Ep125 "Why do brains need friends?" (with Ben Rein)

Why do human brains need social interaction? Why might AI chatbots be insufficient to scratch the itch? What do we love so much about real human touch and in-person interaction? Why do so many of us live with dogs? From empathy to introversion to social media to isolation (and what to do about it), we’ve got it all this week with guest Ben Rein, author of the new book Why Brains Need Friends. 

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Why do brains need friends, Why do human brains in
particular need social interaction, and how does that interaction affect
the brain? Our AI chatbots enough to scratch the social itch?

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Why or why not?

Speaker 1 (00:20):
And what do we love so much about real human
touch in person interaction, and for that matter, why do
we love dogs? From empathy and introversion, to social media
to isolation and what to do about it? We've got
it all this week with guest Ben Rain. Welcome to
Intercosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and author

(00:43):
at Stanford, and in these episodes we seek to understand
why and how our lives look the way they do.

(01:08):
Let's start with an experiment. In nineteen fifty eight, the
psychologist Harry Harlowe placed newborn monkeys in separate cages.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
They were fed and kept warm.

Speaker 1 (01:18):
And safe, but instead of a mother, each baby was
given a simple wire frame to cling to. The result
was heartbreaking. Even with food and shelter, the monkeys grew
anxious and withdrawn and sickly. They rocked themselves for comfort.

Speaker 2 (01:36):
Many of them refused to eat.

Speaker 1 (01:38):
It was a heartbreaking experiment, and what it surfaced is
even more evidence of something we probably already into it,
which is that food and protection isn't sufficient for survival
for a social brain like.

Speaker 2 (01:53):
That of primates. We need connection.

Speaker 1 (01:57):
Now, we often picture the brain as a demanded center
running the body from inside its sealed chamber. It's like
a solitary captain at the helm. But the right way
to think about it is that brains are like instruments
in a symphony. We're all evolved to play in harmony
with others. In fact, there's a whole field now of

(02:19):
neuroscience known as social neuroscience, which examines all the circuitry
involved with representing other people representing each other. So every
shared smile, every moment of eye contact, every active empathy,
these are all massively important to the functioning of the

(02:40):
nervous system from the very start of life. Connection is
a sort of biological fuel. Babies who are held and
comforted develop more resilient neural networks. Adults with deep and
trusting relationships they live longer, they heal faster, they handle
stress more effectively, and studies generally show that chronic loneliness

(03:04):
is as harmful to health as smoking in terms of
heart disease, stroke, diabetes, depression, anxiety, and so on.

Speaker 2 (03:12):
So we are built to connect.

Speaker 1 (03:15):
Yet here we are in an age of unprecedented connection digitally,
and at the same time we have unprecedented social isolation.
Unlike all humans who came before us. We text instead
of talk, we scroll instead of strolling with a friend.

(03:36):
We're all surrounded by people online, yet many people feel
completely alone. So we've been living in a massive technocultural shift.
But in today's context, the thing I want to emphasize
is the importance of this from the point of view
of the brain. We can see the effects of loneliness

(03:56):
in brain scans. We can measure this in stress hormones,
we can trace it in the immune system. Now, why
does the brain crave connection so strongly? Why does it
reward us for being together and punish us for isolation.
What role does empathy play in keeping us healthy? And
how do our relationships with our friends or partners, or

(04:19):
children or even dogs. How does this modify the architecture
of the brain. These are the questions that my guest today,
neuroscientist Ben Rain, dives into in his new book Why
Brains Need Friends, which comes out this week. The book
is an important reminder that our minds are not soloists,
but symphony players, and that thriving in a post interaction

(04:43):
world means relearning how to live and connect like this
social creatures that we are. As a side note, Ben
and I teach a class together at Stanford called how
to Communicate Science, in which we talk about books and
videos and podcasts and television and social media. And Ben
is excellent at breaking down the science and representing it

(05:03):
accurately and concisely. So it's a pleasure to welcome my
colleague Ben to the podcast today. Before we get started
about the neuroscience of social brains, the thing I want
to ask you is you describe in the book that
we live in a post interaction world.

Speaker 2 (05:24):
So what do you mean by that? First off, excited
to be here, This is awesome, good to see you.

Speaker 3 (05:29):
The post interaction world, as I refer to it, is
basically describing that we are becoming less and less social.

Speaker 2 (05:35):
We are spending less time together interacting.

Speaker 3 (05:37):
I mean, the fact that we are virtual right now
is sort of a testament to that. But just a
variety of changes have led us down this path of
being less connected, and it kind of, you know, you
could point to a number of scapegoats. The COVID nineteen
pandemic was a huge one, and I actually think that
extended period of isolation sort of reset or shifted our

(06:00):
expectations for social interaction, because going in, you know, in
twenty nineteen, we all had a social life. We all
saw our friends let's say, once twice, three times a week.
Then that was just completely demolished, just gone. So during
those subsequent few years where we had less interactions, our
expectations shifted our brain. Our brains are prediction machines, and

(06:21):
so we spent all this time in isolation, and so
we started to not expect to see our friends once
or twice or three times a week, which, by the way,
the fact that we weren't seeing them was upbending our expectations,
which is why it was so disturbing in the beginning.
But then maybe gradually we got kind of used to it.
We reset our lives a bit, and now life is restored.

(06:41):
COVID's over. We're back out in the normal world interacting
as we used to. But our brains have shifted from
expecting one, two or three interactions a week to maybe
expecting one interaction every two weeks or once a month,
and so that's a big part of this post interaction
world I refer to, and I think that's very bad
because shifted expectations don't mean shifted needs. You know, just

(07:04):
like sleep or nutrition, socializing is a really core pillar
of what drives the brain and what supports our health.
And you know, while we may not expect to interact
three times a week, most of us would be better
for it. So, you know, but on top of COVID
is also.

Speaker 2 (07:17):
You know, remote work.

Speaker 3 (07:19):
Many of these societal shifts that happened because of COVID,
you know, people got used to working from home. We
had the rise of things like instacart, where you could
pick up your groceries instead of actually going in the
store yourself and talking to the cashier and whatnot. And
there's just this automation of essentially everything you could do.
You know, there's telemedicine, you can tour a house, you
can you know, instead of having to go to the bank,

(07:40):
you could do it online. Everything that used to involve
a human generally doesn't nowadays. And so it's important for
us to recognize the value of interaction in this post
interaction world.

Speaker 1 (07:50):
So from a neuroscience point, of view, why do we
need interaction?

Speaker 3 (07:55):
So I'm going to start with the evolutionary perspective. If
you think back hundreds of thousands or millions of years, humans,
like many animals on Earth, survive best in groups.

Speaker 2 (08:06):
We are really.

Speaker 3 (08:07):
Good at hunting and defending ourselves when we're together. And
part of the reasons for that is we have all
these features in our bodies that allow us to work
so well together, like our eyebrows, which we can emote expressions,
and the white part of our eye, the sclera, which
allows us to tell where other people are looking.

Speaker 2 (08:24):
And of course that's super helpful.

Speaker 3 (08:25):
You can basically read someone's mind and infer what they're
thinking by recognizing the direction of their eyes. By the way,
that's not standard across the animal kingdom. Humans are one
of the only species that have whites Clara. Anyhow, all
that to say, since we survive better in groups, our
brains are built in a way that reward us for
social interaction, because how would you get a species to

(08:48):
stick together, Well, you can get them to stick together
if being around each other is pleasant and rewarding. So,
like all social species, and by that I mean any
animals that existing, we have social reward systems in our brain,
where being around others drives the release and the activation
of brain systems that are basically rewarding and reinforcing, so

(09:11):
that we want to be around others more frequently. It's
by reinforcing, you know, in the psychological sense, when something
is pleasant or nutritional, food is very good for you,
or provides a lot of nutrients, a lot of sugars
like chocolate, it drives the release of things like dopamine,
which keeps us coming back. That's reinforcing, and socializing drives
the release of dopamine and other rewarding neurotransmitters just the same.

Speaker 1 (09:34):
So beyond the reward system, what's going on with social
interaction in the brain.

Speaker 3 (09:39):
Yes, so there's two main things. Number one, socializing is
just supportive for brain health. And if you think about
the brain like a muscle, that the more you exercise it,
the more it grows and strengthens. Socializing is really great
exercise for the brain. It's not a simple task to
take on. You have to read the body language to

(09:59):
enter for these statements and think for your responses, and
you know, coordinate your own movements and everything while interpreting
their behavior. It's really not easy, and so it's good
exercise for the brain, and it may lead to the
development of new synapses and the strengthening of existing synapses,
which is sort of the way that the brain exercises
and strengthens. And potentially, as a consequence of this, people

(10:23):
who live more social lives and who engage with others
more literally have larger brains. They have more gray matter,
and that's a great selling point for a person like
me who wants to encourage others to connect more. But
it also has real consequences, not in that like you
immediately become smarter because you have a bigger brain, but
as we age, having this added gray matter can serve

(10:45):
as this cognitive reserve, which can make us more resilient
through aging and less vulnerable to dementia.

Speaker 2 (10:52):
Quick interjection.

Speaker 1 (10:53):
Cognitive reserve is this concept that as your brain, let's say,
degenerates with age, you've got all this backup material. You
have sort of a larger hard drive that you can
depend on on cognitive reserve.

Speaker 3 (11:06):
That the way that I like to describe it, or
the way that I refer to it in the book
is you think about a battalion of ten thousand troops
going into a battle and losing one hundred troops, well,
going into the next battle, they'll be still quite strong
and powerful. But if it's a battalion of five hundred
troops and they lose one hundred, it's a big difference.
And so having this cognitive reserve, all this build up

(11:29):
extra brain tissue, will make you more resilient as that
brain tissue gradually declines and atrophies as we age, which
happens to everybody unfortunately exactly.

Speaker 1 (11:40):
And by the way, what's interesting is that brain plasticity
is such an important part of this because you can
essentially build cognitive reserve by constantly challenging yourself with novelty,
with things that are tough, and that builds new roadways
and bridges, so that even as some things are dropping
out with time, you're building new ones. The interesting part

(12:01):
here is that the expression is that nothing is as
difficult for the brain as other people, which is to say,
other people provide really good fuel for your brain to
rewire and so on.

Speaker 3 (12:13):
Why is that, Well, like I said, it's you know,
it's challenging. Socializing is not easy. It comes easier for
some people than others, but it really involves a lot
of executive control.

Speaker 2 (12:25):
You have to really be tuned in.

Speaker 3 (12:27):
And actually, on that note, there's a really interesting study
where they basically did a social intervention in older people
I believe they were folks living in retirement homes sixty
five plus age group, and what they found was that
when they socialized more, they did brain scans and they
found that there was an increased activity in this salience network,
which is a cluster of brain areas that work together

(12:50):
to basically pay attention to the outer world. And it
makes perfect sense because if you're sitting and you're watching TV,
do you think that salience network is really coming online?

Speaker 2 (13:00):
You're paying attention a little bit, but it's not engaging
you in the way that.

Speaker 3 (13:03):
Really the outcome of your behaviors has a consequence. And
when you're engaging with someone else, you really have to
tune in because you might embarrass yourself, you might insult them.

Speaker 2 (13:14):
There's a lot more at risk.

Speaker 3 (13:15):
And again, evolutionarily, social interactions are really important. You know,
if we are not liked, if we are cast out
from our tribe, it can have very serious consequences. You know,
a million years ago, those consequences may be death, you're
easy prey, you're hunted alone.

Speaker 1 (13:32):
So let's turn to isolation. What happens with isolation.

Speaker 2 (13:36):
In the brain.

Speaker 3 (13:37):
Yeah, so isolation is effectively processed in the brain as stress.
There there's more to it than this, of course, but
we do not like being alone. This also may have
evolutionary roots, because, like I just said, if you're cast
out from your tribe, the brain would be wise to
have a built in system that basically makes you uncomfortable

(13:57):
until you find community again for the sake of your survival.
But when we are stressed, there's a stress is not
good for you. And studies have shown that when people
are exposed to isolation, like if you know controlled environments,
person goes into a NASA space station by themselves, they
know what they're doing thirty days, but during the thirty days,

(14:21):
their cortisol levels will progressively rise and they will remain elevated.
Cortisol being this stress hormone. It's glucocorticoid, meaning it drives
a stress response in the body. And then once they
exit and return to normal life and socialize again, their
cortisol levels will return to normal. Now, the thing is
cortisol in driving the stress response one of the things

(14:42):
that it does is it reduces inflammation. Because when we're stressed,
when we're being challenged by something like a Saber two
tiger coming after us, it would be helpful if we
didn't have inflammation in our bodies.

Speaker 2 (14:54):
We need to be ready to fight, ready to take.

Speaker 3 (14:56):
On the challenge. But with chronic stress, when cortisol levels
remain elevated for a long time, that anti inflammatory property
basically fades away because the tissues cannot always remain in
this anti inflammatory state. Eventually they become desensitized to the cortisol.

Speaker 2 (15:15):
Just like you know, if you're stressed.

Speaker 3 (15:16):
For a long time, you can't remain in fight or
flight hyper vigilant for weeks, right, Eventually you just kind
of you desensitize to that.

Speaker 2 (15:23):
So the reason that's bad.

Speaker 3 (15:25):
Is because it means the cortisol's ability to reduce inflammation diminishes,
which means that it can lead to chronic inflammation in
chronic stress. With social isolation being a form of stress,
being chronically isolated can lead to effectively chronic inflammation and

(15:47):
basically a long term stress response.

Speaker 2 (15:49):
And that's really bad.

Speaker 3 (15:49):
And the evidence for why that's so bad comes from
studies tracking people who are isolated. When you have chronic inflammation,
it interferes with the function of your tissues, and soeople
who are isolated for extended periods they're at higher risk
of dementia, heart disease, diabetes, and of course on the
mood side, depression and anxiety, suicidality.

Speaker 2 (16:12):
It's really impactful.

Speaker 3 (16:14):
And so I think that especially given what I mentioned
about this post interaction world, and of course it's not
that nobody's interacting anymore, but we are objectively most of
us interacting less. And the thing about loneliness and isolation
is that it's not a binary thing where it's like

(16:35):
I'm lonely and isolated or I am socialized. It's really
a continuum where you can have one interaction a month
or you can have five interactions a month. The person
having one interaction a month is objectively more isolated than
the person having five a month. And so given that
we've shifted in the way that we interact with one
another and engage with the world in general, I worry

(16:57):
that we may be leading ourselves into unecess story health
complications and anxiety and depression because of this stress response
that isolation induces.

Speaker 1 (17:06):
So when people are socializing, their salience network is on.
It leads to a stronger brain. When people are isolated
leads to these stress responses.

Speaker 2 (17:15):
What is your opinion about these.

Speaker 1 (17:19):
Three D avatar chat bots that you can have friendships
or relationships with. This is taking over the world at
a very fast paced There are apparently a billion people
now with AI relationships.

Speaker 2 (17:30):
What's your take on that.

Speaker 3 (17:32):
I have a lot of thoughts on this, and I
haven't quite gotten to the point where I'm like, this
is my firm stance. But in general, there's something special
about human to human interaction. And there's many examples of this.
I mean, for one, if you think about like video gamers,
they could play against the route with the bot or

(17:52):
the computer people call it right, But instead people will
pay a monthly subscription to play against other humans even
though they're not interacting with them.

Speaker 2 (18:00):
There's something special about that.

Speaker 3 (18:01):
And there are studies that show where when people go
on websites that have like an AI chatbot that can
help you or a real human avatar, people are more
likely to recommend the website.

Speaker 2 (18:11):
To others when there's a human involved.

Speaker 3 (18:13):
There's just something valuable about that, and there are areas
of the brain in the context of social touch that
seem to be especially activated by human touch, and one
of those is called the posterior superior temporal sulcus.

Speaker 2 (18:30):
And it's activated by touch.

Speaker 3 (18:33):
And when people are touched by a robot, which sounds
kind of wild and freakish, but massage by a robot,
I should say, a foot massage from a robot. And
so this suggests that the brain has some ability to
distinguish the social nature of touch, which makes sense, right, Like,
right now I'm rubbing my feet on the carpet. My
brain is telling me, well, you know, there's no reason

(18:55):
to release oxytocin and bond with this carpet. It's a carpet,
it's not your wife, right. There's these areas of the
brain that manage this distinction. And I think when we're
having these chat interactions with these AI large language models,
I would imagine that for most people, the brain is
making that distinction, which may or may not be making

(19:16):
it less valuable, making it less exciting. But I do
think that we hold the keys to that barrier.

Speaker 2 (19:24):
I think because.

Speaker 3 (19:24):
There are studies where people have shown that basically people
who use AI chatbots more and have relationships with them,
believe that it's good for their health, whereas people who
don't think it's bad for us. And I'm one of
the people who I think it's bad for us because
I don't hear the AI chatbots as friends. And so
I think we do have this ability to make that

(19:47):
leap hurtle over that barrier and convince ourselves, yeah, this
chatbot cares about me. It's human like, it matters. What
it says matters. But I think that it would be
very I don't want to say dangerous. Maybe that's a
strong word, but it would be a bad idea for
us to allow ourselves to get there. Right now, we
are the very first generation of humans having these human

(20:09):
like interactions with these AI chatbots, and I think that
the way we behave and the way we treat them
will determine how our children, our grandchildren treat them, and
whether our grandchildren will maybe go into AI therapists instead
of human therapists because we may or may not accept them.

Speaker 1 (20:41):
I will say I do think there's a great advantage
to AI therapists in the sense that they're available twenty
four to seven. And remember everything you've said, and they
never get distracted and they're just you know, I think
it's going to change the world and change suicide rates
to have things like AI therapists. But as far as
AI friends go this two things I want to mention.
One is they're getting better fast, and so they are

(21:06):
more and more like a person.

Speaker 3 (21:09):
You know.

Speaker 1 (21:09):
Grock released these three d avatars which are incredibly engaging
and so on. The reason I think this won't scratch
the itch totally is because in the end, you want
to take your wife or girlfriend or you know, someone
takes their boyfriend or their husband out to dinner with
other people and wants to do the foot massage and

(21:31):
wants to look at the stars with them and all
those sorts of things. So I think fundamentally there's going
to be this unfilled part and that's that's you know,
what we're talking about, is like what is it that
humans fulfill here. The second thing is I'm interested in
us getting back together in a year from now to
see where this has evolved to and to see whether

(21:53):
the chatbots get so good that they can actually activate
the same brain networks as you have another person.

Speaker 3 (22:01):
And what they found was that this brain area it
was more active when people were receiving the massage from
a human than a robot.

Speaker 1 (22:07):
Okay, so now let's return to the realm of humans entirely.
So tell us why social interaction is so important in childhood.

Speaker 3 (22:15):
Yeah, so, as we grow up, we of course are
exposed to a bunch of interactions that probably many of
us don't remember, but those interactions through our early life
I play a critical role in shaping the development of
certain brain areas. So there is a just like there's
a sensitive period for a language where you know, we've

(22:35):
all seen a child pick up a language like this,
and then we try to learn a language as an
adult and it's just impossible, there's a sensitive period for
social interaction as well. And during this period, in the
first couple of years of life, we are exceptionally sensitive
to learning social information, so we can begin to understand
effectively the rules of social conduct. You know, I shouldn't

(22:57):
cut in line, I shouldn't push Johnny down the slide
during recess. You know, I should share my candy that
I got from Halloween because it earns me social credit.
These types of things where we're learning and building these
social models of the world and there's some evidence to
suggest that this socializing may help shape and develop the

(23:19):
prefrontal cortex, of course, a critical brain area involved in
planning and executive decision making, all sorts of things that
are really important for everyday life, but also social functioning.
And the evidence for this comes in two forms. One,
children who experience less social interaction in early life show

(23:39):
actually a smaller volume of the prefrontal cortex, and that's
about as detailed as we can look at a human brain,
just kind of looking at volumes and functions, But in
mice we can look much more deeply at this micro structures,
these synapses, the interactions between neurons, and research in mice
has found that when mice are isolated in early life,

(24:00):
they literally show basically immature synapses and the preferal cortex.
The are the dendrites where the neurons receive neurotransmitter signals.
They are not as mature in the way they are formed,
which means that these neurons are basically not able to
signal quite as well to each other. And what's especially
interesting as well is that when the mice were isolated

(24:22):
at a later period, just a few weeks later, they
showed no such changes. So there's, like I said, this
sensitive period in early life where the shaping occurs. And
of course, you know, there's examples like Genie, the girl
Susan Wilie I believes her full name who She was
born in California and horrifically held in captivity and isolation

(24:44):
for the first thirteen years.

Speaker 2 (24:45):
Of her life by her parents, by her parents.

Speaker 3 (24:48):
Yeah, and when she was discovered by California authorities and
released and entered the world and to have a normal life,
she was basically never able to fully form social skills.

Speaker 2 (25:00):
Window had passed.

Speaker 3 (25:01):
And so without that critical shaping, you know, we don't
end up as the same adult that we would be otherwise.

Speaker 1 (25:09):
I wrote about several cases of these feral children, as
they're called in my book Live Wired. This sort of
thing tragically happens once in a while. Yeah, a child
is so neglected, so deeply neglected, they're locked in a
room by themselves, they have to sleep in their closet,
tied up in a sleeping bag.

Speaker 2 (25:26):
I mean, just this bizarre stuff.

Speaker 1 (25:28):
Because of mentally ill parents, they never developed language, they
don't develop the ability to use a toilet correctly. They
sometimes have what's called psychosocial dwarfism, where they don't actually
even grow to the normal height, to the expected height. Yeah,
and there's all kinds of deeply embedded problems with the
development of their brain as a result. And you're exactly right,

(25:49):
socializing is one of these. Okay, So let's switch gears.
Tell us about the difference between introverts and extroverts.

Speaker 3 (25:56):
Yeah, okay, So extraversion is something that can be measu
quite well. In fact, one of your recent guests, Jordan Peterson,
has a scale on this that I modified slightly and
included in the book, and it's a trade extraversion is
what I'm referring to. And you know, for listeners, you
can go online and see if there's a freely accessible

(26:17):
trade extroversion scale and sort of figure out where you land.
And generally, the higher your score, the more extroverted you are,
the more likely you are to enjoy socializing to get
energy from interaction, and the lower you score, the more
introverted you are, the less likely you are. However, I
think a common misconception is that introverts basically don't like

(26:39):
interacting at all, and that they would rather if it
was an option to just stay home all the time
and never interact with another human ever, that would be
their preference. But what's interesting is that the psychological studies
on this, people are thrown into these environments and said
act like an extrovert, regardless of whether people are an
introvert or an extrovert. If they do this for just
one interaction, like a ten minute conversation or a little

(27:01):
bit longer, they will feel better after. They will show
mood increases, even if they are very introverted. However, if
those same researchers say act like an extrovert for a
whole week, then by the end of that week, those
introverted people, those who score lower on trade extraversion, they
are miserable. It's basically a week of torture. It's completely draining,

(27:22):
you know. And the extroverts, on the other hand, they
feel great after that week. Now, you know, I think,
regardless of how extroverted you are, there is always, you know,
a limit to this, and I score very high and
those I'm very extroverted. But if I go on vacation
for a week with my family, like put me in
a you know, isolation room for at least another week

(27:44):
after that, I need to be by myself. And I
think what's important for everyone, regardless of where you stand
on that continuum, is to work to recognize that sort
of fine line where you cross over. And like I said,
everyone will be a little different.

Speaker 2 (27:58):
You know.

Speaker 3 (27:58):
For some people, socializing once a week going to one
dinner is plenty. You know, by the end of that dinner,
they're like, Okay, I'm good.

Speaker 2 (28:05):
I don't need to see anyone for a week.

Speaker 3 (28:07):
For others, that may be just the start of it,
and they may need to see friends another two or
three times for the the end of the week to
feel good. And so I think that identifying your trade
extraversion is actually a really useful tool, which is why
I include the scale in my books that people can
fill it out and you know, literally right on the
pages if you want to and figure out exactly where
you stand.

Speaker 1 (28:26):
So let's talk empathy for a moment. So what is
empathy from the brain's point of view.

Speaker 3 (28:31):
Yeah, empathy is the ability to either understand what someone
else is going through or to actually share their emotions.
And you know a clear example of this. I hate
to do this to people, but I'm going to do
it to you right now. So imagine that you're in
a parking lot, you're walking to your car, and you're
looking at a person getting into the car, and as

(28:53):
you're watching, they slam their fingers in the car door,
and you can you know, I'll just leave it there.
I could go into greater detail, but just if you
can actually picture that and you put yourself there, how
does that feel awful?

Speaker 1 (29:07):
I mean, yeah, you run the simulation in your own
mind of what it would feel like to your fingers
exactly exactly.

Speaker 3 (29:14):
That is empathy. That's exactly it. And so you know
the interesting part about that. And by the way, empathy
can be good or bad. You know, I happen to
give you a horrible example. I could have also said,
imagine you know, you see the love of your life
received the biggest career award that it could ever receive.
You know, they're on stage and you're in the crowd,
you're in the front row, you're clapping, and they look

(29:34):
at you and you make eye contact that there's tears
streaming down your face.

Speaker 2 (29:38):
You feel amazing. That's also empathy, right.

Speaker 3 (29:40):
But the interesting thing is a lot of the research
that we have on empathy the field of neuroscience, I mean,
is studying empathy for pain, including some of your own work,
and what it, as you know, reveals is that the
brain systems that activate when we are empathizing with someone's
pain have significant over lap with the brain areas that

(30:01):
encode pain itself. And specifically, it's not that the brain
areas that actually encode pain in your fingers are turning on,
because otherwise you would you know, you would be flinching,
you'd be.

Speaker 2 (30:12):
Grabbing your hand.

Speaker 3 (30:13):
Rather, there is this what's called the effective, aaff effective,
or emotional component of pain that is encoded by these
two areas, the anterior singular cortex and the insula, which
is that sort of you know, you hit your hand
and now there's something screaming inside your head saying, oh
this is horrible, I hate this, this is terrible. That's
the part of the brain that's activating in the observer.

(30:36):
And so you know, when we activate those brain areas,
we create that feeling of disgust and revulsion, which is
why we are able to feel that sense that you experienced.
But what's so fascinating to me is that the brain
is so good at just modeling. It can look at someone,
it can identify what they're going through and it will
just model their same brain state in some way in

(30:57):
your own in your brain and the observer's brain. I
think again, this goes back to what I mentioned about.
You know, white scleare, eyebrows. You know, without a word spoken,
we can detect someone's emotions and start to feel them ourselves. However,
that doesn't always happen. Empathy is not always present, and
there are a number of things that determine how engaged

(31:19):
our brain systems are going to be in.

Speaker 2 (31:21):
The context of empathy.

Speaker 3 (31:22):
And there are a number of things that determine how
much empathy we will feel and literally how much brain
activity will be happening in those empathy related areas. And unfortunately,
one of the biggest ones is basically in group outgroup.
If someone is different from you in nearly any way,
you will show less activity in those brain areas. And

(31:43):
of course some of the evidence for that comes from
your own study, which is one of the best.

Speaker 2 (31:48):
Maybe you should tell this story is better for you
to tell me.

Speaker 1 (31:50):
I'll just mention it really quickly. Yeah, we did this
study where we put people on the scanner. They see
six hands on the screen and the computer boo boo,
Boo boop goes around, picks one of the hands at random,
and then you see that hand get stabbed with a
syringe needle. The control is that you see it get
touched with a Q tip, which looks visually almost the same.

Speaker 2 (32:09):
And then what happens.

Speaker 1 (32:11):
When you see it stab in the syringe needle. These
this empathy network lights up. What we summarize is the
pain matrix. And exactly as you said, it's not that
you are feeling the pain physically, but you're feeling all
the other stuff about what would that be like if
my hand had been stabbed. You're feeling all the disgust
and the effective component of the pain. Okay, Now what

(32:33):
we do is we just label each hand with a
one word label Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Scientologist, Hindu, atheistoop.

Speaker 2 (32:42):
The computer goes around, picks a hand.

Speaker 1 (32:43):
You see that hand gets stabbed, and the question is
does your brain care as much if it's a member
of your out group? And the result was that your
brain does not care as much. We tested all groups.
We tested people of every religion, plus atheists as well.
Even atheists have a big empathic response when they see
the atheist hand get stabbed. Than when they see any

(33:03):
of the other groups. But this is true for every religion,
every group. You just you care more about your label
and less about the other labels. And this is something
that's very very clear to show and very striking and
very depressing in some way.

Speaker 2 (33:18):
But yes, we are we have higher empathy for our
in groups.

Speaker 3 (33:23):
Yeah, and religion is one that's you know, very salient
in the world, especially today. But also another thing I
love about the study is the Augustinian and Justinian right right.

Speaker 1 (33:34):
So what we did there is we had people come
into the lab, new participants, and we said, here, here's
a coin. Toss the coin. If it's heads, you're an Augustinian.
If it's tails, you're a Justinian. So they toss the
coin and they find which team they're on. We give
them a wristband that says the name of their team.
We remind them of their team. They go in the scanner.
Now they see the same thing happening, but the computer
is stabbing either Augustinian or Justinian hands.

Speaker 2 (33:57):
Now, the point is these labels are totally arbitrare.

Speaker 1 (34:00):
You're the one who tossed the coins, so you know
it's random which team you're on. But Nonetheless, we can
still detect that there's a bigger difference about your in
group getting stabbed versus your out group. Even something like
an arbitrary made up label still induces this in group
out group response.

Speaker 3 (34:18):
And that's, you know, a bit concerning, and you know,
it makes sense in the world of a couple hundred.

Speaker 2 (34:25):
Thousand years ago. Right, you have your tribe.

Speaker 3 (34:27):
It's important that you care about your tribe because if
they die, you're probably gonna die. But if you come
upon a rival tribesmen in the woods being attacked or
you know, a tree fell on them, it's actually more
supportive for your survival arguably if you don't feel a thing,
if you just let them die and you move on
and you go home to your tribe and you're safe.

Speaker 2 (34:47):
So, you know, back then it made a lot of sense.
Now we live in a.

Speaker 3 (34:51):
Very different world, and empathy is so core to the
way we connect with others and the way we relate
to others. You know, I worry that with less empathy nowadays,
because of all these new ways we're finding to sort
of divide ourselves from one another, that we may not
be functioning as yeah as a society, you know, and

(35:16):
our evolutionary ancestors would agree with that.

Speaker 2 (35:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:19):
Although the good news is there is one thing that
we found from our studies on this over the years
is that the way to combat this has to do
with complexifying the relationships, which is to say, let's say
somebody is in a different group than I am, but
they're also they happen to share this membership in this
other group with me, and they happen to, you know,

(35:41):
live in the same place I live, and they happen
to like bike riding the way I do, and they
have whatever.

Speaker 2 (35:45):
Then I've got all.

Speaker 1 (35:46):
These things where I'm like, oh, well, the sort of
the sort of in my our group, and the more
it gets complexified, the better that relationship is. The place
where this becomes the real problem is when you have
some group that you say, oh, they're clear.

Speaker 2 (36:00):
Nothing like me.

Speaker 1 (36:01):
And of course the history of propaganda across place and
time is all about saying, oh, those people they're like animals,
or they're like viruses, or they're like robots or whatever,
but it's something that's not human. They're so different from
me that I have nothing in common with them.

Speaker 3 (36:18):
Yeah, although twenty years from now they may not be
saying they're like robots anymore, because robots will be quite like.

Speaker 2 (36:22):
Us, right at least AI chatbots quite right.

Speaker 1 (36:27):
And I was going to ask you what is the
difference between cognitive empathy and emotional empathy?

Speaker 3 (36:33):
Yes, so right in the beginning I described that empathy
can be either understanding someone's emotions or feeling their emotions.
Cognitive empathy is that first one, so you're able to
into it what someone is going through, for example, in
the hand slamming in the car door example, by looking
at them, seeing their reaction, their facial expression, whatever sounds

(36:55):
are emanating from them, which are probably going to be
uncomfortable to listen to. All those things, you can tell, Okay,
this person's in pain. That's the emotion they're feeling. I
can understand that. Emotional empathy, though, is to share and
step into those emotions, which would be in your case,
I asked you, how does it feelings that it felt horrible?
That emotional component of feeling something in response, that's emotional empathy.

Speaker 2 (37:18):
So is it possible to become more empathic? It is?

Speaker 3 (37:23):
It is so Interestingly, empathy is something that we learn
and develop in early life. Most of you know, like
I said, you learn that you push Johnny down a
slide and he starts crying, and of course this is
in childhood, not in adulthood. But Johnny falls, it's your fault.
You feel bad. You recognize, Oh he feels bad, I
feel bad too. Through these experiences, you develop empathy in childhood,

(37:46):
but that doesn't mean that when you reach adulthood that
you no longer can grow and develop. And there are
actually some really fascinating studies where they've put people through
the specific empathy and compassion trainings and found that not
only are those empathic capabilities flexible, that people can grow
and become more empathic, but also that it's associated with

(38:09):
changes structural changes in the brain. And what's really interesting
is the two exercises that they put these people through
that really stick out to me. One is a loving
Kindness meditation, which if anyone's interested, you know, you could
basically YouTube is Loving Kindness Meditation and find it. It's basically,
you are entering this relaxed state, you're thinking of someone.

(38:30):
It could be someone you love, someone you care about,
or it could be a stranger, or it could be
the entire universe, and then you're just extending love and
kindness onto them and you know, you're in a very
relaxed state. It's a really beautiful thing to experience. But
that exercise, as part of a larger training is associated
with greater empathic abilities. The other is empathic listening, which

(38:53):
is you sit down with a partner and that person
tells you about something that they experienced in ideally the
last twenty four hours, something that was emotional for them,
that made them feel either good or bad. And that
person is meant to tell you in as great of
detail as possible, what that experience was like, how it felt.

(39:14):
And your job is to do absolutely nothing but listen.
You cannot interject, you cannot you know, interrupt them. You
just sit and you listen and and you know, emphasis
on listen. You're taking it in as they're describing how
it felt. You're trying to imagine what it would feel
like for you. So you're basically taking these empathy systems
for a test drive. You're engaging them in a basically
practice run, you know, which isn't a practice run, it's

(39:37):
a real run, but it's you're.

Speaker 2 (39:38):
Focusing on the empathic component of it.

Speaker 3 (39:41):
You're really trying to feel what they're feeling, and you're
not interrupting them to say, oh, I went through something
like that before.

Speaker 2 (39:46):
You know, you're just taking it in.

Speaker 3 (39:48):
And so those two exercises, among other things, are associated
in adults with those positive changes.

Speaker 1 (40:10):
Okay, I want to cover two more topics. Is social
media good for us or bad for us?

Speaker 3 (40:15):
Generally bad sadly, and I think for a lot of people,
you know, the lived experience is consistent with that. You know,
you open social media, first couple of minutes, you're like, yeah,
this is you know, doing the trick. I'm relaxing, I'm
kind of stepping away from real life. I'm forgetting about
my problems, and then all of a sudden you look
and it's like two hours later and you're thinking, oh

(40:36):
my gosh, what just happened. A lot of people experience
that unfortunately. But that's not the reason why it's bad
for us. It's bad for us for a number of
other reasons. By the way, when I say it's bad
for us, the more people use social media generally, they
tend to be more depressed, more anxious, they sleep worse.
That's one of the key mediators, it seems, because when

(40:58):
people spend you know, those who score higher when they're
asked how much time do you spend per week on
social media?

Speaker 2 (41:03):
Those who score higher, where do they find that time?

Speaker 3 (41:06):
While they're often laying awake at night watching videos instead
of sleeping, And as we know.

Speaker 2 (41:11):
Sleep is a big mediator of mood, So that.

Speaker 3 (41:14):
Could be the reason why people who use social media
are more depressed and anxious. But you know, there's also
it's very isolating in itself. You know, the funny thing
about social media. I'm doing air quotes for those only
listening social air quotes media is that people who use
social media more feel more lonely. They end up feeling

(41:34):
more isolated because it is isolating. You're not actually interacting
with anyone. You're spending time alone with a device that's
approximating social interaction and doing just enough to hit those
social rewards systems in the brain to keep you hooked
and keep you swiping and scrolling, but you're not actually
interacting with anybody. And so I believe that that's a
key part of it. But you know, there's also a

(41:57):
key role of many other things. The social comparison. You know,
people are posting their very best moments on social media,
so you're scrolling and being like, oh my gosh, I'm
doing terrible at life compared to these people who are
doing so well every time I log on. So in general,
you know I, as you know, I post on social
media a lot, and you know, one of the messages
I try to keep consistent is basically, go away, stop

(42:19):
stop watching this, and go you know, outside, go live life,
better things to do.

Speaker 1 (42:26):
Okay, I want to ask you about something different now,
which is so my entire life. I've always had dogs,
and humans have been with this other species for such
a long time. Why are our relationships with dogs so important?

Speaker 3 (42:38):
Yeah, I'm a dog lover myself. Dogs are amazing. My
dog Zoey is around here somewhere. So dogs, it's so fascinating.
I mentioned the evolutionary history of humans that we survive
better in groups, right, So we have this this social reward,
this oxytocin, this glue that holds us together, humans and dogs,
presumably if they've survived better as one unit when they

(43:02):
exist together. And the relationship between dogs and humans, by
the way, was thought to occur somewhere between like twenty
seven and forty thousand years ago, so we've been living
together for so long. We've been living together for so
long and working together that when geneticists look back at
our genes, they see similar changes over time in the
genes between humans and dogs, which suggests that we face

(43:25):
the same challenges of ancient Earth together and evolved through
the same mechanisms to survive, which is awesome and just
you know, go give your dog a kiss. Anyways, the
reason that dogs are so beloved to us is because
they activate these social reward systems just like other humans do,
just like children do. And that when we look into

(43:47):
the eyes of our dogs, when we pet our dogs,
we have all these benefits. We produce oxytocin, which is
probably why we love them so much. You know, we
show lower blood pressure. People who have dogs and also
other animals too, generally have greater health. They are more
likely to just live longer basically, but also like lower

(44:08):
rates of heart disease things like that. And you know,
I actually i'd never said this. Earlier, I mentioned that
there were three reasons socializing is good for you. One
of them is that it boosts your mood through these
social reward systems. The second is that it can lead
to cognitive reserve and the third that I never actually
said is that, you know, oxytocin, people think of it

(44:29):
as this love hormone, which it is. It's really important
for bonding, but oxytocin is also this incredibly powerful medicinal
compound in the body. Basically, oxytocin is anti inflammatory. Oxytocin
can produce stress and anxiety. Oxytocin it can help bone growth,
it can help with wound healing. It has all these

(44:50):
amazing properties. It's also neuroprotective, which makes sense because when
we are in a position to mate perhaps and we're
producing oxytocin, we want to be physically fit to make
sure that we are probably going to produce a child.
So the fact that oxytocin has all these amazing health benefits,
I don't think we should forget about the fact that

(45:11):
dogs drive the release of oxytocin as well. And you know,
I really do believe that the isolation of older people
in America and worldwide is a massive, unspoken public health crisis. Isolation,
as I mentioned, is really bad for us. As we
grow older, we are more prone to a range of conditions,

(45:34):
and oxytocin may be healing. As I said, it's neuroprotective.
So I really think that a simple intervention for older
human beings is to get a dog, because they may
be able to sort of scratch some of that same
biological itch that social interaction does, especially for those who
are you know, maybe have trouble getting out of the
house and so they're stuck at home and so it's

(45:54):
exacerbating their isolation. And the reason for that is because
dogs basically hitched a ride on our evolutionary bonding systems
to connect with us and stick together for the same
reason that we are social animals. You know, they dry
boxytosin release, which drives dopamine release. We love being around them,
but they are also good for us because this connection

(46:14):
is meaningful for the brain.

Speaker 1 (46:16):
So the relationship between the caregiver and the dog and
the relationship between the parent and the child.

Speaker 3 (46:22):
What's the similarities there? There are a few, one being
that the oxytocin component. You know, oxytocin's key for parent
child relationships because you know, it's a tremendously powerful glue.
You need to be glued to your child so that
the child survives, And with dogs, they activate the same system.

(46:42):
May be simply looking into your eyes. The eyes of
your dog can dry oxytocin release not just in you,
by the way, but in the dog too, because they
need to be motivated to hang out with us as well. Interestingly, though,
when they had wolves look in the eyes of humans,
the wolves didn't show this oxytocin rise, suggesting that dogs
evolved in order to bond with humans or in the
process of forming this long term relationship with us. The

(47:06):
other thing, though, beyond the biological comparisons, dogs actually treat
us like parents, like as if they were children.

Speaker 2 (47:18):
Anyone who owns a dog knows this to be true.

Speaker 3 (47:20):
But what's really interesting is in psychological studies of children,
you know, there are various attachment styles and the most.

Speaker 2 (47:27):
Common is a secure attachment style.

Speaker 3 (47:30):
And the way this can be tested is through this
thing called the strange situation test, where the baby is
put into a strange situation. So imagine your mom, you
have the baby, You go into this room. You know,
baby plays, looks, there's some toys on the ground, whatever.
Then this stranger comes in grabs a seat nearby, and
you know, the baby is kind of looking at this
guy who's is a weird guy.

Speaker 2 (47:51):
I don't know. Mom gets up and leaves.

Speaker 3 (47:53):
So now the baby is by themselves in this room
with this stranger, and the way they behave in this
st situation can suggest how they basically relate to their parent,
and so what often happens is the babies will feel
skeptical of the stranger until mom returns, and then willingly
play with the stranger, suggesting that they view mom as

(48:16):
a beacon of safety. Right when Mom's nearby, it's safe
to play with this person a couple, I don't know.
Decades after that study was published, scientists did the same
thing with dogs and their caregivers, where they had the
same exact situation. Person walks their dog into this room,
there's a stranger there, and then the caregiver gets up
and walks away, And what they found was that the

(48:39):
majority of dogs, just like children, will avoid the stranger
until the parent gets back or the caregiver gets back,
and then they will be more comfortable socializing and playing
with the stranger. So biologically, yes, it's similar, but also psychologically,
from the dog's perspective, they may also view us.

Speaker 2 (48:57):
In a similar way, at least to the way a
children view parents.

Speaker 1 (49:00):
Oh beautiful, okay, So subsuming back out to the big picture.
We've got these extraordinarily social brains. We are social species.
What should we all be keeping in mind about how
to best navigate ourselves through the world in terms of
the social context.

Speaker 3 (49:16):
Well, I'm very firm believer that we can gain a
ton of benefit, that there's this uneaten ripe fruit of
social interaction effectively everywhere we go in basically strangers. I
think that if we are willing to open ourselves to
interacting with strangers more, we can gain a lot. And
there's evidence on this too that people when they are

(49:38):
invited by scientists to talk to a stranger, they feel better.
And I think that a lot of the time we
don't do that because we think we're going to be rejected.
We think that they're going to think we're weird or
whatever we thinking. But the truth is people don't mind
being spoken to, they don't mind having a conversation as

(49:59):
long as it's in the right content.

Speaker 2 (50:00):
And so I guess my answer to your question is we.

Speaker 3 (50:02):
Should identify ways to explore new social domains that are
comfortable for everybody. Of course, you know, you don't want
to go up to a person on the train and
pull their ear, butt out of their ear and say, hey,
what are you listening too? But finding when we have
these moments which we often have. You know, you're sitting
in a doctor's office waiting room, and you know it's
fifteen minutes go by, and you're doing nothing, and there's

(50:24):
six other people sitting near you that are doing the
exact same thing. Nobody's talking to each other. Why don't
we talk to each other? Like I said, I'm an extrovert.
This may be terrible advice for introverts, and again, it's
all about finding that cadence of where you are comfortable,
and for many people this may not be comfortable at all.
But I think what what everyone should really be doing
is just that figuring out what sort of social schedule,

(50:47):
or what I refer to it in the book as
the social diet we're eating or taking in is most healthy,
most beneficial for our mood and well being, and with
mood being the real output variable that we're measuring, so
I think, you know, if we take time to maybe journal.
I do provide a social journal in the book as well,
where you can, after you come home from an interaction,

(51:09):
answer a bunch of questions. You know who was I
with how many people were there, where were we how
busy was it? Also, what do we talk about all
sorts of things like that, And if we can start
to interrogate our interactions in a way that we recognize, oh,
this thing makes it less pleasant than this thing. You know.
I don't like being in a bar where it's shoulder
to shoulder and now I've packed, you know, squeezing through

(51:29):
to see my friends, or screaming over the music. Or
on the other hand, I don't really like being in
one on one environments where it's quiet and we're just
talking and looking each other's eyes. You know, if we
can configure our interactions in a way that allow us
to step into a new level of connected connectedness, I
think that could be really good for us, not only
on the individual level, on our for our brains and

(51:51):
our health in general, but also for the sake of
our entire society, because the data are very real that
we've become much more fragmented and isolated in the last day.

Speaker 1 (52:00):
So that was my interview with Ben Rain, author of
the new book Why Brains Need Friends, and our conversation
today took us from babies to robots to social media
to dogs, to the bonds that.

Speaker 2 (52:16):
Sustain us in old age.

Speaker 1 (52:18):
The lesson that comes up is that it doesn't really
work to think about the brain as a loan captain
at the helm. Instead, it's more like an instrument that
is meant to play in a symphony. And today we
covered the biology that makes connection essential. We talked about
how we can leverage the science to help our brains thrive.

(52:40):
In wrapping this up, I just want to remind us
that connection doesn't always mean crowds or noise or constant presence.
Sometimes it's just the quiet looks between two people who
know each other well. Sometimes it's the weight of a
dog's head on your knee. Sometimes it's chatting with a
friend over call. Sometimes this holding a baby. What matters

(53:03):
is just these invisible strands that tie your nervous system
to other people. We have to keep an eye on
this proactively, because in a world that moves fast and
rewards self sufficiency, it's easy to forget to tend.

Speaker 2 (53:20):
To those threads.

Speaker 1 (53:22):
We're rushing, we're doom scrolling, and we convince ourselves often
that we'll make that call tomorrow. But the science is clear.
Our brains are built for interaction. And in fact, when
I made my television show The Brain, I devoted an
entire episode to this called why Do I Need You?

Speaker 3 (53:40):
So?

Speaker 2 (53:41):
I want to remind you that one of the.

Speaker 1 (53:42):
Most important things you can do for your mental clarity,
for your emotional resilience, for your physical health, it's one
of the simplest things. Just stop and look up and
connect with other people. Think of conversation like medicine, think
of friendship like food. So now that we've reached the

(54:02):
end of today's podcast, think of someone that you haven't
reached out to for a while and pick up the
phone and arrange that coffee or hike or meal. It's
easy to do, and it's one of the most important
things that you can do for the health and happiness
of your brain. Go to eagleman dot com slash podcast

(54:29):
more information and to find further reading. Go in the
weekly discussions with other people on my substack, and check
out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos
of each episode and to leave comments Until next time.
I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.