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Connecting and Binding Social Brains and Minds

We evolved as social organisms in the context of face-to-face interaction. Much of our human biology was established before the technology of email and cell phones. As a result, our biological nature is tuned primarily to social signals and interaction that occurs in the presence of another. It takes just a moment of observation for us to know a lot about another person as a social being. We can understand other speakers easily within tens of milliseconds of experience. Our brains have developed to make this kind of social connection quickly and easily, whether through language or action. In order to understand someone else, we need to be able to understand their goals and intentions. Moreover we need to relate their behavior to our own individual and personal experience. Steve Small discusses some of the brain machinery that may allow us to translate our perception of language and observation of behavior into a form that can be related to our own use of language and action. This kind of resonance with experience, rather than elaborate inferences, may allow us to connect quickly with others, satisfying our drive for sociality.

But understanding behavior and communication is not all there is to forming social connections. It is one thing to read intentions and another to feel someone’s pain. If we only could understand action and communication, an important element of human connection would be missing. In forming a collective mind, as Gün Semin discusses it, we need to have collective emotional responses. Jean Decety discusses the foundations of empathy and the brain machinery that supports this important capacity by providing a resonant response to the observation of another person’s distress. Although sympathy may motivate helping others, empathy may be one of the social glues that binds us together as a collective social organism.

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