Lewis, the famous writer, he said, you know, friendship has no survival value, but it gives value to survival. While friendship in human society has a lot of cultural aspects to it, and it’s not entirely cultural and that’s the way people imagined it for a long time. You need to know what it is you’re trying to measure in order to sort of make a statement about it. It’s hard to define-and science is all about measurement and definition. But why is it that a conversation with a good friend sort of gets inside your body and changes the way your body works? I mean it literally affects your blood pressure, your sleep, your stress responses, your immune system, all of those things.įriendship for a long time was not studied seriously by biologists, anyway, because it’s very hard to measure. The newest part of the science is the biology, this question of how is it that a social relationship, which is not like food that you actually put in your body or exercise where you’re moving your muscles and you can understand why going for a run might affect your blood pressure. Heffner: You are giving rebirth to this science in the book and you’re acknowledging that friendship revitalizes us.ĭenworth: Right. It was that kind of confluence of my personal life and the work I was already doing. That’s one of the big topics that social neuroscience gets into-that’s really how I came to it. It made me think about the ways that people in our lives affect us, even our biology, the way they make your pulse pound and your adrenaline spike.īut then I also thought about here I am losing my parents and my kids are growing up and out: I better make sure I’ve got my friends. So I was very buffeted day in day out by other people’s emotions and ups and downs.
I was right at that moment sort of wedged in between a parent with Alzheimer’s disease and teenagers. I sat there at this meeting listening to them talking about all these elements of social behavior and what it does in the brain. I went to a meeting about social neuroscience, which is a sort of newer field within neuroscience, that is about mapping connections in and outside of the brain, this kind of web of connections that we have with other people. What neuroscience is mainly interested in these days is mapping connections in the brain and inside the brain. As a science writer I mostly cover the brain. The Open Mind explores the world of ideas across politics, media, science, technology, and the arts. The American Prospect is republishing this excerpt.Īlexander Heffner: We need more friends in our lives today in this digital environment. Lifelong friends catch up with each other while eating at Outback Steakhouse in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, January 2020.
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