Social Connection Makes a Better Brain - Emily Esfahani Smith - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Recent trends show that people increasingly value material goods over relationships—but neuroscience and evolution say this goes against our nature.
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“Man is by nature a social animal … Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.”
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Just as human beings have a basic need for food and shelter, we also have a basic need to belong to a group and form relationships.
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Every time we are not engaged in an active task—like when we take a break between two math problems—the brain falls into a neural configuration called the “default network.” When you have down time, even if it’s just for a second, this brain system comes on automatically.
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“The default network directs us to think about other people’s minds—their thoughts, feelings, and goals.”
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“Evolution has made a bet,” Lieberman tells me, “that the best thing for our brain to do in any spare moment is to get ready for what comes next in social terms.”
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When economists put a price tag on our relationships, we get a concrete sense of just how valuable our social connections are—and how devastating it is when they are broken.
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To the brain, social pain feels a lot like physical pain—a broken heart can feel like a broken leg, as Lieberman puts it in his book.
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But over the last fifty years, while society has been growing more and more prosperous and individualistic, our social connections have been dissolving.
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Over the same period of time that social isolation has increased, our levels of happiness have gone down, while rates of suicide and depression have multiplied.
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Across the board, people are increasingly sacrificing their personal relationships for the pursuit of wealth.