of primates become so large?
What Is The Brain?
Today, asking what is the brain? seems almost laughable. We read or hear about the brain nearly every time we turn around, including on television, in newspaper articles, and across a wide variety of online sites. Almost everyone “knows” that the brain is the seat of thinking. However, what the brain is and what it does has not always been so clear. In fact, beginning with the ancient Greeks, through the Enlightenment and well into the 20th century, there was considerable confusion about the location of thinking in the body and even about the nature of thinking itself. For example, Plato accurately believed that reason resides in the brain but incorrectly believed that mental processes are unaffected by bodily ones (Hunt, 2007). The perspective that the mind operates independently of the body and is not constrained by it is called dualism, a term that suggests that the mind and body are two distinct things. Plato’s pupil Aristotle contradicted him, claiming (inaccurately) that the heart hosted the mind. To Aristotle’s credit, however, he proposed that mind and body were intimately interconnected. Understanding the exact nature of the relationship between the two has proven to be quite challenging, and it is commonly referred to as the mind/body problem (A. R. Damasio, 2010; Dennett & Weiner, 1991; Hergenhahn & Henley, 2014; Hunt, 2007).
Let’s fast forward to the 17th century and another of the most influential philosophers in the Western tradition, the Frenchman René Descartes. Descartes sided with Plato and famously argued that the mind is indeed separate from the body. According to Descartes, the mind is made up of “nonphysical” stuff—what he called animal spirits—and, despite its attachment to the body, it is fundamentally independent of it (Descartes, 1641/1960). He proposed that the mind had no need of the physical body and was unaffected by the fact that it was trapped within it. Descartes further argued that he could understand the workings of this disembodied mind—literally, the mind separated from the body—simply through introspection or looking inward (introspection is discussed in more detail in Chapter 4). It is difficult to overestimate the enormous influence of Cartesian dualism on Western culture: Much of contemporary philosophy and psychology as well as conventional Western approaches to medicine continue to be haunted by Descartes’ ghost (Churchland, 1988; A. R. Damasio, 2010).
For the past several decades, Cartesian dualism has been under fire from psychologists, neuroscientists, and others who have proposed that the mind can only be understood with reference to the fact that it resides within a body (Keefer, Landau, Sullivan, & Rothschild, 2014; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). This means that reasoning and other mental processes arise from and/or are influenced by the sensory experiences of the body (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991). In other words, what we think about and how we think about it are affected by our physical location and the physiological limitations of our bodies (Cacioppo & Berntson, 2005; Rotella & Richeson, 2013). For example, humans cannot avoid categorizing everything that we experience, and the categories that we use—such as girl, poodle, or iPhone—come from our experience of the world (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999).
A classic study by Wells and Petty (1980) found that U.S. participants were more likely to agree with a persuasive message if they nodded their heads—a physical movement that generally means yes—than if they shook their heads—a gesture that generally means no. Thinking must have been influenced by what the body was doing; otherwise, agreement would have been the same in both conditions. Do you find this to be strange? Surely one would expect that whether or not an advertisement or other persuasive message is convincing would have nothing to do with what our body was doing when we heard it. But let me give you two more examples.
In another study, participants were asked to list as many possible alternate uses for everyday things, like tires or buttons, a task intended to assess creative thinking (Oppezzo & Schwartz, 2014). They completed this task twice, the first time when either sitting or walking, and the second also when sitting or walking. As you can see in Figure 2.1, those who generated ideas while walking were much more creative than those who sat. So, the next time you struggle to come up with a new idea for a paper or project, try taking a walk!
Finally, would you believe that you may be more likely to seek the company of a socially warm friend when you are physically feeling cold versus when you are feeling warm? Researchers in Zhang and Risen’s (2014) study randomly approached students who were outdoors in fairly cold weather (less than 44°F) or indoors in a heated building (72°F). While either cold or warm, participants reported how much they were interested in experiencing 10 different activities. Some of activities were socially warm ones, such as visiting their parents or having dinner with their “loved one,” whereas others were positive but not warm, such as having their plane arrive early on a flight or getting a great haircut. The cold participants were significantly more likely to prefer the socially warm activities than the positive but socially neutral ones.
Clearly, mental processes do not take place in a vacuum-like state that is isolated or disconnected from the body or the environment. These and other studies convincingly demonstrate the embodied nature of cognition: Where you are and how you feel influence how you think and what you think about (Adam, Obodaru, & Galinsky, 2015; Beilock, 2015; Keefer et al., 2014).
Thinking—as we will see later in this book—is also linked to and influenced by our motivation and our emotional states (A. R. Damasio, 1994). Psychologists recognize that cognition that appears to be objective, rational, or culturally universal is vulnerable to many biases and shortcomings, some of which will be discussed in later chapters. The hindsight bias discussed in Chapter 1 is but one example of this. Moreover, as we’ll see in Chapter 4, introspection does not provide us with the accurate insight into our mental processes that Descartes believed it did, in part because much of our thinking occurs at a nonconscious level that our conscious mind cannot access.
Social psychology has made a critical contribution to this reorientation toward embodied cognition: Not only must we take into account the physiological foundation of mental processes, but we need to further consider both their social context and content (Semin & Echterhoff, 2011).
Figure 2.1 Embodied Cognition: To Think Better, Take a Walk!
Source: Study 3 in Oppezzo, M., & Schwartz, D. L. (2014). Give your ideas some legs: The positive effect of walking on creative thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40, 1142–1152.
As I discuss in Chapter 3, social cognition is not a subset of nonsocial cognition but is fundamentally different from it. Briefly, how we think about people diverges in important ways from how we think about objects, although of course their reliance on common brain structures and processes ensures that there is also much overlap (Cacioppo & Berntson, 2005; Mitchell, Heatherton, & Macrae, 2002). Lieberman (2010, 2013; Spunt, Meyer, & Lieberman, 2015) puts forth the somewhat radical argument that social thinking is the default state of our mental processing, which is to say that our mind naturally focuses on people whenever it is at rest. For instance, if you take a break from madly typing your social psychology paper, the chances are you will begin thinking about people or people-related things. In a sense, social thinking is more fundamental than nonsocial thinking (Spunt et al., 2015).
So what does all of this have to do with social neuroscience? Let me address that question by defining our topic. The term social neuroscience was proposed by Cacioppo and Bernston (1992) in a paper describing the importance of studying the brain in order to more fully understand social behavior.
