TY - JOUR
T1 - Growing a social brain
AU - Atzil, Shir
AU - Gao, Wei
AU - Fradkin, Isaac
AU - Barrett, Lisa Feldman
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2018, The Author(s).
PY - 2018/9/1
Y1 - 2018/9/1
N2 - It has long been assumed that social animals, such as humans, are born with a brain system that has evolved to support social affiliation. However, the evidence does not necessarily support this assumption. Alternatively, social animals can be defined as those who cannot survive alone and rely on members from their group to regulate their ongoing physiology (or allostasis). The rather simple evolutionary constraint of social dependency for survival can be sufficient to make the social environment vitally salient, and to provide the ultimate driving force for socially crafted brain development and learning. In this Perspective, we propose a framework for sociality and specify a set of hypotheses on the mechanisms of social development and underlying neural systems. The theoretical shift proposed here implies that profound human characteristics, including but not limited to sociality, are acquired at an early age, while social interactions provide key wiring instructions that determine brain development.
AB - It has long been assumed that social animals, such as humans, are born with a brain system that has evolved to support social affiliation. However, the evidence does not necessarily support this assumption. Alternatively, social animals can be defined as those who cannot survive alone and rely on members from their group to regulate their ongoing physiology (or allostasis). The rather simple evolutionary constraint of social dependency for survival can be sufficient to make the social environment vitally salient, and to provide the ultimate driving force for socially crafted brain development and learning. In this Perspective, we propose a framework for sociality and specify a set of hypotheses on the mechanisms of social development and underlying neural systems. The theoretical shift proposed here implies that profound human characteristics, including but not limited to sociality, are acquired at an early age, while social interactions provide key wiring instructions that determine brain development.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85060179811&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1038/s41562-018-0384-6
DO - 10.1038/s41562-018-0384-6
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C2 - 31346259
AN - SCOPUS:85060179811
SN - 2397-3374
VL - 2
SP - 624
EP - 636
JO - Nature Human Behaviour
JF - Nature Human Behaviour
IS - 9
ER -