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Social Summary
About Social Book
We are profoundly social creatures--more than we know.
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 book suggest ways to improve learning in schools, make the workplace more productive, and improve our overall well-being.
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Ideas which challenge our notion of self
Trojan Horse Self
"I believe the self is, at least in part, a cleverly disguised deception that allows the social world in and allows us to be “overtaken” by the social world without our even noticing."
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More Time Working And Less Time Socializing
"Materialism in our culture has been growing over time, and this aspiration toward financial success for many of us has come at the cost of our social connections."
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Nature Of The Self
"the self exists primarily as a conduit to let the social groups we are immersed in (that is, our family, our school, our country) supplement our natural impulses with socially derived impulses."
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Social pain Vs Physical Pain
Why are our brains built in such a way that a broken heart can feel as painful as a broken leg?
When someone says, “He broke my heart,” we understand this as a metaphor. No one mistakes this for a medical emergency.
Physical and social pain seems 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?
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The Language We Use
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.”
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We Form Attachments
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. Observe the intense and relentless crying and distress that can occur when a mother leaves her child. Each of us is born with an attachment system. 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.
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