Where is the Brain’s Social Centre?
Social constructs are incredibly important to human beings but where does this sit in the brain?
The term the social brain was given to us in the 1990s. Researchers have attempted to find the social brain over decades and have found many structures and chemicals that can be related to aspects of sociality. And what we can see is that the social brain is way more complex than we could imagine and is a super network rather than a few isolated regions.
Just about everything human beings do is concerned with a social function of some sort. I am writing this with you the reader in mind. You are reading this because it interests you firstly, but because this will probably enable you to do some more stuff in life with other people or in social settings. This may be in business, in your career, in academia, with your family, etc. I have a family and many of my daily behaviours, and certainly daily routine revolves around this, even though my children are now older. I do busines with people, for people, and to enable them to deal with people better. Our entertainment is about people, of people doing things we like such as playing music or doing art, but normally with other people. People, people, people. We are indeed, as Aristotle said, a social animal.
This is often forgotten because of the many features in our life that are social to some degree – hermits are rare, extreme introverts similarly. Human society is, well, a society, a huge collection of people doing things together or against each other.
The term social brain is generally ascribed to Robin Dunbar, a well-known anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist now head of the Social and Neuroscience Research Group at the University of Oxford. He noted that brain size of primates was larger, the larger the social group they lived in. This suggest that sociality is the single biggest driver of brain growth and complexity. Managing social relationships is a complex process and requires immense brain power. And who has the largest social groups of them all? Human beings, of course.
Robin Dunbar came up with what has now become known as the Dunbar number the "cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships". This number is around 150 and a lot of research suggests this is pretty close to what we can observe in all settings including true friends on social media.
But back to the brain: do we have a social part of the brain or a social centre? If there is anything that is associated with social constructs, it is the neuromodulator oxytocin which we review in the next article. But in this article let’s review areas of the brain.
At first glance it may seem like a toddle: put people in brain scanners and see what lights up when they look at people. Or maybe at people they like. But then again what about those extremely social individuals amongst us what makes their brains different? Or what about parenting? Those kind loving parents. Do they have different brains to harsher parents? So, as we ask these questions, we start to see that this is much more complex than we may assume. Colloquially we may speak of social people but there are many aspects and facets of this. Here are some things we may consider, and have been researched in the neurosciences:
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