Other People

Julian Baggini has an interesting review at the Financial Times of three new books about human sociality. I was struck by this passage on a book by Matthew Lieberman about the neurobiology of our social interactions:

Most neuroscientists believe we have a dedicated system for social reasoning, quite different to the one that is used for non-social thinking. . . . Lieberman says that brains “experience threats to our social connections in much the same way they experience physical pain”, and that some brain scans of social and physical pain are indistinguishable. The visceral nature of emotional hurt might well explain why one survey found that more people feared public speaking than death, or why languages around the world use metaphors such as a broken heart, a punch in the gut or a slap in the face. . . .

“Some day we will look back and wonder how we ever had lives, work and schools that weren’t guided by the principles of the social brain,” he says. In the book’s last chapters he makes some suggestions for how we might reach this truly enlightened age, some more credible than others. In education, he says we must find a way to “stop making the social brain the enemy during class time”. That makes sense but I’m not sure I like the sound of “communication classes” replacing English. Some employers might welcome the study that found reminding people of how their work helped others improved performance more than cash incentives – but only if there is such a fact to be reminded of. As for his idea that apartment blocks should have social organisers and more communal space, I’m sure I’m not the only one who shudders at the prospect of living in a grown-up version of a student hall of residence.

Absolutely. We need other people in a thousand ways, and we are happiest while socializing with others. We are also least happy while fighting with others or being treated badly by them; those events that make us feel slapped in the ace or punched in the gut mostly involve other people. As a result of this most of us are wary of strangers and very uncomfortable in unfamiliar social situations. There are also millions of families that give each other more pain than pleasure but somehow need each other too much to ever break away.

Because other people are the most important thing in our lives, they are also the source of most of our troubles. This is the basic problem in human life, and I suppose for all other social mammals. Cant about the importance of the social brain will not help us solve it.