Furthermore, I think this emphasis on the primacy of the individual brain (at the expense of larger social structures) has only been exacerbated by the rise of modern neuroscience. With rare exceptions, the field is forced to study the brain in artificial isolation, so that we look at people all by themselves in brain scanners, or study them one by one in the lab. (It’s ironic that even the field of social neuroscience is forced to use experimental tools, like fMRI machines, that require isolation.) And so the mind becomes the brain and the brain becomes a collection of fleshy parts, like the insula and the PFC.
But we are not meant to be alone: The private events inside the brain depend, in larger part, on where we are and who we are with. It reminds me of something Nicholas Christakis, who studies human social networks along with James Fowler, recently told me: “The story of modern science is the story of studying ever smaller bits of nature, like atoms and neurons,” he said. “But people aren’t just the sum of their parts. I see this research as an attempt to put human beings back together again.”
