Here is an excerpt from Daniel Goleman’s new book, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships. This connects with what Paul Bloom is discussing in Descartes’ Baby on page 115, where he talks about imitation and mimicry and its relevance to our development. “When a person performs an action, such as grasping some food, certain neurons in the cortex fire, including some known as “mirror” neurons. The mirror neurons also fire if the person observes another person performing the same action.” Not only is this one of the major contributing factors in the development of babies it is suggested that we continue through our lives to respond to the thoughts and actions of the people we are surrounded by.
In this book I aim to lift the curtain on an emerging science, one that almost daily reveals startling insights into our interpersonal world.
The most fundamental discovery of this new science: We are wired to connect.
Neuroscience has discovered that our brain’s very design makes it sociable, inexorably drawn into an intimate brain-to-brain linkup whenever we engage with another person. That neural bridge lets us impact the brain—and so the body—of everyone we interact with, just as they do us.
Even our most routine encounters act as regulators in the brain, priming emotions in us, some desirable, others not. The more strongly connected we are with someone emotionally, the greater the mutual force. The most potent exchanges occur with those people with whom we spend the greatest amount of time day in and day out, year after year—particularly those we care about the most.
During these neural linkups, our brains engage in an emotional tango, a dance of feelings. Our social interactions operate as modulators, something like interpersonal thermostats that continually reset key aspects of our brain function as they orchestrate our emotions.
The resulting feelings have far-reaching consequences, in turn rippling throughout our body, sending out cascades of hormones that regulate biological systems from our heart to immune cells. Perhaps most astonishing, science now tracks connections between the most stressful relationships and the very operation of specific genes that regulate the immune system.
To a surprising extent, then, our relationships mold not just our experience, but our biology. The brain-to-brain link allows our strongest relationships to shape us in ways as benign as whether we laugh at the same jokes or as profound as which genes are (or are not) activated in t-cells, the immune system’s foot soldiers in the constant battle against invading bacteria and viruses.
That represents a double-edged sword: nourishing relationships have a beneficial impact on our health, while toxic ones can act like slow poison in our bodies.
Link:
http://www.danielgoleman.info/
