Why Our Brains Are Wired To Connect, By Matthew Lieberman

In his book Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman describes the biology behind how our brains engage with the social world. As humans, we cannot get far in life if we are not able to interact well with others. The human species has evolved to master bringing people together and being able to work well in teams. Our brains and social wiring allow us to successfully build connections with other people. According to Lieberman, "we will spend our entire lives motivated by social connection” and research into social psychology has inferred that our brains play a larger role in social situations than we are aware of (Lieberman, 2013, p.5). When someone suffers from a physical ailment, more often than not, people
Lieberman devised an experiment where people play a ball-tossing game on the computer while they were lying in an MRI scanner. At a certain point in the game, two players stop throwing the ball to one of the participants (Lieberman, 2013, p 57). When Lieberman looked at the brains of these individuals who had just been rejected, he saw two fascinating things. The first thing he saw is that the same brain regions that register the distress of physical pain were also more active when people were left out of the game compared to when they were included. The second thing he saw was that the people who told us they were more bothered by being left out of the game where the people who activated these brain regions the most intensely (Lieberman, 2013, p
These infants were highly dependent on their mothers for nutrition, protection, comfort and socialization. The evolutionary theory would suggest that infants have an innate need to touch and cling to something for emotional comfort. Monkeys were separated from their mothers immediately after birth and placed in cages with access to two surrogate mothers, one made of wire and one covered in soft terry toweling cloth (Lieberman, 2013, p 48). Four of the monkeys could get milk from the wire mother and four from the cloth mother. Both groups of monkeys spent more time with the cloth mother even if she had no milk. The infant would only go to the wire mother when hungry. Once fed it would return to the cloth mother for most of the day. This supports the evolutionary theory of attachment, in that it is the response and security of the caregiver that is important, not necessarily nourishment or food. Harlow found that it was social deprivation rather than maternal deprivation that the young monkeys were suffering from (Lieberman, 2013, p