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Social Neuroscience

• A newly discovered class of neuron, the spindle cell, acts the most rapidly of any, guiding snap social decisions for us—and has proven to be more plentiful in the human brain than in any other species.
• A different variety of brain cells, mirror neurons, sense both the move another person is about to make and their feelings, and instantaneously prepare us to imitate that movement and feel with them.
• When the eyes of a woman that a man finds attractive look directly at him, his brain secretes the pleasure-inducing chemical dopamine—but not when she looks elsewhere.

Each of these findings offered an isolated snapshot of the workings of the "social brain," the neural circuitry that operates as we interact. None in itself told the whole story. But as they accumulated, the outlines of a major new discipline became visible.

Only long after I started to track these isolated dots did I understand the hidden pattern that connects them all. I chanced upon he name for this field, "social neuroscience," when reading about a scientific conference that had been held on the topic in Sweden in 2003. earching for the origins of the term "social neuroscience," the earliest use I found was in the early 1990s, by psychologists John Cacioppo and Gary Berntson, who back then were lone prophets of this brave new science." When I spoke with Cacioppo recently, he recalled, "There was a lot of skepticism among neuroscientists about studying anything outside the cranium. Twentieth-century neuroscience thought social behavior was just too complex to study."

Today," Cacioppo adds, "we can start to make sense of how the brain drives social behavior and in turn how our social world influences our brain and biology." Now director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, Cacioppo has witnessed a sea change: this field has become a hot scientific topic for the twenty-first century.

This new field has already begun solving some older scientific puzzles. For instance, some of Cacioppo's initial research uncovered links between involvement in a distressing relationship and hikes in stress hormones to level? That damage certain genes that control virus-fighting cells. A missing piece in that trajectory had been the neural pathways that could convert relationship troubles into such biological consequences—one focus of social neuroscience.

The emblematic research partnership in this new field is between psychologists and neuroscientists who are jointly using the functional MRI (or fMRI), a brain imaging machine that until now was usually devoted to making clinical diagnoses in hospitals. The MRI uses powerful magnets to render an astonishingly detailed depiction of the brain; insiders actually call MRIs "magnets" (as in "Our lab has three magnets"). The fMRI adds massive computing power that yields the equivalent of a video, showing what parts of the brain light up during a human moment like hearing the voice of an old friend. From such studies are flowing answers to questions like: what happens in the brain of a person who is gazing at her lover, or of someone gripped by bigotry, or of someone plotting how to win a competitive game?

The social brain is the sum of the neural mechanisms that orchestrate our interactions as well as our thoughts and feelings about people and our relationships. The most telling news here may be that the social brain represents the only biological system in our bodies that continually attunes us to, and in turn becomes influenced by, the internal state of people we're with. All other biological systems, from our lymphatic glands to our spleen, mainly regulate their activity in response to signals emerging from within the body, not beyond our skin. The pathways of the social brain are unique in their sensitivity to the world at large. Whenever we connect face to face (or voice to voice, or skin to skin) with someone else, our social brains interlock.

Our social interactions even play a role in reshaping our brain, through "neuroplasticity," which means that repeated experiences sculpt the shape, size, and number of neurons and their synaptic connections. By repeatedly driving our brain into a given register, our key relationships can gradually mold certain neural circuitry. In effect, being chronically hurt and angered, or being emotionally nourished, by someone we spend time with daily over the course of years can refashion our brain.

These new discoveries reveal that our relationships have subtle, yet powerful, lifelong impacts on us. That news may be unwelcome for someone whose relationships tend toward the negative. But the same finding also points to reparativc possibilities from our personal connections at any point in life.
Thus how we connect with others has unimagined significance.
That brings us to what it might mean, in view of these new insights, to be intelligent about our social world.

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