Instant Genius - Why social connection is vital for our health and well-being

Episode Date: December 19, 2025

There’s little doubt that we humans are a deeply social species; in many ways, our interactions with others define the very essence of who we are. But in recent times, studies have shown that we’re connecting with one another less and less, to the point where some say we may now be facing a loneliness epidemic. So, why are social interactions so vital to our health and well-being, what actually happens in our brains and bodies when we form meaningful relationships, and what measures can we take to reverse this worrying trend? In this episode, we’re joined by Dr Ben Rein, a neuroscientist, science communicator and author based at Stanford University, to talk about his latest book, Why Brains Need Friends, The Neuroscience of Social Connection – and Why We All Need More. He tells us how feel-good chemicals are released in our brains when we interact with others, how we all lie on a spectrum of introversion and extroversion and that recognising our own personalities can help us all make the most of our social interactions, and how small acts such as complimenting a stranger or putting emojis at the end of a text message can help us all to boost our social capital. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bi-sized masterclass in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I am Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. There's little doubt that we humans are a deeply social species. In many ways, our interactions with others define the very essence of who we are. But in recent times, studies have shown that we're connecting with one another less and less.

To the point where some say we may now be facing a loneliness epidemic. So why are social interactions so vital to our health and well-being? What actually happens in our brains and bodies when we're going to be? form meaningful relationships and what measures can we take to reverse this worrying trend? In this episode, we're joined by Dr. Ben Raine, a neuroscientist, science communicator and author, based at Stanford University to talk about his latest book, Why Brains Need Friends, the neuroscience of social connection and why we all need more. He tells us how feel-good chemicals are released in our brains when we interact with others, how we all lie on a spectrum of

introversion and extroversion, and that recognizing our own personalities can help us all make the most out of our social interactions. And how small acts, such as complimenting a stranger, or putting emojis at the end of a text message, can help us all boost our social capital. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, thank you for having me. So today we're talking about your book, Why Brains Need Friends, the Neuroscience of Social Interaction, and why we all need more. So in the book, the main theme is social connection. So let's start off with a sort of overview, a bit of a too far.

So first off, what do you mean by social connection? And, you know, before we get into the meat and the details, why is it so important? So for context, I'm a neuroscientist. My research is on social behavior. It's always been on social behavior. My PhD was on the neurobiology of autism. My postdoc research was on empathy. and, you know, as I've gone through my career, I've developed, of course, a deep appreciation for

what's happening in the brain when we connect with others, what brain systems drive these complex interactions. And meanwhile, as I went through my academic training, I started to see that people became less and less connected. You know, I went through COVID during my PhD and saw that after we came out of COVID, we didn't really seem to be connecting the same way that we were prior. You know, and then a couple years ago in the U.S., the U.S., the U.S., the U. U.S. Surgeon General announced this epidemic of loneliness that people are far too lonely.

It's damaging their health. And, you know, that hit me on a really deep level where it wasn't, it wasn't just, you know, you see the statistics of being isolated is as bad for you as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Whoa, that's, you know, alarming. But what does that really mean, right? Like what's actually going on in our brains and bodies biologically when we are not connecting and when we are isolating. And that's where I felt that my knowledge kind of filled a gap that wasn't really being addressed in the public conversation about this. So I wrote this book for that purpose, really to give people a little bit more grip, you know, a stronger grapple on this topic. And to really understand on a Friday night when you're invited to dinner or drinks and you

decide last minute, yeah, I think I'd probably rather just lay here on the couch. I wonder if it's too late for me to bail when you're sitting in the middle of that decision that you can reflect and think, wait a minute, my brain, my biology, right? How is this decision going to impact me? Because we face those decisions all the time and we often make the choice that's not necessarily the healthiest. Yeah, so let's go way back to the origins of this then. So obviously, as you say there, we all need and sort of, well, most of us need and thrive on social connection. So is that due to the way that we've evolved. Can we say that? Yeah, that's my belief. I mean, I guess it's, you know, as one of those things that, like, you can never be sure because we don't have,

you know, records of this kind of thing. It's so, so long ago, millennia, hundreds of thousands, millions of years ago. But it makes perfect sense. Because if you think about it this way, humans are incredibly adept. We're incredibly good at working together in groups and surviving in groups, hunting in groups, defending ourselves in groups. Because if you just look at each other, You know, we have all these amazing, powerful social indicators on our bodies, right? We can, just by looking at someone's eyes, looking at their face, you can tell where they're looking, you can tell what emotion they're feeling, you can tell probably what they're thinking. And all of these skills, all of these tools, I should say, built into us make us really,

really good at working in groups. So because of that, you know, a long, long time ago, really before history was really even documented, humans very likely survived best in groups. And so our brains evolutionarily would be better off to tell us, stick together, be in groups because it's the best way for you to survive. And because of that, we actually have these social reward systems built into our brains. All social animals do. Where basically when we are socializing, when we're connecting, our brains produce and release,

neurotransmitters, brain chemicals, that are positive, that basically tell us this feels good. You should come back for more of this and make us feel good. And what's really interesting and what suggests that this is an evolutionary mechanism is that if you look at animals that are solitary, that prefer to live on their own, or actually, not prefer to live, but I should say that survive best on their own. And an example of this is like a tiger. Tigers are really good at hunting. You know, they're beasts.

There's no need for tigers to exist. in groups because they would be so effective at killing that they would all just have to share the prey. They're better off on their own. So in animals like tigers, in solitary animals, they actually have the opposite wiring of us humans where when they are around each other, they produce cortisol, they experience stress because their brains are telling them this is not good for survival. Whereas for us being around each other makes us feel good, makes us release neurotransmitters like oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin, these feel good. come back for more chemicals.

Yeah. So for those who don't know, you know, what function do these neurotransmitters play in our brains and our actions? Yeah. So oxytocin has been called like the love hormone and, you know, it's sort of like a social bonding chemical. And by the way, it's produced, you know, it's both produced in the brain and actually functions as a neurotransmitter in the brain.

By that, I mean brain cells use it to communicate and send messages between brain cells. but it's also produced and distributed throughout the body and the blood. What I'm talking about in this case is in the brain. In the brain, oxytocin, it basically functions like social glue. Because what it does is when you're experiencing a positive interaction and you're connecting with someone that you like or that your brain wants to strengthen the bond with, good example of this is early on in a romantic relationship, right? You're on the third or fourth date.

You really like each other. It's going great. You want to deepen that bond. I can guarantee you that in those moments when you're connecting, oxytocin is just pumping in your brain because it acts as that social glue. And the reason why it makes us feel more connected with each other is because oxytocin then triggers other things to happen in the brain,

two things specifically that matter. One, I already hinted at this, is the release of dopamine. Dopamine, you know, people think of dopamine as reward, pleasure. dopamine is really, its main function is reinforcement. It's to tell you this is good. Whatever you're experiencing right now is good. It's good for you. And you should come back and do this again.

It's reinforcing a behavior. So when you're in that third date and you get that dopamine because of the oxytocin, it's telling you, hey, this feels good. Come back for more. You can see where this one part of the social glue is happening. On the other side, the other thing that oxytocin does is it drives the release of serotonin. And there is this kind of hand wavy concept that like more serotonin is like better for mood. And you know, that comes from like the field of depression and SSRIs drugs that target serotonin.

They boost serotonin. They alleviate depression. I'm not sure that it's that simple that more serotonin equals more happiness. Serotonin does a lot of things. But there's definitely some sort of link between serotonin and mood. And so I think probably there's, it's likely that that increase in serotonin is responsible for making us feel good. in these interactions. But another layer to this, not to get overcomplicated, but dopamine and serotonin together, when they happen at the same time in the brain, which is a pretty rare thing, is a very

rare kind of concoction that's really, really powerful. Because if you look at drugs that stimulate this, like if we could ask, what drug would create the same effect as oxytocin in the brain, there's very few. And one of them, the one that comes to mind first, is MDMA, ecstasy. The fact that the brain activity that is triggered by oxytocin is very similar to the brain activity triggered by ecstasy tells you just how important social interaction is for us that our brains have these systems built in and explains some of that, wow, I feel really good after spending a night with this date, you know, or spending some time with your infant child, which all. also produces lots of oxytocin or your best friends, any social, powerful social connection. Having said that, like in the book, you talk about the spectrum of one side lies extreme introversion and the other side extreme extroversion. So some people can find socially interacting comes very easy to them, where others find it draining. You know, so what can we say about that? What's

going on there? Have it, you know, in the context of what you've just said? You know, it's pretty unclear what exact brain differences underlie, you know, the difference between an introvert and an extrovert. Behaviorally, it's very well defined. You know, we know that extroverts, they enjoy socializing. They get more energy from socializing. Introverts are quite the opposite. They don't get as much enjoyment from interacting. You know, they're much more likely to spend that Friday night on the couch because it's like, I don't really know about this. You know, if I had to hypothesize, I would guess that there is something to do with dopamine going on there, that extroverts may simply be people who experience a greater dopamine surge from interacting with others, which would

make sense because it would produce higher feelings of, you know, reward and excitement and energy and also a higher likelihood of coming back and interacting more. And there is some evidence that introverts and extroverts have some differences in some dopamine genes and some receptors. And so that's my working hypothesis that there's something going on there. Of course, the brain's very complicated, so it's probably more. But I do want to talk about, you know, aside from the neuroscience, which may be interesting to some people, what's definitely interesting to everyone is how do we use this information,

right? And what I found from digging into the research is that the key difference between introverts and extroverts is that introverts become exhausted. from a much lower dose of interacting. You know, they can go to, let's say an introvert and extrovert walk into a bar. The extrovert can hang out for five, six, seven hours and still be happy, still be comfortable,

still be enjoying themselves. Where that introvert, one hour in or 30 minutes in, depending on the person, everyone's different, that person starts to say, okay, I've had my surfing of interaction and I'm ready to go home and relax. And that's really what it comes down to is that extroverts have larger, social batteries that take longer to charge and actually deplete as well, that a battery charge depletes

faster. So they need more interaction. They need more frequent interaction. And the message that I really try to convey in the book is that, yes, interaction is good for us. We should be making it a priority. But that doesn't mean that every introvert should be pushing themselves to uncomfortable limits and socializing every single day just for the sake of their longevity. I don't think that's actually a good thing. I think what we should each be doing is finding what level, what amount of interaction is the best for us. It makes us feel satisfied without overdoing it and just try to kind of meet that need on a regular basis. So you just touched on there. What are some of the benefits that we can gain, the many benefits that we can gain from social interaction?

There's so many. It's amazing. I mean, on one side, it's kind of a two-sided coin because on one side, it's like interaction is good for us. On the other side, isolation is bad for us. And so I could just kind of, I could frame this in either way. I'll frame it in the context of what does isolation do for us? Why, or why is isolation bad for us? And there's studies, a ton of studies with lots of people in them showing that more isolated people are at higher risk of dementia. They're at higher risk of heart disease. They're at higher risk of anxiety and depression. there's even studies tracking people for a long time

and finding that those who are much more isolated are up to 50% more likely to die by any cause which is just startling and on top of that now looking at the other side you know what's good about interacting well obviously interacting reduces your likelihood of all those things I just mentioned because it's the opposite of isolation

but also people who interact more actually have larger brains and it's kind of a, it's one of those like handwavy, like stupid neuroscience fact where it's like, you're going to have a bigger brain. Like, who cares? That doesn't really matter. But in this context, it actually does because what I think is happening here is that people who are interacting more, they're exercising these neural circuits.

They're, you know, they're really engaging these brain systems. And the brain is a kind of a use it or a lose it organ. If you exercise it, it's like a muscle. It'll grow. It'll strengthen. You'll form new synapses. And I think that that may be underlying that extra brain matter, that why people who are socialized have bigger brains because they're actually just sustaining and growing all these

social brain areas. And the reason that matters is because as we age, our brains naturally shrink and thin. Unfortunately, it happens to everybody. Cannot escape this. But if you've built up more brain tissue throughout your life, this is this idea of cognitive reserve, that you have this reserve, this extra brain matter, that you can better tolerate the things. thinning and shrinking of your brain. And that may actually be why, I mentioned the first thing, isolated people are at higher risk of dementia. And by the way, isolated people with dementia, their memory declines twice as fast.

It may be because socialized people have built up this extra cognitive reserve that can sort of keep them sharp even as they are losing brain tissue. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton.

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Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. You mentioned earlier this idea of the loneliness epidemic. So is there a difference to be drawn between isolation and loneliness? There is. Isolation is the objective state of being alone. When we hang up this call and I'm sitting here in my office by myself, technically I will be isolated. However, I may not be lonely.

Loneliness is a state where you are detecting that your social needs are not being met. So they are different. You can be isolated without. being lonely. Like, for example, you come home from a, you know, like that that introvert comes home from five, six hours at the bar. They're isolated. They might sit at home alone for the next 24 hours. They are isolated, but they're not lonely because they, their social needs have been met. They're not thinking about connection. On the other hand, you can go to, let's say, a concert by yourself and you can be surrounded by thousands of people, but you are not engaging with the people around you,

and you can be lonely even when you're not isolated. And so what's interesting is that both of these things are not necessarily good for us. There's research showing that both are associated with negative health outcomes. And there's actually a slight distinction. So what's really important, though, is that if you're lonely, please, that is a sign from your brain to go seek connection. But also, loneliness is sort of elusive. We can experience loneliness without noticing that it's loneliness. And we can be isolated for a period and feel off, you know, feel stressed. feel like something's wrong, but not name it loneliness. You know, it's so easy to say, oh, maybe it's because I didn't get so much sleep last night

or work has been really stressful lately. But what I really hope people will start to do more is when they experience that. They can do a quick inventory. Wait a minute. How much interaction have I gotten lately? Oh, gosh, you know, I've been working. It's Thursday. I've been working from home all week.

I haven't seen anybody. Maybe I'm lonely. Maybe I should go see friends. That's what I hope people will do is start to consider their social diet is what I call it, the kind of interactions they've been getting lately, as a part of their kind of mental health regimen. So in the book, you write about the notion of empathy. So this is really fascinating. So, you know, what's going on inside our brains when we feel empathy? Why do we do it? And are some of us more empathetic than others, just naturally? I absolutely love talking about

empathy. I got to study this in my research done at Stanford. And it's just such a fascinating topic because it's one of those things that the more you learn about it, the more it blows your mind, and it feels like it can't be real science. It feels like sci-fi. You know, in empathy, well, at first empathy, to define it, is the process of either understanding what someone else is going through and what they're feeling or the process of actually sharing their emotions. You know, sometimes you step into someone's emotions.

You see someone you love crying and all of a sudden you find yourself tearing up. You see someone you love, you know, experiencing something amazing and they're smiling and they're giddy. and all of a sudden you find yourself smiling. Like, why are we taking on each other's emotions? Well, the research on the neuroscience of empathy suggests that actually, when we observe someone's emotions, which, by the way, we're really good at because of these facial expressions, like I said in the beginning, you know, we can read each other's eyes,

we can read each other's face, we can reach each other's vocal tone. We're really good at identifying emotions. And then our brains often will just naturally step into those emotions. Like, if you put someone in a brain scanner, while they're looking at someone, for instance, experiencing something painful, the observer will show a brain response similar to pain itself, which is incredible. The fact that we can just share someone's experience on a true neurobiological level. And I think the reason for why this exists, answer your one question in there, is because

it's evolutionarily advantageous, if we can look at someone and understand immediately, without a word spoken, what they're going through, it makes us so much better at surviving in groups. And I give an example of this in my book where I describe, you know, it's ancient times. You're walking through a jungle with your tribe. And all of a sudden, someone starts shrieking, falls to the ground, and is holding their foot. You know, probably. They just stepped on something, right? They just stepped on a sharp object, presumably. You know, you can see there's blood coming from their foot. Okay, they definitely stepped on something. Think about how advantageous it is to have empathy in that moment. Number one, you know this person needs help. You're immediately going

come to tend their wounds, which is supportive for the survival of your group. Number two, without anybody saying anything, everybody walking together is going to look down at the ground and check their footing. Make sure they don't step in something. Because we can understand someone just stepped on something dangerous. That's unbelievably powerful and effective for keeping us alive. And so it's a really, I mean, there's been debates. You've seen people on social media. Oh, as empathy even a good thing? You know, it makes us so weak. It makes us so delicate. No, it's an incredible thing. It's a huge, advantageous trait that we have it. The concern, another point that I really harp on in my book, something I'm concerned about is that our brains have evolved to experience

more empathy for those people in our tribe walking with us, right? If you are in your tribe and then, let's say you pass on a rival tribe and you see a person in the rival tribe step on something and start yelling and their foot's bleeding, it's actually better if you don't really experience any pain yourself. If you can kind of just notice it, understand it, but not embody those emotions yourself. Because if you embody those emotions too much, you're going to rush over there and help your enemy. And that's not helpful. That's not supportive for your survival. And so what our brains do is that they draw quite clean lines between who is on my team, who is on the other team. And when someone is perceived as being on the other team, we experience less empathy. There's literally,

brain studies showing that the areas associated with empathy activate less. And it can be because someone is a different race. It can be because someone is a different sexuality. They affiliate with a different political party. There are even studies that have arbitrarily divided participants into two groups based on nothing at all. And still in those groups, people experience more empathy for those in their group and less empathy for those in the other group. And what I worry about is right now, we are becoming very, very good at noticing who's on our team and who's not. You know, there's all these new identity factors rising to the surface, you know, especially political, you know, gender identity, sexuality, many of these things that are

making it much easier for us to divide us from them. And that's something I worry about is that we're becoming less empathic. So another issue that comes up these days with social connection is the huge effect that technologies having on the way that we communicate. with one another. So, you know, say on the phone or email, I guess everyone will listening, has done it. We like, we sometimes miss these vital social clues. Like, I've experienced this myself, you know, I write an email to someone or something, and I receive something back and saying, oh, you know, are you okay? What's wrong with you? What is absolutely nothing. And I,

the same thing comes up to, they're not in a good mood. So, you know, what's causing that effect? You know, I have a theory on this. I'm planning to test this hypothesis in the next few years with research. But I call my hypothesis on this the virtual disengagement hypothesis. And that refers to this idea that in virtual environments, like when we're emailing, even when we're on Zoom, the brain areas that are responsible for empathy, I think they are disengaging. And I think what's happening is when we interact face to face, we have all these social cues, vocal tone, facial expression, all those things. those cues are what fire up those brain areas that drive empathy, right? Like I said, you can look at someone's facial expression, you can understand what they're feeling. But what if you can't see their facial expression? Of course, you can't understand what they're feeling, right? That's such critical information. When we strip away these social cues and take all the texture of our interactions and flatten

it down to a, let's say, a text message or an email, you can't hear their vocal tone, you can't see their body language, you can't see their facial expression, your brain, has nothing to grip onto. You know, it has nothing for those grappling hooks that are searching for emotion. There's no texture for those things to grip onto. And so we fail to understand each other. Not only that, though, I think we also experience less empathy overall, which a key part of my hypothesis here is that this underlies a lot of the hostility people experience online,

on social media, that you post something and people are in the comments just vicious attacking you, brutally. Right. Like if you stood on stage and presented the same idea to a group of people in a theater, even if people disagreed, they would be much more polite and kind in voicing their disagreements. On social media, it's, it is cutthroat. And I think that's what's happening is that we are not sharing and embodying and understanding each other's emotions as well, which is leading us to be much less careful. Because when you are throwing a dart at somebody and it hits them and they yell and start to cry and they experience pain, you feel bad. because you just hurt them. But if you throw a dart at them and you can't see them, because they're somewhere in the network of social media thousands of miles away, you don't feel anything, you don't care, because those empathy systems are not being engaged.

And I think that's what's really happening, is that we're becoming a much less considerate online society because these systems are not built the way that our brains are meant to interact. Yeah, I think likely anyone listening will know exactly what you're talking about. So what do you think we can do to sort of mitigate these effects? Is there anything we can do? Well, I always encourage if you can restore any of the texture and social cues to your interactions to do it. You know, if you live in the same city as someone and they say, oh, let's jump on a phone call or a Zoom.

No, just meet in person, right? You can just, you're a drive away, just go in person. If someone says, hey, let's do a phone call, we'll see if a video is available. But when it comes to social media, you know, I've thought about would it be helpful if there was like, Like, you know, what if X or Instagram were virtual reality environments where instead of scrolling on screens and looking at text, we were all in virtual and reality systems, we could see each other. I think it would probably be better, but there's still a great level of detachment where, especially reputationalally, right?

There's this condition of anonymity. You're anonymous on social media. You can be anonymous in a virtual reality world as well and just go around hurting people's feelings and then just turn off your headset and go back to the real world and nobody knows you did it. So it's complicated. I don't really know, but I hope that by raising awareness about the brain impact of online hostility, because it is very real, you know, people hurt through virtual environments, experience real social pain. Talk about that a lot in the book as well. Hope that by raising awareness of that and kind of reminding people, wait a minute, before you leave

that comment, pause for a second and just imagine how would you feel if your daughter or your brother or your parent experience this comment on their social media post. They would feel probably pretty bad. Can you reframe your comment? You know, does it have to be left this way? But one other kind of stupid trick that I propose in the book, but I do stand by it, is when we're interacting via text message to use emojis, because there's actually some evidence that when human brains, when we look at an emoji expressing a facial expression, our brains show a very similar response to if we were looking at a real face making that expression. And so I talk about, you know, trying to restore as much texture to your interactions as possible. Well, if you're on that

email thread and you get that email and you're like, oh, wow, he's in a bad mood today, right? But all of a sudden, there's a smiley face at the end. It's like, oh, okay. No, I guess he's fine. You know, if you can restore some of that emotion to our, to our text message, you can kind of add a little bit of that texture back. And so I propose that maybe we should start doing that a little bit more, even though emojis are kind of, you know, maybe sometimes people see them as like juvenile or silly. I actually think they're really supportive. Yeah, so let's move on to another thing that you talk about in the book, which I found really interesting, was the notion of likeability.

So I'd imagine most people would rather be likable more than not. So what do you mean by that? And, you know, how can we foster that? Yeah, well, not only people like to be likable, but there's a lot of benefits to be, being likable. It's pretty amazing. You know, people, there's all sorts of studies on this. Like more likable waitresses get larger tips. More likable teachers are graded as better teachers by their students. You know, there's this halo effect, right? When someone is likable, you generally assume that they're really good at everything. They're more trustworthy, you know,

they're smart, all these great things. So there are benefits to being likable. And, you know, I include a whole chapter in the book on likability. Not for the point of giving people weapons to make themselves artificially more likable. I worry about that and I warn against it in the book. And I do say that one of the important drivers of likability is authenticity. So if you change yourself to try to be more likable, probably not going to work. You're going to sacrifice authenticity. But the reason I do talk about it is because I think there's also a lot of people out there who may not recognize how many of the behaviors that they're doing socially that are completely controllable are actually harming their interactions. And so I wanted to.

to lay some of that stuff out. And what it comes down to is that there's a lot that's controllable and there's, there's some things that are not. As for the controllable things, you know, I think some of them are really obvious, right? Like, don't take out your phone. Maybe that's not obvious, actually. But it does show, it is shown that, you know, it's called fubbing, pH, like snubbing with a phone.

You know, nobody likes that. We've all experienced it. You know, you're talking to someone and all of a sudden they're talking to the top of their head because they're buried in their phone and they're, uh-huh, uh-huh. And it's like, you're not listening. Hello, that's horrible. Nobody likes that. Don't do it.

You know, there's things that are more direct, like eye contact. Eye contact is really supportive for likability. It builds trust, it builds respect. It's really funny. There's a lot of these things are also kind of subliminal, like mimicry. There are studies where they have a participant interact with someone. The person that they're interacting with is an actor. They don't actually know that, though.

And the actor has been told to mimic the body position. of the participant. So the person, you know, stands there and they crosses their arms. And all of a sudden, a couple seconds later, the actor crosses their arms. You know, they fold their legs and the actor folds their leg. And at the end of the interaction, they asked them, how much did you like that person you were interacting with? And they liked them more when the person, when the actor had been mimicking them.

And it's so interesting because this actually happens all the time in our interactions. We are very often mimicking each other's facial expressions, mimicking each other's body position. And it's thought to be kind of an expression of, affiliation that it's like you know I talked about the brain's really good at identifying who's in your tribe who's on your team and who's not well if someone's in the same position as you every time you look up you notice oh look we're in the same body position there's this quiet you know sort of subconscious note taken in your brain that this person is like you and so your brain

treats them more favorably so there's so many of these things I I lay out in the chapter and the chapter is much better has much better memory than me especially with a six-week-old newborn but it's all laid out in there. Yeah, so just one final question then by way of summary, other than, of course, buying the book, what sort of message would you like to leave our listeners with? You know, a couple of things about friendship and social connection and why it's so important.

Yeah, I think we really need to start appreciating that this super healthy, salubrious ingredient of life is all around us. We go to the grocery store, we keep our heads down, or, God forbid, we don't go to the grocery store at all. We order our groceries through an app delivered to our door. You know, we sit in the waiting room at our doctor's office, surrounded by 10 other people, and we all just sit there staring at our phones. You know, we ride the train to work or the bus, and we don't talk to anybody. And I think all of these moments are opportunities to support our brains. It might feel weird. I mean, certain environments are worse than others. Like,

in a doctor's office, maybe it's a little uncomfortable. But on a bus or a train, hey, I really like that backpack. Where did you get that? How was your day today? I mean, think about from the other side of that when you're sitting and you're bored on a train and someone comes out to you and is like, hey, how you doing? I really like your shoes. Like, how is your day?

I think you'd probably feel really nice. It would be like, oh, my gosh, like this person from my community cares about me and they want to talk to me. And there's all sorts of research showing that those interactions and that community building is really supportive for our brain health and for our happiness. And so what I encourage people to do is engage with people around them, engage with the world around them, for the sake of your brain health, if nothing else. And it will be good for your brain. It may extend your life. It may reduce your likelihood of dementia. It may reduce your likelihood of heart disease. And even better,

you will be passing on those benefits to the people that you engage. And what I really hope in an ideal the world is that every person, or at least half of the people in the world, read the book, experience that message, and then go and engage the other half, and that people will start to naturally kind of spread this appreciation and respect for the power of social connection for our brain health. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Dr. Ben Ring. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out this book, Why Brains Need Friends, The Neuroscience of Social Connection, and why we all need more. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider

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