handful of times per year.  It seems that as more time
passes between each visit, the amount of time to get “reacquainted”
gets progressively longer.  I’m sure there could be a handy
equation, but I’m not feeling that adventurous yet. 

Currently, that time is about 1 night (about 4 hours).  This
varies depending on how many people are involved, but that’s the
current general estimate.  Meaning,
it takes about 1 night of bullshitting with each other (usually at a
bar) until we feel comfortable to just “hang out.”  It takes that
time to go through all of the crap going on in our lives… After we’re
done with that part, we hang out like we did when we were growing up
and just getting to know ourselves.

Now, I’m guessing this could be avoided if we all talked more.  But that just doesn’t happen…

The scientist in me wants to relate this to brain waves… I’d like to
think that since we’re all coming from different places, our brains are
all going at different frequencies.  That first night is like a
buffer.  It allows us to all get more in sync with the brain
waves.  So the following days, our brains are operating at similar
frequencies, making interaction more fluid.