ABSTRACT
When I started in psychology some 20 years ago, there was almost no hint of social neuroscience. Cognitive neuroscience was alive and well, so this was not a reflection of a lack of activity in the wider field. Rather, it reflects that studies of the brain were for the most part nonsocial. We had, for example, Blakemore’s and Weiskrantz’s classic studies of the visual system in kittens, monkeys, and humans to tell us which (nonsocial) features of the environment were perceived and how. We had Luria’s and Shallice’s classic studies of the (nonsocial) control of action to reveal not just a “central executive” for planning in the brain, but a syndrome of executive dysfunction. We had a wealth of other studies investigating conditions such as amnesia and agnosia to tell us how memory and knowledge of information in general worked in the brain. Even Wernicke’s and Broca’s classic studies of the language system in brain-damaged patients focused for the most part on the production and comprehension of words in general by the normal brain. But such aphasias were lexical or syntactic or semantic, and ignored the social aspects of communication: pragmatics.
