Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (7 page)

Pain is also at the center of many of society’s moral decisions.
Innovations in how the death penalty is carried out, from the guillotine to lethal injection, are considered progress because they minimize pain to those on death row.
As a society, more of us are all right with sentencing someone to state-sponsored death than to sentencing someone to state-sponsored pain.
Whether or not a fetus can feel pain has been brought into the debate about abortion.
Similarly,
which animals are able to feel pain
is often invoked in discussions of which animals can be sacrificed for food.

But in each of the aforementioned cases, we’re talking about physical pain.
What is our reaction to
social pain
, the pain of real or perceived damage to our social connections?
When someone says, “He broke my heart,” we understand this as a metaphor.
No one mistakes this for a medical emergency (“We’ve only got moments to repair this broken heart.
Nurse, get me 200 volts to the paddles.
Clear!”).
Most of us believe social pain isn’t real pain; here, “pain” is just a figure of speech.

Real pain (that is, physical pain) serves an essential role in our survival.
For every need with a capital
N
, there is a corresponding physical pain with a capital
P
that we feel when the need is not being met.
A lack of food leads to hunger, and this painful state of deprivation motivates us to find food.
A lack of water leads to thirst, which when unquenched can be similarly painful and motivating.
Physical injury leads to bodily pain, which motivates us to find shelter and rest so that our body can heal itself.

If our social needs really are basic survival needs with a capital
N
, then unmet social needs should be experienced as a pain with a capital
P
too.
This sentiment was expressed by noted neuroscientist Paul MacLean, who wrote,
“A sense of separation is a condition
that makes being a mammal so painful.”
Is there a link between the pain of physical harm and the pain of social harm?

Is Social Pain Real?

I have been studying social pain with my wife
, psychologist Naomi Eisenberger, for the better part of a decade now (she more than I).
In the next several pages, I will try to convince you that social pain is a kind of real pain.
But I have to be honest with you—to this day, part of me still finds this hard to accept.
Physical and social pain seem as if they are worlds apart.
Every time I experience a physical pain, I can point to a place on my body where I am feeling the pain; presumably there is some kind of disturbance or tissue damage at the spot where the pain is coming from.
When I feel social pain, where should I point to?

In reality, physical pain is no more physical than any other psychological experience we have, such as seeing a red square, discovering the serenity of meditation, or anticipating a great first date.
There are two distinct but equally important ways to interpret the preceding statement.
First, pain is
less
physical than we typically assume.
We know this because
pain can be dramatically modified through the power
of suggestion, via hypnosis or placebo treatments.
There have actually been surgeries performed on individuals under the influence of hypnosis only, with no anesthesia and no pain.
In pain experiments, simply expecting that a shock
you are about to receive will be very painful can make the shock feel more painful than it would be otherwise.
Various psychological disorders
such as anxiety and depression commonly alter how sensitive we are to physical pain.
Pain may not be
all
in your mind, but it is a lot more in your mind than most people realize.

There is also a second interpretation of the statement equating the physicality of pains and anticipating a first date.
What we take as purely psychological events are
more
physical than we typically assume, in the sense that all psychological events are rooted in the physical processes of the brain.
The serenity of meditation is the result of biochemical and neurocognitive processes occurring in the brain and body.
If the joy of connecting with others did not have a physical basis in the brain, then there would be no way for a pill to shape and induce those feelings, and yet that is exactly what the drug ecstasy does.
And how else can we explain that
a drink that selectively depletes the brain’s serotonin will
render a person more sensitive to insults moments later?
I don’t mean to suggest that the psychological aspects are somehow done away with.
I am not a reductionist.
Rather, in daily life we tend to create an artificial separation between things like pain and emotion.
Pain, emotion, and all that we experience are necessarily simultaneous expressions of psychological and physical processes.

Starting from this view, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that something as seemingly abstract as social pain could be just as tangible and just as painful, from the brain’s perspective, as physical pain.
I do not mean to suggest that physical and social pain are identical.
No one has ever broken his arm and confused that
with having been dumped by his girlfriend.
And memories of social pain are much more intense than memories of physical pain.
Different kinds of pain feel differently and have distinctive characteristics.
What I am suggesting is that social pain is real pain just as physical pain is real pain.
Understanding this has important consequences for how we think about the social distress that we and those around us experience.

One of the obvious hints that social pain is similar to physical pain is the language we use to talk about social pain.
Most of the
words we use to describe feelings of social rejection or loss involve the language of physical pain.
We say, “She broke my heart,” or “He hurt my feelings,” or that a girlfriend’s leaving “was like being punched in the gut.”
Psychologists are discovering that language
that sounds metaphorical is often less metaphorical than first supposed.
When it comes to social pain,
the language of physical pain is the metaphor du jour
all around the world.
This is true in Romance languages like Spanish and Italian, which share roots with English, as well as in Armenian, Mandarin, and Tibetan.
It is unlikely that this metaphor would spring up again and again across the globe if there were no connection.

Wire and Cloth

A second piece of evidence that social pain is real pain is the separation distress that mammalian infants show when separated from their primary caregivers.
Anyone who has had a baby has observed the intense and relentless crying and distress that can occur when a mother leaves her child.
In the 1950s,
psychologist John Bowlby developed the concept of
attachment
to explain the observations he and others made during World War II of orphans and abandoned children living in residential nurseries, who did not receive the warmth, love, and affection that children typically experience.
He posited that each of us is born with an attachment system responsible for monitoring our proximity to a caregiver and that this attachment system sounds an alarm when we lose that proximity.
Internally, that alarm manifests itself as painful distress, which quickly becomes loud crying, a separation distress call that serves to alert the caregiver to retrieve the infant.

Attachment distress is distinctly social; it is as much a signal for those around the infant as it is for the infant itself.
And like a walkie-talkie, the attachment system works only if child and care-giver stay connected.
If babies were born with attachment systems
that faded away in adulthood, then the cries of babies might fall on emotionally deaf ears.
Fortunately, the same attachment system that causes us to cry as infants when we are separated from our caregiver also causes us to respond to our own baby’s cries once we are grown.
We all inherited an attachment system
that lasts a lifetime, which means we never get past the pain of social rejection, just as we never get past the pain of hunger.
We have an intense need for social connection throughout our entire lives.
Staying connected to a caregiver is the number one goal of an infant.
The price for our species’ success at connecting to a caregiver is a lifelong need to be liked and loved, and all the social pains that we experience that go along with this need.

One of Bowlby’s contemporaries,
psychologist Harry Harlow, examined primate attachment
processes in some of the most striking psychological studies ever conducted.
He was working with rhesus monkeys in the 1950s when behaviorism was at its heyday, and concepts like love and attachment were taboo among animal researchers.
An infant’s apparent emotional attachment to its mother was understood as associative learning.
In other words, the warmth, smell, and feel of the mother were thought to be associatively linked with primary reinforcers like food.
By this account, infants “care” about their mothers only because of the statistical association between the presence of mom and the satisfying of their needs.
By this view, if a poster of Barry Manilow were present whenever feeding took place, infants would become Barry Manilow fans because they would associate him with being fed.
Harlow didn’t buy this account, so he put it to a test.

Newborn monkeys were raised apart from their mothers.
Substituting for the mother were two surrogate “monkeys” that Harlow built in his lab.
One surrogate was a wire-mesh frame that was constructed roughly in the shape of an adult monkey and that provided the milk the newborns needed for survival.
The other surrogate was a wooden block that was covered in a layer of sponge rubber, with an outer surface of terry cloth, also roughly in the shape of an adult
monkey.
This cloth mother provided no milk.
Harlow then kept track of which surrogate the infants became more attached to: the one associated with nourishment or the one that felt a little more like a real mother monkey.
The results were unambiguous and profound.
Soon after birth, infant monkeys were spending nearly 18 hours a day in contact with the cloth monkey and almost no time at all with the wire monkey that provided food.
The food association theory of why infants cling to mothers was clearly wrong.
These monkeys were attached to the thing that felt most like a real monkey, regardless of the sustenance it provided.

Since Harlow’s work, social attachment has been identified in a variety of mammalian species.
Given that all mammals are born incapable of caring for themselves, they all have a similar need to stay connected with a parent or caregiver.
Across a wide range of mammalian species, including rats, prairie voles, guinea pigs, cattle, sheep, nonhuman primates, and humans,
scientists have discovered
separation distress vocalizations
—cries made when infants are separated from caregivers, typically leading to retrieval by the caregiver.
Separation also leads to
increased production of
cortisol
(a stress hormone)
and long-term social and cognitive deficits.
Children under the age of five
who are separated from their parents by lengthy hospital stays can develop long-term behavioral and literacy deficits.
And
children who lose a parent
show elevated cortisol responses a decade later.
This type of early childhood stressor
can also lead to brain alterations in a key region related to self-regulation in social contexts, as I’ll discuss in more detail in
Chapter 9
.

In 1978, Jaak Panksepp, a luminary in the field of affective neuroscience, hypothesized that social attachments functioned by piggybacking onto the physical pain system and did so through opioid processes.
Opioids are the brain’s natural painkillers
.
Their production and release diminish the experience of pain.
This is why morphine, a synthetic opiate, is such a powerful painkiller.
Like all opiates, morphine is powerfully addictive.
Panksepp noted the parallels with attachment processes in animals.
Separation appears
to cause drug withdrawal–like pain, whereas reconnection appears to act like a painkiller.
Additionally, infants and caregivers show a reciprocal devotion that fits the description of addiction.

Panksepp first tested his social pain hypothesis in a group of puppies.
When the puppies were socially isolated, they produced separation distress cries.
However, when the puppies were given low doses of morphine, the separation distress cries were largely eliminated.
Since then,
nonsedating levels of opiates
have been shown to reduce separation distress cries in a variety of mammalian species.
Moreover,
reconnection between mother and infant
increases opiate levels, naturally, in both parties.
This suggests that the same neurochemical that is instrumental in alleviating the distress of physical pain may also be central in alleviating the distress of social separation in infants.
This was the first hard evidence that social and physical pain are treated in similar ways by the brain.

The Anterior Cingulate Cortex and Human Pain

When we think about social pain in humans, there is a common montage of cinematic moments that easily come to mind.
We think about being picked last for a team in gym class, being dumped by a significant other, or the death of a loved one.

For obvious reasons,
we do not conduct experiments with humans
that involve giving people morphine after they have been rejected, excluded, or cheated on.
Instead of manipulating opioid levels artificially, as Panksepp had done with puppies, Naomi Eisenberger and I turned to fMRI to study how the experience of social pain is represented in the human brain.