Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (43 page)

The implication of these findings for schools is that we could present students with a wide variety of ways to practice self-control, and many of them would likely create benefits across an array of self-control domains.
In fact,
mindfulness meditation may turn out to be a great way
to strengthen this muscle, as it has been shown to enhance ventrolateral prefrontal responses.
There are many ways to exercise this self-control muscle, and doing so can help our self-control efforts throughout our lives.

Each proposal I’ve suggested here requires hard choices to be made.
There is only so much time, money, and human energy to put toward education; giving these resources to one initiative means diverting them from another.
But it is worth doing the hard work to get this right.
Every junior high student who stays engaged rather than losing interest is vastly more likely to go to college and make greater contributions to their community.
It is natural to believe that education should be primarily about presenting the most important facts to children and expecting them to absorb and retain them.
But education doesn’t work that way.
The smartest kids with the strongest natural self-control can force themselves to learn this
way, but the great majority of our students can’t.
Shaping the context and curriculum in light of what we are learning about the social brain will help our students maximize their potential.
Over the last generation, we have turned all of our C students into B students through grade inflation.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could turn all those B students into A students because they learned more?

EPILOGUE

It is useless to attempt to reason a man
out of a thing he was never reasoned into.

—J
ONATHAN
S
WIFT

T
he great double-edged sword of being the most sophisticated mammals on the planet is that no matter how smart or rational we become, we can’t outthink our basic needs.
We all need people to love and respect, and we all need people who love and respect us.
Would life without them be worth it?
Does the ability to play chess and solve calculus problems make up for a life without other people?
Mother Teresa, who observed people in the most squalid living conditions imaginable, believed that a life without other people “is the worst disease that any human being can ever experience.”
Those basic social needs are present at birth to ensure our survival, but we are guided by these needs until the end of our days.
We do not always recognize these needs, and we may not see them influencing those around us, but they are still there nonetheless.

Our basic urges include the need to belong, right along with the need for food and water.
Our pain and pleasure systems do not merely respond to sensory inputs that can produce physical harm and reward.
They are also exquisitely tuned to the sweet and
bitter tastes delivered from the social world—a world of
connection
and threat to connection.
A condescending look from a complete stranger can feel like a dagger, just as a kind look can reassure us that we are safe in a new environment.
As we saw, evolutionarily, this wiring came from the need to keep mammalian young, who are born too immature to fend for themselves, close to their care-givers.
The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula treat real or potential separation from others as painful, which promotes distress calls in mammalian young when separated from their mothers.
In contrast, the reward system is sensitive to both giving and receiving care, which promotes social bonding from the perspective of parent and child, respectively.
When we experience social pains or feel the distress of withheld social connection, we are unable to focus on much else until this need is met.

Social pain and pleasure make use of the same neural machinery as physical pain and pleasure, creating a powerful motivational drive to maximize our positive social experiences and minimize our negative ones.
Luckily, evolution has given us an arsenal of social weapons to help satisfy these social needs and ensure group cohesion.
Emerging to some degree in other primates, the capacity for
mindreading
allows us to consider the goals, intentions, emotions, and beliefs of others.
Monkeys see the world in terms of the psychologically meaningful actions and expressions of others thanks to the mirror system.
This allows them to empathize, help others, and coordinate their activity in many situations.
In humans, our social imagination, processed via the mentalizing system, primarily in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and the temporoparietal junction, allows us to take this coordination to the extreme, creating various symbolic social connections like the attachment we feel to sports teams, political parties, and even celebrities.
Fortunately, it also allows us to build societal institutions for government, education, and industry.
And it allows us to take deep pleasure in fiction, whether in books, on the big screen, or on the small screen.
Indeed, most pleasures that we experience beyond sex and drugs (and even
those to a degree) depend on our ability to imagine the experiences of others.

The mentalizing system is coherently active from the moment we are born, reliably comes on whenever we have downtime, and is even on while we dream.
The brain is designed to devote as much time as possible during our development and adulthood to mentalizing activities.
We don’t know exactly what the mentalizing system is doing during rest (because as soon as you ask someone, that person isn’t at rest anymore).
But we do know that people who turn the mentalizing system on more at rest also do better in general at understanding the minds of others.
People who happen to have the mentalizing system spontaneously activated seconds before doing a mentalizing task do the task better.
These results suggest that at rest the mentalizing system may be rehearsing and reconsolidating various kinds of social information that will benefit our long-term social abilities.
And in the moment, it may nudge us to see the world through a social lens.
For those of us who wondered whether our sociality is just an accident, this is strong medicine: our brain sets itself to see the world socially, presumably because of the great benefits of doing so.

Finally, we humans have the ability to reflect on ourselves, to think about our characteristics, beliefs, and values in relation to other people, and then to deploy our capacity for self-control to restrain undesired impulses in order to pursue our long-term goals.
As we have seen, the way the self-architecture is set up in the medial prefrontal cortex and the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, it also serves a more duplicitous purpose that we are generally unaware of in daily life.
The self system serves as a Trojan horse, sneaking in the values and beliefs of those around us under the cover of night without our ever being the wiser.
So when we use our capacity for self-control to pursue our goals and values, they are quite often goals and values that will benefit society as much as or more than they will benefit us personally.
And when we are made aware of ourselves as social entities that can be judged by others, our self-control often
kicks in to ensure that we act in accordance with the values of those around us.
A self system that operates this way improves our odds of being liked, loved, and respected by members of the groups we are in because we will work hard in pursuit of the groups’ goals and values.
These mechanisms are the glue that keep us
harmonizing
with one another much more easily than we otherwise would.

When I started to think about writing this book, I thought there was a series of pretty cool findings in social cognitive neuro-science worth sharing.
I thought each of them stood on its own, independent of one another.
Today my perspective is quite different.
I see a tapestry of neural systems woven together to bind us to one another.
Our social brain keeps expanding, using the existing building blocks to further enhance our ability and inclination to be social.
The fact that we like soap operas, reality TV, and gossip isn’t a strange accident of having a complex mind.
It’s the natural consequence of having brains that were built to make sense of other brains and to understand everyone’s place in the pecking order.

As exciting as the last twenty years have been in terms of laying the groundwork for understanding the social brain, the next twenty may prove to be all the more exciting.
Increasingly, neuroimaging techniques will allow us to measure the neural bases of people’s social and emotional experiences as they unfold in real-world social interactions.
Functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a technology that shows real promise in this regard.
fNIRS subjects can essentially just wear a headband that has light emitters that direct light through the skull.
As the light hits brain tissue, it scatters back out of the brain in such a way that we can detect when a brain region is more or less active.
How it works is inside baseball, and it has many limitations of its own, but the essential thing is that it allows fMRI-like studies to be conducted while a person is sitting up, talking, and interacting with one or more other people.
fMRI requires the participant to lie down, alone, on a surgical bed slid into a giant mechanical donut.
In contrast, fNIRS can be conducted wirelessly, allowing two people, each wearing an fNIRS headband,
to take a stroll together while their neural activity is being transmitted back to a base station.
And whereas MRI scanners can cost $3 million and another $1 million to install, an fNIRS headband can be purchased for under $100,000, meaning that this equipment could be broadly accessible in schools, businesses, or even psychotherapy offices as the price comes down gradually over time.
As more and more groups study the social brain in more and more real-world contexts, we will gain increasing perspective on how the mind works when it is fully immersed socially.

In Isaac Asimov’s science fiction classic
Foundation
, Hari Seldon creates a new branch of mathematics called “psychohistory,” in which principles of psychology are used to predict how major geopolitical events over the next several decades will materialize and be resolved.
As sinister as such a tool might seem in the wrong hands, it could also allow us to have unprecedented quality of life.
We are fundamentally psychological creatures, social psychological creatures.
Stock markets are moved as much by our general hopes and fears as they are by the fundamentals and specific activity of the any stock.
As we learn more about our sociality from psychology, neuroscience, and beyond, we have a great opportunity to reshape our society and its institutions to maximize our own potential, both as individuals and together as a society.
Someday the president will consult with social neuroscientists and psychologists when making policy decisions.
Someday, CNN will want to add experts on the social mind and social brain to their stable of political scientists, political strategists, and economists when making sense of world events.
Someday we will look back and wonder how we ever had lives, work, and schools that weren’t guided by the principles of the social brain.
The years ahead that will change this from science fiction to science will be exciting ones indeed.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Finally, I get to say thank you to all the people in my social network who helped make this book possible.
Amazingly, as I count up all the folks I am grateful to, it comes awfully close to Dunbar’s number.
My family has been supportive since the beginning (I’m talking diapers)—thanks to the Liebermans, Albucks, and Eisenbergers for your encouragement over the years.

The first intellects who lit a fire for me were philosophers such as Nietzsche and Sartre.
They have influenced my thinking since I was a teenager (and thanks to Dad for having been a philosophy major and leaving those books on the shelf even if they weren’t his favorites).
In college, my philosophy mentor, Bruce Wilshire, convinced me that the
big problem
to understand was “experience, hot off the griddle.”
Though neuroscience strays far from this dictum, it has stayed with me as something to strive for.

In many ways, I owe my career to three people from Harvard.
My PhD advisor, Dan Gilbert, never ceases to inspire me to be a better social psychologist (as amazing as his writing is, he’s even better in person).
Steve Kosslyn oversaw an undergraduate course that I taught and switched the curriculum from focusing on Freud, Skinner, and cognitive science to one in which each topic was taught from three levels of analysis: social, cognitive, and neuroscientific.
Kevin Ochsner was a fellow graduate student, and we took the initial steps of this journey into social cognitive neuroscience together,
in the process becoming best friends and each other’s best man.
I am so grateful for how these three people shaped my thinking and my research at such a pivotal moment in my career.
Without them, there is no way I could have written this book.

Since arriving at UCLA almost fifteen years ago, I have been able to do the work described here because of the outstanding collaborators and mentors I’ve had: Lori Altshuler, Susan Bookheimer, Ty Cannon, Mark Cohen, Michelle Craske, Mirella Dapretto, Alan Fiske, Andrew Fuligni, Adam Galinsky, Ahmad Hariri, Marco Iacoboni, Michael Irwin, Edythe London, Emeran Mayer, John Mazziotta, Bruce Naliboff, Annette Stanton, Shelley Taylor, and Kip Williams.
I’m grateful to have been able to work with each of you.
I’m also thankful to have spent time with Scott Gerwehr, Bryan Gabbard, and everyone at DGI who helped me think about how social neuroscience could be applied in the real world.
Scott, we still miss you.