Lecture 1: Evolution of the social brain

• The first Homo Sapiens appeared about 200,000 years ago.
• Homo sapiens, or wise humans, are humans with big brains.
• Groups of humans slowly get bigger as they need to spend about 20% of their time grooming or preening.
• The release of oxytocin, the bonding or “love” hormone, is a key part of human social interaction.
• Sociology is the study of human beings as social creatures.
• Global Environmental “crisis”
• Sociology is a science of studying human behaviour and beliefs that is premised on the assumption that interaction between human-beings impacts these behaviours and beliefs.
• Sociologists study major areas like Individual cognitive development, Culture, Politics, Economics.
• There is unlikely a genetic cause for even mother/daughter bonds, which arise through touch and communication.
• The most thorough sociology combines the study of these major areas.
• Some Homo Sapiens began to talk 130,000 years ago, while some did not have language.
• Homo Sapiens used simple, descriptive language, not abstract thought.
• The most important part of the environment for Homo Sapiens became other humans, leading to the need for more efficient “preening” or “grooming” which is a form of communication.
• Communication and Sociality are now our Primary Inherited Needs, as even well-nourished human babies die without social interaction.
• Neurons die if they can’t communicate with other neurons, as explained by Franks in Neurosociology.
• Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs was edited to include the need for communication after 50,000 years ago, when the brain changes its wiring to better process complicated social information.
• Cultural aspects of human society, such as music, theoretical/abstract thought, man-made beads used as currency, identity, social roles & rules, symbolic cave-art, thinking beyond the present, and God/Afterlife, appeared around 50,000 years ago.
• Communicated ideas became so powerful, we would die or at least suffer great harm for them, such as in the Soccer War Honduras/El Salvador 1969 or the Vikings and fish.
• As complex societies emerged, the brain became smaller because people did not have to be as smart to stay alive, as explained by Geary.
• Specialized knowledge and written language, the earliest known being Sumerian (Iraq) about 5000 years ago, are key aspects of human society.
• The human brain is socially produced, and all experience is perceived inside the human brain, but the rules of this perception are absorbed from the outside.
• Multitasking increases the production of the stress hormone cortisol and the fight-or-flight hormone adrenaline, which can overstimulate the brain and cause mental fog or scrambled thinking.
• Empathy is a biological trait we share with all social creatures, and mirror neurons help us to achieve altruism by helping us to actually feel sensations that other people feel.
• Use your sociological imagination to become aware of the social causes for things, and for the social solutions (C Wright Mills).
• The human brain helps socially produce the other individuals in its society, and intersubjectivity is a key aspect of the social human brain.
• Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation.
• The sense of equality and morality and fairness are also biological traits we share with all social creatures.
• The prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, meaning its attention can be easily hijacked by something new – the proverbial shiny objects we use to entice infants, puppies, and kittens.
• Key questions for using your sociological imagination are: Who wins/loses in this social arrangement? and What imagined social concepts are creating/defining this situation?
• The biggest question of our time is whether the social human brain has evolved enough to solve all of the problems it has created.
• If students study and watch TV at the same time, or check email while in lecture, the information from their schoolwork goes into the striatum, a region specialised for storing new procedures and skills, not facts and ideas.
• Without the distraction of TV, the information goes into the hippocampus, where it is organised and categorised in a variety of ways, making it easier to retrieve.
• Learning information while multitasking causes the new information to go to the wrong part of the brain.
• Emotion is not rational, and neural conduits for transmitting emotional information are much faster than those that think rationally.
• From 1500 cubic centimetres to below 1400cc, the size of the human brain has shrunk over the past 20,000 years.
• Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at MIT and one of the world experts on divided attention, says that our brains are “not wired to multitask well… When people think they’re multitasking, they’re actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly.