cal newport default network
THE SOCIAL ANIMAL
The idea that humans have a particular affinity for interaction and communication is not new. Aristotle famously noted that “man is by nature a social animal.” It wasn’t, however, until surprisingly recently in the long sweep of human history that we discovered the biological extent to which this philosophical intuition turns out to be true.
A key moment in this new understanding came in 1997, when a research team from Washington University published a pair of papers in the prestigious Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. During this period, PET scanners, which were originally developed for medical purposes, were migrating into neuroscience research, where they provided researchers the breakthrough ability to observe brain activity. The Washington University team looked at a collection of these new brain imaging studies to investigate a simple question: Are there regions of the brain that are involved in all types of brain activity?
As the psychologist Matthew Lieberman summarizes in his 2013 book, Social, the results of this initial analysis were “disappointing,” revealing that “only a few regions showed increased activity across all the tasks, and they weren’t very interesting brain regions.” But the research team wasn’t done. After failing to find regions that fired for many different activities, they decided to ask the opposite question: What, if anything, is active in the brain when someone is not trying to do a task? “It was an unusual question,” notes Lieberman, but we should be glad they asked, because it led to a remarkable discovery: the team found that there’s a particular set of regions in the brain that consistently activate when you’re not attempting to do a cognitive task, and that just as consistently deactivate once you focus your attention on something specific.
Because almost any task caused this network to deactivate, the researchers originally called it “the task-induced deactivation network.” Because this name was a mouthful, it was eventually abbreviated to a catchier label: “the default network.”
At first, scientists had no idea what the default network did. They had a long list of tasks that turned it off (telling them what it didn’t do), but little hard evidence about its true purpose. Even without good evidence, however, scientists began to develop intuitions based on their own experience. One of these pioneering thinkers is our guide to this research, Matthew Lieberman—who now enters our narrative as an active participant.
As Lieberman recalls, images of the default network were typically produced by asking a subject in a PET scanner to take a break from whatever repetitive activity the experiment required. Because the subject wasn’t engaged in a specific task, it was easy for researchers to think of the default network as something that comes on when you’re thinking about nothing. A little self-reflection, however, makes clear that our brains are hardly ever actually thinking about nothing. Even without a specific task, they tend to remain highly active, with thoughts and ideas flitting by in an ongoing noisy chatter. On further self-reflection, Lieberman realized that this background hum of activity tends to focus on a small number of targets: thoughts about “other people, yourself, or both.” The default network, in other words, seems to be connected to social cognition.
Sure enough, once scientists knew what to look for, they discovered that the regions of the brain that defined the default network are “virtually identical” to the networks that light up during social cognition experiments. When given downtime, in other words, our brain defaults to thinking about our social life.
It’s here that Lieberman’s research takes an interesting twist. When he first encountered the conclusion that the default network is social, he wasn’t impressed. Like others in his field, he noted that people naturally have a strong interest in their own social life, so it’s not surprising that this is what they like to think about when bored. As Lieberman continued to study different aspects of social cognition, however, his opinion shifted. “I have since become convinced that I had the relationship between these networks backward,” he writes. “And this reversal is tremendously important.” He now believes “we are interested in the social world because we are built to turn on the default network during our free time.” Put another way, our brains adapted to automatically practice social thinking during any moments of cognitive downtime, and it’s this practice that helps us become really interested in our social world.
Lieberman and his collaborators devised a clever series of experiments to confirm this hypothesis. In one study, for example, they found that the default network lights up during downtime even in newborns. The importance of finding this activity in infants is that they “clearly haven’t cultivated an interest in the social world yet. . . . [The infants studied] cannot even focus their eyes.” This behavior must therefore be instinctual.
In another study, researchers put (adult) subjects in a scanner and asked them to solve math problems. They discovered that when they gave the subjects a three-second break between problems—a duration too short for them to decide to start thinking about something else—the default network still fired up to fill the small gap, further indicating that this drive to think about social issues kicks in like a reflex.
This finding underscores the fundamental importance of social connections to human well-being. As Lieberman summarizes: “The brain did not evolve over millions of years to spend its free time practicing something irrelevant to our lives.” But the default network is not the whole story. Additional studies by Lieberman and his collaborators uncovered other examples where evolution placed “big bets” on the importance of sociality by adapting other expensive systems to serve its needs.
The loss of social connection, for example, turns out to trigger the same system as physical pain—explaining why the death of a family member, a breakup, or even just a social snub can cause such distress. In one simple experiment, it was discovered that over-the-counter painkillers reduced social pain. Given the power of the pain system in driving our behavior, its connection to our social life underscores the importance of social relationships to our species’ success.
Lieberman also discovered that the human brain devotes significant resources to two different major networks that work together toward the goal of mentalizing: helping us understand other people’s minds, including how they are feeling and their intentions. Something as simple as a casual conversation with a store clerk requires massive amounts of neuronal computational power to take in and process a high-bandwidth stream of clues about what’s going on in the clerk’s mind. Though this “mind reading” feels natural to us, it’s actually an amazingly complicated feat performed by networks honed over millions of years of evolution. It’s exactly these highly adapted systems that are leveraged by the rock paper scissor champions who opened this chapter.
These experiments represent only some key highlights among many from a vast social cognitive neuroscience literature that all point to the same conclusion: humans are wired to be social. In other words, Aristotle was on the right track when he called us social animals, but it took the modern invention of advanced brain scanners to help us figure out how much he was likely understating this reality.
The idea that humans have a particular affinity for interaction and communication is not new. Aristotle famously noted that “man is by nature a social animal.” It wasn’t, however, until surprisingly recently in the long sweep of human history that we discovered the biological extent to which this philosophical intuition turns out to be true.
A key moment in this new understanding came in 1997, when a research team from Washington University published a pair of papers in the prestigious Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. During this period, PET scanners, which were originally developed for medical purposes, were migrating into neuroscience research, where they provided researchers the breakthrough ability to observe brain activity. The Washington University team looked at a collection of these new brain imaging studies to investigate a simple question: Are there regions of the brain that are involved in all types of brain activity?
As the psychologist Matthew Lieberman summarizes in his 2013 book, Social, the results of this initial analysis were “disappointing,” revealing that “only a few regions showed increased activity across all the tasks, and they weren’t very interesting brain regions.” But the research team wasn’t done. After failing to find regions that fired for many different activities, they decided to ask the opposite question: What, if anything, is active in the brain when someone is not trying to do a task? “It was an unusual question,” notes Lieberman, but we should be glad they asked, because it led to a remarkable discovery: the team found that there’s a particular set of regions in the brain that consistently activate when you’re not attempting to do a cognitive task, and that just as consistently deactivate once you focus your attention on something specific.
Because almost any task caused this network to deactivate, the researchers originally called it “the task-induced deactivation network.” Because this name was a mouthful, it was eventually abbreviated to a catchier label: “the default network.”
At first, scientists had no idea what the default network did. They had a long list of tasks that turned it off (telling them what it didn’t do), but little hard evidence about its true purpose. Even without good evidence, however, scientists began to develop intuitions based on their own experience. One of these pioneering thinkers is our guide to this research, Matthew Lieberman—who now enters our narrative as an active participant.
As Lieberman recalls, images of the default network were typically produced by asking a subject in a PET scanner to take a break from whatever repetitive activity the experiment required. Because the subject wasn’t engaged in a specific task, it was easy for researchers to think of the default network as something that comes on when you’re thinking about nothing. A little self-reflection, however, makes clear that our brains are hardly ever actually thinking about nothing. Even without a specific task, they tend to remain highly active, with thoughts and ideas flitting by in an ongoing noisy chatter. On further self-reflection, Lieberman realized that this background hum of activity tends to focus on a small number of targets: thoughts about “other people, yourself, or both.” The default network, in other words, seems to be connected to social cognition.
Sure enough, once scientists knew what to look for, they discovered that the regions of the brain that defined the default network are “virtually identical” to the networks that light up during social cognition experiments. When given downtime, in other words, our brain defaults to thinking about our social life.
It’s here that Lieberman’s research takes an interesting twist. When he first encountered the conclusion that the default network is social, he wasn’t impressed. Like others in his field, he noted that people naturally have a strong interest in their own social life, so it’s not surprising that this is what they like to think about when bored. As Lieberman continued to study different aspects of social cognition, however, his opinion shifted. “I have since become convinced that I had the relationship between these networks backward,” he writes. “And this reversal is tremendously important.” He now believes “we are interested in the social world because we are built to turn on the default network during our free time.” Put another way, our brains adapted to automatically practice social thinking during any moments of cognitive downtime, and it’s this practice that helps us become really interested in our social world.
Lieberman and his collaborators devised a clever series of experiments to confirm this hypothesis. In one study, for example, they found that the default network lights up during downtime even in newborns. The importance of finding this activity in infants is that they “clearly haven’t cultivated an interest in the social world yet. . . . [The infants studied] cannot even focus their eyes.” This behavior must therefore be instinctual.
In another study, researchers put (adult) subjects in a scanner and asked them to solve math problems. They discovered that when they gave the subjects a three-second break between problems—a duration too short for them to decide to start thinking about something else—the default network still fired up to fill the small gap, further indicating that this drive to think about social issues kicks in like a reflex.
This finding underscores the fundamental importance of social connections to human well-being. As Lieberman summarizes: “The brain did not evolve over millions of years to spend its free time practicing something irrelevant to our lives.” But the default network is not the whole story. Additional studies by Lieberman and his collaborators uncovered other examples where evolution placed “big bets” on the importance of sociality by adapting other expensive systems to serve its needs.
The loss of social connection, for example, turns out to trigger the same system as physical pain—explaining why the death of a family member, a breakup, or even just a social snub can cause such distress. In one simple experiment, it was discovered that over-the-counter painkillers reduced social pain. Given the power of the pain system in driving our behavior, its connection to our social life underscores the importance of social relationships to our species’ success.
Lieberman also discovered that the human brain devotes significant resources to two different major networks that work together toward the goal of mentalizing: helping us understand other people’s minds, including how they are feeling and their intentions. Something as simple as a casual conversation with a store clerk requires massive amounts of neuronal computational power to take in and process a high-bandwidth stream of clues about what’s going on in the clerk’s mind. Though this “mind reading” feels natural to us, it’s actually an amazingly complicated feat performed by networks honed over millions of years of evolution. It’s exactly these highly adapted systems that are leveraged by the rock paper scissor champions who opened this chapter.
These experiments represent only some key highlights among many from a vast social cognitive neuroscience literature that all point to the same conclusion: humans are wired to be social. In other words, Aristotle was on the right track when he called us social animals, but it took the modern invention of advanced brain scanners to help us figure out how much he was likely understating this reality.
Comments
Post a Comment