How Your Lizard Brain Helps You Read The Minds Of Other People
Many of us rely on intuition to “read a room” and gauge how well social interactions go, like when we give presentations at work or have tense conversations with friends.
Now, researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Minnesota have uncovered a groundbreaking connection between brain regions involved in understanding others’ thoughts and feelings and emotional processing centers.
Using ultra-high-resolution brain imaging in a new study, the team mapped a complex network that ties social intelligence to some of the most ancient structures in the brain, such as the amygdala.
The researchers determined that brain regions responsible for understanding the mental states of others are directly connected to parts of the amygdala. This structure deep in our brains is sometimes referred to as our “lizard brain” and processes emotions.
This connection sheds light on how we combine emotional information with advanced social reasoning. In other words, how humans are able to handle intricate social interactions with an impressive level of finesse.
Rodrigo Braga, the study’s senior author, pointed out that many people reflect on others’ feelings and thoughts following social situations, trying to determine what they are thinking or feeling.
“The parts of the brain that allow us to do this are in regions of the human brain that have expanded recently in our evolution, and that implies that it’s a recently developed process,” he explained.
“In essence, you’re putting yourself in someone else’s mind and making inferences about what that person is thinking when you cannot really know.”
The study included only six participants, but they all underwent multiple brain-scanning sessions. The extensive scanning allowed the team to collect thousands of data points for further examination.
Sign up for Chip Chick’s newsletter and get stories like this delivered to your inbox.
They identified previously unknown areas within the amygdala as part of the brain’s social network. The regions become especially active when we try to interpret the thoughts and feelings of others. In psychology, this skill is regarded as the “theory of mind.”
The study revealed that these social brain regions are linked to the basolateral complex and the medial nucleus, two distinct parts of the amygdala.
The former processes emotional information from our senses, and the latter plays a role in emotional learning and social behaviors.
According to Donnisa Edmons, a co-author of the study, the team also uncovered network regions that were previously unable to be seen, which represents a major milestone.
“These regions had been overlooked in past research, but the exceptional resolution of our data allowed us to reveal them,” Edmons detailed.
Finally, the research showed that these social brain networks are strikingly similar across individuals, indicating they are a core part of how the human brain is structured.
This finding was confirmed among a small group of participants that were closely studied, as well as a larger, separate dataset of over 4,000 people.
The study’s results could impact how depression and anxiety are treated. Both of these conditions involve amygdala hyperactivity, but current treatments that target the structure are surgically invasive, given its deep location in the brain.
“Through this knowledge that the amygdala is connected to other brain regions, potentially some that are closer to the skull, which is an easier region to target, that means people who do TMS could target the amygdala instead by targeting these other regions,” Edmons concluded.
TMS, or transcranial magnetic stimulation, is a procedure that utilizes magnetic fields to stimulate nerve cells in the brain and improve major depression symptoms, according to the Mayo Clinic.
To read the study’s complete findings, which have since been published in Science Advances, visit the link here.
More About:Science