Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect

Written by Matthew D. Lieberman

Narrated by Mike Chamberlain

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Nov 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9781452687704

Reviews for Social

[Michael · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Eye opening read on how our social nature shapes us. There are quite a lot of surprises and unintuitive findings that the author proposes. Well worth the read.

[Kamlesh Bonomaully · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It changed my way of thinking when interacting with people.

[zoomball · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Fascinating. I've read a fair amount of popular press non-fiction that synthesizes contemporary neuroscience research. This book introduces a line of research that I was not familiar with that I found absolutely fascinating. I listened to the audio version (from the library) so I can't go back to the text to cite things here, but I just may buy the book to hand it to friends to read - those who would be put off by the neuroscience. I believe there is a chapter entitled something like inverting Maslow's Hierarchy - and to me this sums up my "take-away" from the book. The research paths of multiple scientists are well detailed but yet very readable for those without a background in neuroanatomy. Retired now, I have some background in cognitive development, social psychology, and neuroscience. Lieberman's treatise presented me with a whole new way of thinking about human behavior. Near the end he presented suggestions about how this line of scientific inquiry might be harnessed to improve our educational system. When this started I wanted to groan. Not what I was reading this book for. But his thoughtful ideas really made sense. Highly recommended.

[msbaba · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

“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. Now I’ve discovered neurology. Putting the two together has been thrilling. Lieberman’s book provided a fresh social focus on neurology. He also provides a wealth of new information and discoveries—particularly information about the results of recent experiments undertaken by his UCLA Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory.

In this book, I learned that our brains’ have a default network that comes on like a reflex whenever we’re not concentrating on doing something else. That default network is all about connecting with others socially. It is an evolved predisposition. It is the brain’s preferred state of being. “Most of us have been taught that our bigger brains evolved to enable us to do abstract reasoning, which promoted agriculture, mathematics, and engineering as complex tools to solve the basic problems of survival, But increasing evidence suggests that one of the primary drivers behind our brains becoming enlarged was to facilitate our social cognitive skills—our ability to interact and get along well with others.”

I was amazed to learn that social pain (e.g., from rejection) comes from the same part of the brain as physical pain and incredibly, it, too, can benefit from over-the-counter pain medications!

Another concept that surprised me was about how the importance of being treated fairly is wired into our social brains. When we experience fair treatment, it activates the exact same brain pleasure circuits as those that light up when we eat something delicious. So being treated fairly is in some ways like eating chocolate!

I was astonished to learn that self-control center of our brain is like a muscle; use it too much and it becomes fatigued and needs time to recover. The author convinced me that brain’s mechanism for self-control benefits society more than it benefits the individual…that “self-control is the price of admission to society.” We may “think that people are built to maximize their own pleasure and minimize their own pain. In reality, we are actually built to overcome our own pleasure and increase our own pain in the service of following society’s norms.”

It is concepts like these (and many more) that kept me riveted to this book.

In the last section of the book, the author steps away from informing us about the detailed neuroscience of how our brains are profoundly social and gives us some of his own best ideas about how we might use this information to better society. He sticks his neck out on the line here, but he’s got some interesting ideas and I applaud him for starting the discussion.

Overall, “Social” was a delightful cerebral treat. I feel indebted to the author for taking the time and energy to explain these intriguing concepts in such a compelling and comprehensible fashion.

I recommend this book highly. In my estimation, you couldn’t have a better guide to understanding the social brain than this very accessible and appealing book.

[debnance_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Have you ever read a book about something you were deeply interested in and finished it and thought you somehow now knew less about something than when you first started the book?

That’s how I feel after finishing this book.

I usually read a nonfiction book and take notes as I read. I tried to do that with this book, but found that when I got to the end of the book I hadn’t written a single thing down.

I’m not sure that I really understood anything in the book.

(I reveal these things with honesty and some trepidation. I want to assure you that I’m a fairly astute reader of all-things-psychological; my master’s degree is in psychology. Nevertheless, this book was over my head.)