Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (4 page)

You might be familiar with
the claim that Malcolm Gladwell made famous
in his book
Outliers
that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at something.
Although different people might put those 10,000 hours toward becoming a concert violinist, professional athlete, or Xbox superstar, the brain puts in the 10,000 hours and more to enable us to become experts in the social world.
One study found that 70 percent of the content
in our conversations is social in nature.
Assuming that we spend just
20 percent of our time in general thinking about other people and ourselves in relation to others, our default network would be engaged at least three hours a day.
In other words, our brains have put in 10,000 hours before we reach the age of ten.
The repeated return of the brain to this social cognitive mode of engagement is perfectly situated to help us to become experts in the enormously complex realm of social living.

There is a second reason to think default network activity is often a cause, rather than a consequence, of our focus on the social world.
Typically, the default network is studied by giving people extended periods of rest, ranging from thirty seconds to several minutes.
It is easy to imagine that with all that time, people intentionally turn their minds to whatever matters to them in their daily lives.
But what if people had only a few seconds of downtime?
Imagine solving a math problem; afterward, you know you have just two seconds before the next math problem.
It’s unlikely that people would decide to try to think about anything other than getting ready for the next math problem.
Nevertheless,
when Robert Spunt, Meghan Meyer, and I gave people only a few seconds
of pause between math problems, they showed almost the same default network activity as when they had much longer breaks.
In fact, the default network activity was present the instant the math problems were finished.
This suggests that the default network really does come on like a reflex.
It is the brain’s preferred state of being, one that it returns to literally the second it has a chance.

In psychology,
priming
refers to seeing or thinking of something that prepares you to do something more efficiently right after.
Consider what happens
when you read the word “face.”
Now turn to the next page, and look at
Figure 2.2
.
What do you see?
You are more likely to see faces at first
because seeing the word “face” primed you.
It prepared your brain to see faces.
As we will see in
Chapter 5
, there are now data suggesting that the brain’s reliable and rapid return to its default state similarly serves to prime us to be prepared for effective social thinking.

Figure 2.2 Rubin’s Illusion.

Adapted from Rubin, E.
(1915/1958).
Figure and ground.
In D.
C.
Beardslee & M.
Wertheimer (Eds.).
Readings in Perception.
Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, pp.
194–203.

The default network quiets down when we perform a specific task, such as calculating a math problem in math class or studying ancient Greek pottery in history class.
But when the mind’s chores are done, it returns to Old Faithful—the default mode.
In other words, the brain’s free time is devoted to thinking socially.
Consciously or not, it seems to be processing (and perhaps reprocessing) social information, as well as priming us for social life.
It might be using this time to integrate new experiences into our long-standing knowledge of other people, their relationships with one another, or our relationships with them.
It might be used to extract information from recent interactions to update the general rules we use for understanding the minds of others.
This neural habit is at work in two-day-old infants and in our adult brains the moment we stop whatever else we are doing.
In essence,
our brains are built to practice thinking about the social world and our place in it.

If the brain practices thinking socially from infancy through adulthood, the implication is that evolution has made a major bet on the value of our becoming social experts, and in our being prepared in any given moment to think and behave socially.
This constant practice doesn’t mean we have perfected being social.
We haven’t.
But without this practice, think how much worse-off we
might be.
There are so many other things our brain could have been built to spend its spare time on—learning calculus, improving our logical reasoning ability, cataloging variations in the classes of objects we have seen.
Any of these could have adaptive value.
But evolution placed its bet on our thinking socially.

Accidentally Social?

The popular conception of human nature emerging from psychology over the last century suggests that we are something of a hybrid, combining reptilian, instinct-driven motivational tendencies with superior higher-level analytic powers.
Our motivational tendencies evolved from our reptilian brains eons ago and focus on the four Fs: fighting, fleeing, feeding, and fooling around.
In contrast, our intellectual capacities are relatively recent advances.
They are what makes us special.

One of the things that distinguish primates from other animals, and humans from other primates, is the size of our brains—in particular, the size of our
prefrontal cortex
, that is, the front part of the brain sitting right behind the eyes.
Our big brains allow us to engage in all sorts of intelligent activities.
But that doesn’t mean our brains evolved to do those particular things.
Humans are the only animals that can learn to play chess, but no one would argue that the prefrontal cortex evolved specifically so that we could play the game of kings.
Rather, the prefrontal cortex is often thought of as an all-purpose computer; we can load it up with almost any software (that is, teach it things).
Thus, the prefrontal cortex seems to have evolved for solving novel hard problems, with chess being just one of an endless string of problems it can solve.

From this perspective there might not be anything special at all about our ability and tendency to think about the social world.
Other people can be thought of as a series of hard problems to be solved because they stand between us and our reptilian desires.
Just
as our prefrontal cortex can allow us to master the game of chess, the same reasoning suggests that our all-purpose prefrontal cortex can learn to master the social game of chess—that is, the moves that are permissible and advantageous in social life.
From this perspective, intelligence is intelligence whether it’s being applied to social life, chess, or studying for a final exam.
The creator of one of the most widely used intelligence tests espoused this view, arguing that social intelligence is just
“general intelligence applied to social situations.”
This view implies social intelligence isn’t special and our interest in the social world is just an accident—a consequence of the particular problems we are confronted with.

One of the standards we can apply to determine whether a human characteristic is accidental or not is its universality.
I would guess that less than 10 percent of the world’s population plays baseball, making it a good candidate for an accidental ability.
Almost everyone could learn to play, but few do.
In contrast, standing upright is a human universal.
Learning language of some kind is nearly universal.
So is reasonably good eyesight.
In a study of more than 13,000 people
, 93 percent had good eyesight.
As a back-of-the-envelope calculation, 93 percent seems like a reasonable benchmark to say something might have been significant enough in its own right to promote evolutionary adaptation.

From that perspective,
can we conclude our sociality is an accident
if more than 95 percent of people report having friends?
If you take an alien’s-eye view, friendship is a quirky phenomenon.
Every friend begins as a stranger to us, typically someone we share no genes with, possibly representing an unknown threat.
And yet this person may be someone we ultimately choose to disclose our innermost secrets and vulnerabilities to, or depend on more than anyone else in the world.
Friendship has been documented in
only a few species, but it is nearly universal in humans.
Perhaps we can acquire more resources if we have friends.
Perhaps they can be seen as a means to an end.
If so, we should keep track in any friendship of how much we give and receive in order to ensure that we are getting
our due (and hopefully more).
Yet
the closer friends become, the less they tend to keep
track of who has done more or less for one another.
Often, a friend’s primary value is the comfort of knowing we have friends.
Despite the various ways friends can be directly useful to us, the fact that our friends are our friends is often an end in itself.

And then consider Facebook.
There are more than a billion people with Facebook accounts.
Facebook is the most commonly visited website in the world, ahead of Google, Yahoo!, eBay, and Craigslist.
The Internet dominates our lives as no technology has before.
And the place we go to most often is Facebook.
That’s because Facebook offers the best deals on … nothing.
If Facebook were a religion (and some argue that it is), it would be the world’s third largest behind Christianity (2.1 billion) and Islam (1.5 billion).
Americans spend 84 billion minutes per month
engaged in religious activities—and 56 billion minutes on Facebook.

What Facebook does provide is an efficient way to stay connected with the people in our lives.
It allows us to keep in touch with people we don’t get to see as often as we want or to reconnect with people from our past or to relive the fun of last night’s party with all our friends who were there.
Is it just an accident that the single most successful destination on the Internet, or anywhere else, is a place entirely dedicated to our social lives?

If our sociality were an accident, simply another use of our big brains to achieve our selfish ends by manipulating others, would we altruistically help others in need whom we will never meet, who will never know of our good deeds?
We give to others for many reasons, but one reason is that we are wired to feel empathy and compassion for the plight of others.
When we see others in need, at least some of the time we think, “Something must be done.”
Apparently this kind of compassion happens quite a bit.
In the United States alone,
we give an average of $300 billion a year
to charities worldwide.
That is an awfully big accident.

If social intelligence were a random application of our general
intelligence, we would expect to see the same brain regions associated with both kinds of intelligence.
That would be a sensible story if it were true, but it isn’t.
The brain regions reliably associated with general intelligence
and its related cognitive abilities, like working memory and reasoning, tend to be on the outer (or
lateral
) surface of the brain (see
Figure 2.3
), whereas thinking about other people and oneself utilizes mostly
medial
(or
midline
) regions of the brain (see
Figure 2.1
).

Figure 2.3 Brain Regions Associated with Working Memory in the Lateral Frontal and the Parietal Regions

Moreover, neural networks that support social and nonsocial thinking often work at cross-purposes—much like the two ends of a
neural seesaw
.
If we look at the brain when a person isn’t being asked to do anything in particular, we see the social cognition network turned on.
Typically,
the more this network turns on, the more the general
cognition network responsible for other nonsocial kinds of thinking turns off.
Likewise, when people engage in non-social thinking, the general cognition network turns on and the social cognition network turns off.
(I am using “turn on” and “turn off” colloquially.
Brain regions do not actually turn off.
Rather, they become less active under some conditions and more active under others.)
To the extent that the social cognition network stays
on when we engage in nonsocial thinking, it tends to interfere with our ability to perform.
This is hard to reconcile with the idea that the prefrontal cortex is an all-purpose computer that uses the same random-access memory (RAM) chips to think about office politics as it uses to play chess and figure out our taxes.