
Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect

With 232 ratings
By: Matthew D. Lieberman, Mike Chamberlain, et al.
Purchased At: $18.00
In Social, renowned psychologist Matthew Lieberman explores groundbreaking research in social neuroscience, revealing that our need to connect with other people is even more fundamental, more basic, than our need for food or shelter. Because of this, our brain uses its spare time to learn about the social world-other people and our relation to them.
It is believed that we must commit 10,000 hours to master a skill. According to Lieberman, each of us has spent 10,000 hours learning to make sense of people and groups by the time we are ten. Social argues that our need to reach out to and connect with others is a primary driver behind our behavior. We believe that pain and pleasure alone guide our actions. Yet, new research using fMRI-including a great deal of original research conducted by Lieberman and his UCLA lab-shows that our brains react to social pain and pleasure in much the same way as they do to physical pain and pleasure.
Fortunately, the brain has evolved sophisticated mechanisms for securing our place in the social world. We have a unique ability to read other people's minds, to figure out their hopes, fears, and motivations, allowing us to effectively coordinate our lives with one another. And our most private sense of who we are is intimately linked to the important people and groups in our lives. This wiring often leads us to restrain our selfish impulses for the greater good.
These mechanisms lead to behavior that might seem irrational, but is really just the result of our deep social wiring and necessary for our success as a species. Based on the latest cutting edge research, the findings in Social have important real-world implications.
Our schools and businesses, for example, attempt to minimalize social distractions. But this is exactly the wrong thing to do to encourage engagement and learning, and literally shuts down the social brain, leaving powerful neuro-cognitive resources untapped.
The insights revealed in this pioneering audiobook suggest ways to improve learning in schools, make the workplace more productive, and improve our overall well-being.
- hana_kim
Lieberman makes clear that there are brain networks primarily in charge of social, self-referential and “mind-wandering” thoughts, and other networks that take care of problem-solving and analytical thinking, and these networks are both considered in building the case for how our brains make us human.
And two things for sure make us human: the fact that you can think what the other person thinks that you think (called higher-order theory of mind, and beautifully illustrated by the rock/paper/scissors game), and that we can project ourselves into the future (called long-term planning prediction and anticipation). No other animal can go that far; and the fact that humans created culture means that we have greatly complicated the inferences we can make regarding the evolutionary advantages of specific but complex behaviours such as altruism.
This apparently “human-only” characteristic is also well considered here, and it’s worth weighing Lieberman’s hypothesis about why we tend to avoid boasting about helping others and see it as a rewarding thing in itself.
Lieberman strikes me as an honest scientist, diligently searching for answers about why we feel pain on a psychological level (the end of a relationship, the death of a parent), or why we feel rewarded by praise or when we give money to strangers.
These are not new ideas, but Lieberman, like all original researchers, asks the right questions, looks for the best experiment to do, and tries to answer in light of real neural mechanisms. Classic social scientists are afraid of his kind. He is a threat to all those dark-matter classical psychologists who either backbench from half-dead theories or perform experiments sitting in their black boxes, where the mechanisms of “how behaviour happens” appear to have nothing to do with the workings of the brain.
I might not agree with some of the concepts Lieberman crafts from his experiments, but I am pleased that he shows determination in building a mechanistic, brain-grounded account of who we are. And surely one of the uses of this book should be as a spark to think about precisely that.
Lieberman the scientist is a firm believer in the theory that we are wired to connect, or, to put it rather better, that we have evolved, through natural selection, to be social animals that thrive now in almost all “ecosystems” using the unique feature of mentalising; and that we cannot avoid thinking, and thinking what the other person is thinking…capisce? He brings the book to a courageous conclusion in his attempt to use “social brain” concepts to guide policymaking. I cannot help but applaud any bid to use scientific evidence to back decisions for learning, business or politics in general. The way we are and how we think must be taken into account when deciding the kind of society we want – and the good news is that it can be based on real research into who we are.
Entretando, a mercadoria veio com dois amarrotados, um ligeiramente amassado transversalmente no terço médio da capa e outro verticalmente, partindo da parte medial da borda lateral indo até a parte medial da borda superior capa, como tbm apresentou pequena lasca na quina da borda direita superior e da borda direita inferior vista no plano sagital do livro.
Sem embargo os pormenores destas cincas, eu aconselho a leitura do livro, diferente de minha retórica, ele emana uma linguagem muito simples e de fácil compreensão. Excelentíssimo livro.
For the general masses, it doesn’t give any clarity on the why and what, I guess it’s all about how. The subject is interesting, “Social”, but just it’s way too far away from it. I can imagine a goal and a football being kicked, but the ball goes nowhere near the goal, it’s a miss
I think the content of the book is very interesting. Much of it is well written but I do remember some parts where paragraphs felt like they just dragged on. This maybe parts that I was just less interested in, but I don't remember this happening in other books that mentioned similar topics.