Our Brain Enjoys Making Friends

Abstract

In fact, research shows that human beings who are socially isolated not only report higher rates of depression, which is a state characterized by persistent feelings of very low mood, they also get sick more often and live shorter lives [1]. Many brain functions are involved in allowing us to have healthy human interactions. One such function is empathy. Empathy allows us to understand and respond to the emotional experiences of others. A key part of empathy is "theory of mind, " the ability to understand other's feelings, beliefs, thoughts, and intentions. Without realizing it, we use this ability every time we interact with our family, friends, classmates, and teachers: in order to have healthy social interactions, we have to understand that they think and feel differently than we do. But, we are not born with this ability. It is not until we are between 4 and 5 years that theory of mind starts developing, and this leads to many changes in our behavior, such as learning new social rules and being able to play more complex games with friends. Figure 2 shows that the brain network activated when thinking of our own mind and the mind of a friend is strikingly similar when compared to the brain activity seen when we try to understand the mind of a stranger. That is, our brain does make a difference in the way it responds to friends versus unknown people.Research also suggests that learning in a classroom with teachers and friends is more effective than learning on your own. For example, in a study withIs it important to have friends? Why do we enjoy spending time with them? Do we learn differently around our friends? Neuroscience research is helping us to answer some of these questions by looking at the way our brain allows us to, and benefits from, interacting with other humans. Part of the reason why human brains are so complex is that our interactions with others are so complex; we are social creatures and have been living in groups for thousands of years. Our brain has developed the ability to handle the complexity of the social world that our species (human beings) have created. We organize our interactions into different levels of complexity: we tell apart our closest family members, we can help our neighbors, we belong to a nation, and we recognize ourselves as a part of the large world. But why have humans developed such complex social organizations? Interacting with others has been helpful to us as a species: there is something about cooperating with others that made us more fit to survive through evolution (Figure 1).