Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect [Kindle Edition] Author: Matthew D. Lieberman | Language: English | ISBN:
B00CCPII14 | Format: PDF, EPUB
Download Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect
Direct download links available Download Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect [Kindle Edition] from with Mediafire Link Download Link We are profoundly social creatures – more than we know.
In Social, renowned psychologist Matthew Lieberman explores groundbreaking research in social neuroscience revealing that our need to connect with other people is even more fundamental, more basic, than our need for food or shelter. Because of this, our brain uses its spare time to learn about the social world – other people and our relation to them. It is believed that we must commit 10,000 hours to master a skill. According to Lieberman, each of us has spent 10,000 hours learning to make sense of people and groups by the time we are ten.
Social argues that our need to reach out to and connect with others is a primary driver behind our behavior. We believe that pain and pleasure alone guide our actions. Yet, new research using fMRI – including a great deal of original research conducted by Lieberman and his UCLA lab -- shows that our brains react to social pain and pleasure in much the same way as they do to physical pain and pleasure. Fortunately, the brain has evolved sophisticated mechanisms for securing our place in the social world. We have a unique ability to read other people’s minds, to figure out their hopes, fears, and motivations, allowing us to effectively coordinate our lives with one another. And our most private sense of who we are is intimately linked to the important people and groups in our lives. This wiring often leads us to restrain our selfish impulses for the greater good. These mechanisms lead to behavior that might seem irrational, but is really just the result of our deep social wiring and necessary for our success as a species.
Based on the latest cutting edge research, the findings in Social have important real-world implications. Our schools and businesses, for example, attempt to minimalize social distractions. But this is exactly the wrong thing to do to encourage engagement and learning, and literally shuts down the social brain, leaving powerful neuro-cognitive resources untapped. The insights revealed in this pioneering book suggest ways to improve learning in schools, make the workplace more productive, and improve our overall well-being. Direct download links available for Download Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect [Kindle Edition]
- File Size: 1700 KB
- Print Length: 384 pages
- Publisher: Crown (October 8, 2013)
- Sold by: Random House LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00CCPII14
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
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- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #48,060 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Psychology & Counseling > Social Psychology & Interactions
- #37
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Psychology & Counseling > Neuropsychology - #39
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Medical eBooks > Internal Medicine > Neurology > Neuroscience - #48
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Psychology & Counseling > Social Psychology & Interactions
"Social: Why Our Brains are Wired to Connect," by Matthew Lieberman, is an outstanding and fascinating layperson's guide to the new field of social cognitive neuroscience--an interdisciplinary field that "uses the tools of neuroscience to study the mental mechanisms that create, frame, regulate, and respond to our experience of the social world." In the process of investigating these mechanisms, this science advances our knowledge of the evolutionary path that continue to mold our social brain. The book seeks to answer: why are we wired to connect socially; what advantages did our species gain by evolving along this evolutionary path; how can we use this knowledge to improve society?
This is the perhaps the fifth layperson's guide to neuroscience that I've read in the past few years. Not all have been easy or pleasurable to read. Much of neurology seems inherently difficult, but it doesn't have to be. It the right hands it can be accessible and mesmerizing. In my estimation, this book compares very well to last year's bestselling neuroscience book by V. S. Ramachandran entitled, "The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human." If you are not familiar with Ramachandran, saying this is high praise for Lieberman and this book. After all, Ramachandran is considered one of the leading lights of the academic neuroscience community. He is also a profoundly gifted writer. Lieberman is not far behind; like Ramachandran, he shows an extraordinary ability to convey difficult concepts clearly and personably.
I've always loved psychology. Over my lifetime, I've read at least a master's degree equivalent of academic psychology books.
Let me say up front that I enjoyed this book, but I had some issues with it. Let me say what I did *not* like first, and then what I did.
The title ends "Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect," leading the reader to expect this book to be largely about evolutionary psychology -- explaining *why* the brain does what it does requires investigating the adaptive value of brain features over the history of humans and beyond. That is absolutely *not* what this book is about. Just striking the word "Why" from the title would make it much more appropriate to the book's actual content.
In fact, there were places where I thought the author *should* have dived into the evolutionary mechanics but did not. For example, in the discussion about altruism there was nothing about the fact that altruism is perfectly explained when you stop focusing on individuals as the unit of selection and correctly focus on the genes themselves. No mention of Tit-for-Tat and related strategies, ESSes, or anything of the sort. In fact the author seemed to imply that explanations from other quarters got it wrong, and the book was setting the record straight. Hmmm. In another section the author talked about our social wiring as though it had evolved for the good of the species, but again, evolution operates primarily at the level of genes, not species. A gene or gene combination that makes an organism more successful at reproducing will increase in frequency in a population, that's all -- evolution is not a mystic hand trying to make a better species. A for-the-good-of-the-species argument is not a good one.
The margins of my copy of the book are filled with notes, many of which are objections to conclusions drawn or the way something was presented.
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