Transcript

The Social Brain | Frank Van Overwalle | TEDxLeuvenSalon

URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbQBR1NFynA
Video ID: kbQBR1NFynA
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foreign good evening social intelligence what is it it's very important for humans because without those social intelligence we cannot Converse we cannot understand each other and perhaps one of the most important capacities is reading each other Minds understanding other people's thoughts intentions preferences characteristics and so on now you might think I'm a social psychologist I'm an expert in this that's false you are all experts in this because we are humans and this is an almost unique human capacity we're all very good at it but you might wonder where does it come from is this some mysterious sixth sense no it isn't it's the social brain that is doing this and to understand this we have to go to the prehistoric part past evolutionary past of humans and then look at their predecessors and so on and you will see that some species apes and Sun begun to live together and collaborate together and this brought of course a number of important advantages such as larger praise defending yourself became easier the vision of Labor and so on and so on but this also came at a costs you need a lot of computational power because sometimes people might have differences of opinions how what the best strategy is in preferences and you have to resolve all these social conflicts needs a lot of effort as you are probably aware when people don't have the same meaning and opinion so you needed a lot of value and this is termed to social brain hypothesis and there is some evidence for it because if you look at this picture you see on the vertical axis group size or the number of members in a group and on the horizontal axis brain ratio or the volume of the brain compared to the body and as you can see over time there is a close relationship with the number between the number of members in a group and the volume of your brain but now we don't know exactly what happened in the past but we do know a lot more about a social brain because of the evolution the last 25 years in neural Imaging so we learned a lot about the social brain and what are the key areas to demonstrate this imagine this is an X and I do like this poof I cut my social brain in half that's the front part yeah I have a problem I have to put my brain together again so I need to bowl it here somewhere at the ears and this is also an important key mentalizing social brain area these are two of the most important brain areas involved in reading the mind of others so as an overview you have the front and there the function is who is that person in the middle on the sides where is this person going to what's the intention and at the bottom in the back the cellar of the brain it's about to order what is the order of the action and I will I will go through these functions one by one and for doing this I need you because you are my guinea pigs for tonight and you will experience what is going on in people's mind and then I will show you where in your brain exactly computations took place right are you ready so the first one is easy social knowledge for this look here the front of your brain look at the pictures now and tell me or you don't have to tell me but at least try to figure out what this is about what person characteristic trait characteristic is this about most of you probably thought about violence aggression anger and so on right okay something happened in your brain that was able to identify this okay next one now it's about a person try to figure out who that person is when I was younger I know waiting two years took a lot of my gray ears hairs so what happens is when you were doing this by repeating that information about aggression by repeating the information of about an individual we cannot identify the brain areas that are representing that information where the knowledge resides and that's in the front and as you can see the areas that are involved in traits information or person information and a large overlap in Orange which makes sense because when you think about for example loved ones your mother your father your best friend you immediately think also in terms of their trade characteristics what kinds of person are they friendly and so on and so on so that's the major first function of the social brain building knowledge about people now the second also very important capacity function is to switching to social perspective switching away from your own perspective to the perspective of others and to explain this we go back in the evolutionary past and we look at the very close area very close by to this area an area that's involved in detecting biological movement why is this so important imagine a prehistoric human that doesn't hesitate have this capacity a stone is rolling from a hill what you do you step aside there is The Rock no harm done a line is running up to you you follow the same strategy I don't think that brain will survive for a long time so you need to make a distinction between biological movements and no movements biological movements and in addition to infer where is that lion going to is he chasing chasing me somebody else oof I'm out of danger or I have to go somewhere else and react accordingly uh free for get out of danger and so on and so on so figuring out where this other person is going to and whether he's a friend or an enemy is very important and that's what this is doing but inferring intentions of other people is a relatively simple inference a more difficult one is when your reality differs from that of other people we call this false beliefs or outdated beliefs other people people believe something that has that comes from the past but that has changed since for example in this task Sally has a red ball and she puts it in her basket then she goes away ah naughty and he sees this and she says that's the occasion to pick it out from the basket in my own box Upon returning where will Sally look for the red ball now children before the age of three years old three four years old most often say the Box because that's what they saw lost last and I think perhaps some of you thought the same but think carefully actually Sally only knows that the ball was in her basket and that's the correct answer right now to illustrate this again another quiz now you have to raise your left hand when it's left and you rattle with your right hands when it's right okay so left lifts right rattle on your own body the body part of your neighbor whatever you want to do don't hurt yourself okay I walked through the first one to get it with you we have a boy and only answer when you see the question mark right you can answer now all right the majority is correct it's right he could see everything that happens now it becomes more difficult yeah [Music] um the rattling is not entirely correct watch out it's not that easy it's as I said it's a difficult task I will make it even more difficult now you have two kids the boy and the girl and the question mark will appear next to the boy or next to the girl and you have to tell me what the boy or the girl thinks right foreign you got it will make it more difficult now most of you got it and the last one okay you got it so this illustrates understanding false beliefs and especially those beliefs that differ from yours are very difficult the most difficult things to do and doing this experiment under the scanner in our lab we found out and when the two kids were present and so I had true beliefs that coincided with our beliefs then nothing really happened here not much when there was one false belief it increased a little bit in the activation and when there were two false beliefs so the two kids didn't know what really happened it increased much more so this brain area is really involved in switching attention from the way you see reality to understanding how other people see reality now you have to understand that's a major achievement in intelligence because instead of thinking about reality tools you use you have to think about things that don't exist anymore that existed perhaps in the past in somebody yet somebody's had still but you can't see them so we have to imagine the non-existing things that should that's a major step forward in human intelligence and secondly you have to make conscious explicit what you are thinking about you have to think through what other people believe and even when you make a conversation people have to express what's inside their heads and make it conscious to themselves and to the other listener what they are thinking about so that's a major achievement in human intelligence and especially in Social intelligence now let's go to the last function storing social stories or social sequences social stories are important as I said because they it's about the sequences in which we act socially in which we interact and there's a lot of routine involved in social interaction as I told you if you enter the door for other people first it's much more friendly than when you enter the room yourself first if you attack a person first or when you simply react in self-defense it makes a lot of difference now these social routines are also important because they free your brain your social brain for doing importing and resolving important social questions so this area is in the back of the brain it's almost at a seller and this brain area is known for being involved in motion stepping learning to step to walk to drive a car to ride a bike even to ride and so on but we discovered to you in the last five years in our lab that actually the back part of this is also involved in the order of social actions and it's very important as I told you now important is that this kind this large Brain has 16 billion neurons and this is takes part in the smaller brain the little brain or the cerebellum and you might not have guessed it but now you probably guess it it has much more neurons available for Learning and automatize all these things and you will never forget this number because it's a very sexy number all right now how did we discover this well we took the same uh task two kids looking at flowers they see on the screen but sometimes they are turned away from the flowers and they don't see the flowers anymore so they hold false beliefs outdated beliefs about these flowers and then I walk you through this task because in actuality they had to do this as fast as possible so we will do this slowly he sees one he still thinks one she sees two still two for her and he still sings One and this goes on and on and on what people don't know is that actually after about 20 trials we continue and we repeat this sequence so the different order of flowers number of flowers the position of the boy and the girl and then we repeat it all and what we see happening is that after each repetition they go faster and faster and faster they learn about this order without knowing this and when we change the order all of a sudden they take a lot of time and they tell us yeah all of a sudden it became difficult and then when reinstate the task and the order then it becomes easy for them again that's how we know that they learn this sequence and when under the scanner we learn that the back of their brain the little brain is involved in learning these sequences but they do this without consciousness they learn how to automatize these sequences and so they free up the other parts of the social brain to focus on really unexpected events when they occur so to summarize we have in the front where we store knowledge about who people are in the middle we switch our orientation to that reality of other people that might be different from us that is false in our view and finally at the back of the brain we learn about sequences and routines of social actions that free up our social mind for really important issues that are unexpected and I was all and thank you for your attention and collaboration at the quizzes [Applause]