Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect by Matthew D. Lieberman

Author:Matthew D. Lieberman [Lieberman, Matthew D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Psychology, Social Psychology, Science, Life Sciences, Neuroscience, Neuropsychology
ISBN: 9780307889119
Google: P2nqwjWtJzQC
Amazon: 0307889092
Publisher: Broadway Books
Published: 2013-10-07T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

Panoptic Self-Control

I am a psychologist, whether I’m on the clock or not. Psychology is the filter through which I see life, read books, and watch reality television. It may come as little surprise then that I occasionally examine my son’s social brain development a bit more explicitly than most other people do. I haven’t put him in an fMRI scanner or attached EEG electrodes to his scalp (yet!), but I do pay attention to various milestones commonly associated with the maturing of the social brain. Babies have been shown to imitate their parents almost from the moment of birth, but our son, Ian, didn’t imitate for the better part of his first year. On the other hand, babies typically pass the mirror self-recognition test at around two years, whereas Ian was obsessed with his own reflection by the six-month mark. When Ian was two and a half, he passed a Batman–Iron Man variant of the Sally-Anne false belief task, but we failed to replicate that Theory of Mind result in several additional tests. My favorite study of Ian’s social brain development was definitely the Popsicle test.

We live an hour away from Disneyland in Southern California, so Ian was a veteran at a very young age. When he was two, we took him to Disney, and despite being the first ones into the park at 8 a.m., we could barely drag him out of the park at 11 p.m. Not only was that day clearly the best of his 800 days of life up to that point, but I would be willing to wager that it had the greatest volume of sheer joy he will experience in a single day for the rest of his life. When Disneyland came up with their tagline that it’s “the happiest place on earth,” they clearly had Ian in mind.

A month before Ian turned three, we asked him whether he would rather have a birthday party or go to Disneyland for two days. It took him all of two nanoseconds to answer. The night before his birthday, he was excited to go, and it was obvious that there was nothing he wanted more than to get to Disneyland the next day … or so I thought. Thus began the Popsicle test. He had just finished dinner when he asked for a Popsicle for dessert. Naomi got the Popsicle out of the freezer, unwrapped it, and was about to hand it to him before I stopped her.

“Ian, where are we going tomorrow?” I asked

“Disneyland!!!!” he replied with intense excitement, arms waving in the air.

Ian stared intently at the Popsicle while I asked the next question: “Ian, if you could just have one of these two things, which would you rather have? Would you rather have this Popsicle right now or go to Disneyland tomorrow? If you could only have one of them, which would you choose?” We have video of this episode, and the first thing you can see after I ask this question is a moment of existential dread on Ian’s face.

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