ABSTRACT
Introduction to social neuroscience Imagine two participants lying in different rooms, each with their heads placed in a very large magnetic field. Crucially, the two participants are interacting with each other in order to win money and this interaction requires trust. By trusting money to the other person they stand a greater chance of getting more money returned to them in the future, but they also run the risk of exploitation. As their brains engage in the decision to trust or not to trust, there are subtle changes in blood flow corresponding to these different decisions that can be detected. The fact that different patterns of thought should result in different patterns of brain activity is perhaps not surprising. The fact that we now have methods that can attempt to measure this is certainly noteworthy. What is most interesting about studies such as these is the fact that activity in regions of one person’s brain can reliably elicit activity in other regions of another person’s brain during this social interaction. For instance, in a trusting relationship, when one person makes a decision the other person’s brain ‘lights up’ their reward pathways, even before any reward is actually obtained – as illustrated in Figure 1.1 (King-Casas et al., 2005). Cognition in an individual brain is characterized by a network of flowing signals between different regions of the brain. However, social
Figure 1.1 The technique of hyperscanning records from two or more different brains simultaneously (such as MRI scanners): for example, whilst participants in the scanners engage in a social activity (Montague et al., 2002). The details of this particular study, involving a game of trust, are not important here (they are covered in Chapter 7) and hyperscanning is a relatively rare methodology. What is of interest is that neural activity in different regions correlates not only within the same brain (due to physical connections; depicted in red) but also across brains (due to mutual understanding; depicted in blue and green). From King-Casas et al. (2005). Copyright © 2005 American Association for the Advancement of Science. Reproduced with permission.
