Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - The Neuroscience of Likability, Social Connection, and Brain Health | Ben Rein

Episode Date: August 10, 2026

Ben Rein, PhD is a neuroscientist who studies the biology of social behavior and explains the brain to an audience of over 1.2 million people online. He serves as Chief Science Officer of the Mind Science Foundation, Head of Science Communication at ResearchHub Foundation, and teaches at Stanford University.  In this episode we talk about: Distinguishing between science and online "neurobullshit" Three research-backed ways to protect your brain health and boost social connection, even for introverts Why isolation shows up in the body like a low-grade injury The real difference between loneliness and isolation, and why we rarely recognize either in ourselves The power of pets in reducing stress and inflammation Whether sugar is really more addictive than cocaine (short answer: no, and here's why) Get the 10% with Dan Harris app here Sign up for Dan's free newsletter here Follow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTok Subscribe to our YouTube Channel Additional Resources:  Why Brains Need Friends: The Neuroscience of Social Connection This episode is sponsored by: BetterHelp: See the reviews, see what stands out, and see if BetterHelp is right for you. Visit betterhelp.com/HAPPIER. Quo: Try QUO for free, PLUS get 20% off your first 6 months when you go to Quo.com/HAPPIER. Ironwall: Stop online threats before they become real-world attacks with Ironwall. Visit ironwall.com/DANHARRIS for more. To advertise on the show, contact [e-mail] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. I, as you probably know, think a lot about brain health, not only because I want to be healthy and happy for as long as possible, but also because I have a dad with dementia, and that's been pretty hard to watch. If you pay any attention to brain health, you've probably run into what I call neuro bullshit online, expensive, unproven interventions that people are peddling on Instagram. But It turns out there's actually one really big secret for keeping your brain healthy, and it's completely free, which brings me to my guest today, Dr. Ben Ryan, who's a neuroscientist at Stanford and has written a book called Why Brains Need Friends. Dr. Ben Ryan, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I want to talk about your book in great detail, but let me just start with one of the ways in which you've made a name for yourself. You've got quite a large online following. One of the things you've done online, which I find very helpful, is debunk a lot of what I was calling neuro-bullshit. And so I'm just curious before we get into why brains need friends.

What are some of the top offenders these days? What are you seeing online that worries you? Well, first off, I deeply appreciated that intro. As soon as you said neuro-bullshit, I was like, this is perfect. Because, I mean, yeah, I've seen that it all started for me years ago. and I kind of went viral on accident and was like, do I want to do this or not? Is this worth it? Is this good for my career? And then I started engaging with the social platforms more and discovered that so much of what people consider like scientific education is actually far from scientific education. It's a ton of misinformation out there and it's just pretty bad, honestly. So that's why I kind of started doing what I was doing with the debunking and fact checking. Because for me, it's very simple. It's like someone makes a claim on. online, they're probably referencing some data. Let's find the data and let's see if it's true. So, I mean, when it comes to the most common offenders, gosh, of course, like we all know about

the big ones that have been circulating a lot these days, you know, autism and vaccines and all that. As a person who did my PhD in the neurobiology of autism, and, you know, when I was doing my PhD, I had people coming to me and saying, gosh, I hope you start looking into vaccines. And, you know, I learned pretty early in my PhD, the first time someone said that to me, I looked up in the literature that there's been studies with millions of children showing that autism is not linked to vaccination. So, of course, now we have Tylenol and a lot of other offenders coming out these days. But, you know, I think probably the thing I see the most is like, it used to be psychology says, do this, you know, for happiness or whatever. And now it's neuroscience

says, or I'm a neuroscientist and this is what I think you should do. And I think probably the The most common is supplements because maybe coincidentally, they are an easy way to, they're an easy item to be sold on social media. And so when you're giving someone a basically a prescription and then there's a 10% coupon, you know, it's a pretty easy way to make money if you're framing yourself as a neuroscientist. So something I recently started doing actually was this video series where I call it, do supplements really work? And I go through supplement by supplement and break down like, here's the actual evidence.

Here's what people say it does. does it actually do it, at least in some clinical trials, hasn't been shown to do that, and, you know, take that as you will. If you want to use it, go for it. But here's what the evidence says. Is there anything you found that actually might help the brain? I have to admit, I've been a little bit surprised by some of them because there's so many supplements out there and so many claims for each supplement that it feels like the whole

supplement space is kind of garbage and doomed. When I started looking into it, I was actually a little bit surprised. like, for instance, Ashwaganda, people say it's, like, good for stress. I looked it up. There are some studies showing it reduces cortisol levels. Okay, that's a good sign. Magnesium for sleep. I'll admit, I take magnesium for sleep, but I'm also, I have a magnesium deficiency,

so I don't know if that's representative of the average person. I find it helps a lot. There are studies showing that it's helpful for insomnia. But, you know, for every one that I find some evidence that's really promising, there's other evidence for other supplements that looks kind of poor. and, you know, like, colostrum is a good one. There's, like, no scientific evidence for, like, any of the things people say on social media, sorry to colostrum companies, but, I mean, that's, you know, if you're going to make a claim

to sell a product, you should have evidence for that claim. That's my opinion. Just to say, and this is, this is not aimed at you. This is aimed at the viewers and listeners. If you're interested in taking a supplement, including any of the ones that Dr. Ryan just mentioned, please talk to your doctor first. Okay, having gotten that out of the way. So another thing you hear online.

as neuroscientific is that sugar is more addictive than cocaine. True or false? False. Hardly anything is more addictive than cocaine. I mean, the reason why you can kind of like hand-wavily make the claim that sugar is addictive, and actually sugar can be addictive, is because it stimulates dopamine. And dopamine is like the key to reinforcement in the brain. And by that, I mean, you do something, your brain has dopamine release and your emotional reaction this is, wow, that was great. I want to do that again. You know, that's the whole point of dopamine.

And so anything that stimulates dopamine release is going to have some sort of like addictive liability, I suppose. And sugar is one of those things, which is why, you know, you crave sugar tastes good. You want to have more of it. But cocaine is on a completely different level because what cocaine does is it goes straight into the brain areas that are releasing dopamine and it just dumps dopamine out. It actually kind of hijacks the transporter for dopamine. causes it to be dumped out. So it's just a completely different kind of level of dopamine stimulation, which is why it's so addictive. Can sugar be addictive? Certainly. But do you need sugar? You know, there's a reason sugar tastes good and stimulates dopamine because it's a great source

of immediate energy and fuel. And so your body, you know, your brain is wired to tell you this is, you know, easy to use fuel and easy to store it's fat. So you should eat more of it. Whereas cocaine is just like hitting those brain centers and just telling you go back. Okay, so, so as we've established, there's a lot of stuff that's masquerading as neuroscience online and actually is not. We've also established that often people will use neuroscience to sell you stuff. But as, as I mentioned in the intro and as is the core thesis of your new book, there's actually a really powerful, if not the most powerful intervention and it doesn't cost any money at all. So what is that? That intervention would be social interaction, social connection, as it's named in the book title. Yeah, human beings are

wired for connection. We've heard that before, probably, or some variation of that. But the depth to which interaction influences our biology and our mood is unbelievable. It is, it touches on so many systems, you know, our bones, our immune system, our skin healing. In addition to, of course, our brains, our hearts, you know, being isolated, increases your risk for dementia, stroke, heart disease, diabetes, not to mention depression, anxiety, suicide. I mean, it is so important. And in an era where we are living through a loneliness epidemic and an era of also technology and AI and remote interaction, here we are, Dan, you know, virtually, it's the standard now.

I worry that we're losing sight of something that's unbelievably important for. our health. I believe you say that interaction is medicine for the brain. So like walk us through exactly how, you know, what are the, what's happening in our brain and what are the downstream effects? When you connect with someone and you're having a positive interaction, there are three neurotransmitters happening and being released in the brain that together are responsible for something called social reward. This is this, you know, this feeling of just like sugar is pleasant, you want to have more of it. Social interaction is pleasant. You're having a good time with your friends, your spouse, whoever it may be. You want to have more interaction with them.

Those three neurotransmitters are oxytocin, which is, you know, the love hormone, social bonding kind of molecule, serotonin and dopamine. And of course, both serotonin and dopamine are rather well known for their, you know, mood supporting and, you know, positive emotion promoting effects. but those three neurotransmitters together are a really powerful concoction. In fact, one of the things that I love to point out is that if you look for a drug that has the same effect, or at least a pretty strong overlap with those neurotransmitters, one of the only drugs out there you'll find is MDMA, ecstasy. And the fact that interacting and connecting with others stimulates the same brain pathways

as ecstasy, tells you, one, why people who interact more are at lower risk for anxiety and depression, and two, how important social interaction has been historically for the human species that our brains have wired to make us feel good for being around others. I like to think about connection as kind of a two-sided coin. On one side, we have everything I just said. Interaction makes you feel good. It stimulates the brain in a special way. It makes you feel great and want to come back. On the other side, we have isolation. And it's not just that. that when you're isolated and when you're not connecting, you're missing out on all the great stuff I just described.

It's actually that isolation has its own kind of biological profile that's not good, like specifically bad for you. What happens is when we're isolated, it triggers a stress response. Our cortisol levels start to go up. And when cortisol levels go up, something that happens is in the short term, our inflammation is suppressed because in a short term, fight or flight situation, it's not useful to inflammation, we need to put that inflammation away and get ready to fight. But over the long run, if we're continuously stressed, then our cortisol remains high, kind of the opposite happens.

Because instead of suppressing inflammation, that your tissues, your heart, brain, etc., they're like, all right, this cortisol's been here a long time. I can't keep suppressing inflammation. So I'm just going to kind of start ignoring the cortisol, which can over time lead to a buildup of inflammation. Chronic inflammation is something that's not good. It's not something that you want. And there's evidence, actually, that this buildup of inflammation in organs like the brain and then like the arteries, atherosclerosis, all this, is just detrimental to organ function. And specifically in the brain, there's this one study I love. It's so interesting. They found that they were actually studying stroke. They were trying to look at how the brain recovers

after a stroke, and they were doing this in mice. And so they were inducing a stroke, should have been the exact same stroke across all of the mice, because of, you know, know, these are scientists, really well-controlled. But some of the mice had much bigger strokes than others and had, you know, much poorer recovery. They had worse symptoms. They were more likely to die. Turns out those mice with the worst strokes were living alone. It just happened to be living alone in their cages.

So the researchers suspected maybe this has something to do with the inflammation buildup from isolation. Before they induced the stroke, they suppressed the inflammation. Then the stroke happened. no longer was the stroke much larger. And so you think about this playing out in like real life with humans. And of course we shouldn't extrapolate from mouse research to human research, but there is similar evidence in humans that, you know, isolated people have higher inflammatory burden. And when isolated people have a stroke, they have worse strokes.

So we could think about this playing out in the real population where you have this buildup of inflammation. Suddenly something happens. You have a stroke. you have a heart attack, you have a fall. And what happens next is really important because basically either your body's going to be resilient and it's going to be able to kind of handle and tolerate and adapt to this shift or it's not going to handle it very well at all. And that's kind of the big difference between, you know, who has a healthy outcome, who doesn't? Well, who's returning to a home with loved ones and who's going back into a home after exiting

the hospital and living alone. So it's kind of a subliminal quiet thing that. that's playing out throughout our society and influencing a lot of different brain and body systems. What is inflammation? Okay, it's a great question. And to be honest, this is like kind of embarrassing. I feel like I shouldn't be the one to answer it because I can give you like my neuroscience explanation of it. But it's one of those things that I fear I will butcher.

It's kind of like if you ask an immunologist to explain like snap of transmission, it's like I probably shouldn't. But roughly speaking, it is the body's response to an injury or, you know, or an illness. And what you don't want is antibodies flooding the zone and the body acting as if it's had some sort of insult all the time, which is what isolation does to us. Right. Yeah. I mean, I guess this is how I imagine it. And I picture a bunch of inflammation in the brain. And then a stroke occurs, right? There's a, there's an event where the blood flow is restricted, the nutrients are restricted for some short time, and a number of brain cells die.

Probably the number of cells that die in that event will be higher if they're already kind of sprounded with inflammation that's interfering with the ability to, you know, function typically. And then also when the kind of restorative process after a stroke is unfolding and, you know, the cells are trying to recover. If there's all this inflammation built up that's blocking the way, then it's also not going to be good. Again, this is like an incredibly naive, like stroke is not my area. But that's kind of how I think about it, at least. You've issued all the right caveats and been as humble as one can expect.

This is the problem online when people don't issue caveats and have no humility. So I think you're good. A few things before we hear from our sponsors, I just want to gently nudge you, if you haven't done it already, to go over to Dan Harris.com and sign up for my newish meditation app 10% with Dan Harris. I am so proud of what we're doing over there. We've got all of these live video sessions at least once a week where you can meditate with me or one of our amazing teachers and then get your questions answered. We've also got courses from legendary teachers like Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein. We've got a growing library of guided meditations from teachers like Sharon and Joseph, but also Seven A Salasi, Jeff Warren, and on and on. But really, the secret sauce is community. It is so hard to boot up or maintain a meditation practice. And one of the things that really helps is doing it in the carpool lane. And that's what we have set up over on the app.

Go to Dan Harris.com. There's a free 14-day trial if you want to check it out before you buy. We'll be right back after this. Speaking of the studies, of the science here around the dangers of isolation of having insufficient interpersonal interaction, I believe there was one study that showed, and this was a study of over 300,000 people that found that people with weaker social relationships are 50% more likely to die over a seven and a half year period. Am I, am I, is this all correct? No, you're right. Yeah, I think that particular study may have been kind of flipped that the exact

finding may have been that those who were more socialized were 50% less likely to die. So that, in that effect, similar. But there are also other larger studies with like millions of people that have found 32% higher risk of mortality, death by any cause in those who are isolated. And so that's kind of how I think about this as well. It's like nobody dies of loneliness, right? But if you have this quiet health burden that's influencing your brain and your heart and all these tissues, and then you have a heart attack or you have a stroke, are you going to have a lower likelihood of recovering? Are you going to have a higher likelihood of death? And that's, I think, how we kind of, end up with these kind of shocking numbers of 32 or 50% higher likelihood of death by any cause.

And another thing, too, is I think about the social support that community provides. And there are some studies really interesting. There's a section in the book all about dogs and pets and why it's good to have a pet and why it's good for you. And in one of the studies, they had people go through really stressful experiences, like, you know, doing math in front of an audience or putting their hand into an ice bath or something uncomfortable with or without their pet in the room. And what they found is that basically people had lower, more manageable stress responses and, you know, a weaker spike in their heart rate

during these stressful experiences when they had their pet in the room. So what I think about with that is what if it's your spouse in the room instead, you know, and you are better able to tolerate stress. Like that community acts as a buffer. And I think about, you know, someone getting a phone call and it's bad news and their heart rate spikes and they have a heart rate. heart attack, would they have the same stress response? Would they be at equal likelihood for that event if they had their spouse next to them, kind of acting as that kind of ice pack on their nervous system and buffering the stress? It's complicated and it's, and it affects so many different biological systems in many different ways. Are pets, can they approach the protective

power of a spouse or a tight friend group? The comparison of spouse to pet or friend to pet, as far as I'm aware has not been done, but I think it should be done because I get this question a lot. And I'm personally curious. What I can say is it's in the same direction for sure. There's definitely evidence that having a pet or having a dog specifically, but other animals too, cats and such is basically good for us. It reduces the likelihood of things like heart disease and heart attack. I really believe that for people who are vulnerable to isolation, especially like older folks, Having a pet can be a great kind of substitute to living, instead of living alone. I think you could kind of restore a little bit of the healthy, supportive properties of interaction by having a pet around.

Let's talk to the introverts listening to this who may feel like, wait a minute, my brain fucked because I don't really want, I don't want to be going to parties or I don't want to be hanging out with my friends so often. This is an important subject that I think should not be ignored. Generally, the evidence suggests that interacting more is better, you know, for longevity, for health, et cetera. But of course, we have to ask the question of, does that, you know, broad generalization kind of neglect introverts? What I've seen in the literature is that introverts benefit from interaction on a smaller scale. It's almost like interaction is a medicine and the appropriate dose is lower for introverts and they're much more prone to overdosing.

And any introvert who has spent too long at a party or gone on a longer than preferred vacation with friends or family can tell you, yes, I can definitely overdose and I feel like shit. And that's what the research says too. If you basically force an introvert to be extroverted and socialize all the time, they burn out really quickly and they don't feel good. So I have this kind of framework that I like to think of that everyone is like a potted plant. And just as some potted plants need to be watered all the time, others only need a little bit of water every once in a while. Introverts are like those plants that don't need to be watered often. They like snake plants. An introvert can go to a party.

They could stay there for an hour or to come home and be perfectly satisfied and not need to go out again for another couple of days. And what's really important there for the introverts is like avoiding overwatering. And I think most introverts are great at that. I think most people who are introverted, they by nature are like, nah, I'll skip the party. I'm good. So you don't want to overdo it, of course. But I think on the other hand, it's equally important, maybe more important, honestly, to not let the soil dry out, to not go way too long without interacting because it doesn't

feel like a need. But actually, my belief is that there is a kind of set level. of interaction that everybody needs and everyone's different. And so for me, I score pretty high on extraversion assessments. If I don't interact with my friends two or three times a week, you know, I can start to feel a difference. But for someone else, might only be once a week. And so what I actually think everyone should try and figure out is where do they exist on this continuum of introversion to extraversion. And the great news is there's a simple 20 question assessment. It's a real, it's not like a BuzzFeed quiz. This is a like validated measurement of extraversion that I

included my book. It's also on my website where you can figure out pretty quickly where you stand. What's your web address? So just people want to go to it right now. It's my name Ben-R-R-E-I-N-R-E-N.com slash book. And then the resources will be in there, including that extroversion assessment. Let me go back to the word loneliness that you mentioned earlier. I feel like a lot of us don't see ourselves in that word. And I worry every time loneliness comes up, like I never put it in the title of a podcast because I feel like people who actually technically qualify as lonely don't believe they are because they're maybe surrounded by family and colleagues. But loneliness is not about how many people you know and interact with.

It's something else. There's an important distinction between loneliness and isolation. Isolation is what you just said. How many people are you interact with? You know, if you're alone all the time, you are isolated. But you may not be lonely. You may not feel that you're missing out on interaction. loneliness is about whether or not your social needs are being met, whether you perceive them to be.

And yeah, it's a really interesting point you make that people don't really relate to loneliness. It's not often that someone sits back when they're not feeling right and says, what's off? Oh, I'm lonely. It's usually that they say, oh, I didn't get enough sleep or I had crappy food for lunch or I've been stressed with work. you know, we often kind of overlook loneliness as a mediator of our feelings, especially, especially introverts. I think a lot about like the Surgeon General announced that we have a loneliness crisis. And from where I stand, like not a whole lot changed after that.

Like people heard the news and were like, oh, bad for me. I didn't know that. Okay. And then just went on with their lives, you know, like using the self-checkout lane and ordering groceries delivered to your house instead of going to the store. There's not a meaningful change. And I wonder if that's part of the problem that nobody really relates to it, that they don't see it in themselves.

Honestly, I think it's exactly that. Let me ask a related question just sort of on how we've structured our society. You talked about self-checkout lane and, you know, ordering stuff online instead of going to a restaurant. Why do you think it is that we know every TED Talk mentions that we're social animals? I've given a TED talk that mentions that. We know we're social animals. This is not news.

And yet we have built a society that militates against interaction at pretty much every turn, not only through technology, but also through just our overarching ethos of individualism. How did we get to this point? You know, honestly, I think COVID was a big part of it. When COVID happened, we all had to adapt to a world where we couldn't interact, right? And for a, you know, capitalistic society, what happens? Well, all of a sudden, you can get groceries without interacting, without going to the store. You can, you know, everything.

You can work from home. You can work out from home with a trainer on a screen. You can do telemedicine and talk to your doctor over the phone. You can get a taxi, Waymo. You can sit in the back of a taxi where there's no human driver in the front seat. And it's super convenient, but is it healthy? Is it good? And I think obviously not.

I think on the whole, when we kind of summate all of these micro interactions that we're losing by automating things, it adds up to a pretty significant amount of time that we're no longer interacting. And if you look at the data, I mean, everything's headed in the wrong direction. These are shocking statistic. Probably this is colored by COVID, but from 2013 to 2021, the amount of time that people spent alone every month. increased by 36 hours per month. There's almost an entire work week, and maybe it is because people are working for them. Again, it may have been COVID related, but I mean, even still, like ever since then, the numbers have continued to be in the wrong direction.

And like last year, there was a study finding that 69% of Americans are lacking emotional support. It's clear that this problem exists, but we're not addressing it. And, you know, maybe we need to build more infrastructure for social connection. I think that's probably a big part of it. You know, people talk about third places. We've lost third places, which is this idea of places besides your home and your work that you can go and spend time with friends. People used to hang out in malls and all this. That doesn't really happen anymore. Now, it's pretty much just bars. So I'd like to see more of that happen. I think we just need to build the infrastructure and give people good convincing reasons to step away from the TV and the phone

in the computer and, you know, get back to face-to-face contact. So that's the kind of macro view. Let's talk micro because you have a lot of practical suggestions in your book. What do you, just top line, what do you recommend if somebody is listening to this and thinking, yeah, I care about brain health. You've talked me out of most supplements and you've talked me into social interaction. How do I get more of it? I have three suggestions.

Number one, look to replace any, virtual interactions with in-person interactions. And even if you can just kind of level up your virtual interactions, so if it's text message, phone call, phone call, video call instead. If it's a phone call, video call, in-person instead, my justification there is that the way that the brain detects that you are interacting with another human and has the, you know, stimulates those things like oxytocin and docomia and serotonin is through the observation of social cues, right?

you could see someone's facial expression, you can hear their tone of voice, you can read their body language, you can see the glassiness in their eyes, right? All of these pieces of information tell your brain, you're interacting with someone. And so you would expect that as you kind of strip away those pieces of information, that interactions would become less enjoyable because they're not so effective at stimulating oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin. And while the molecular biology hasn't been done yet, there is. is evidence that less life-like interactions like texting are perceived as less pleasant and

less enjoyable. So if you can, try to get back to something closer to resembling an in-person interaction. Number two, I think we often hold ourselves back from connection because of these, what I call these bad social predictions. We, it's normal to be anxious socially. You know, we talk about social anxiety as like a diagnosis. but really everybody experiences some level of social anxiety. And specifically, there's a couple of things that have been well shown.

One of them is that we actually think people don't like us as much as they really do. This is called the liking gap. It was discovered by a researcher, Dr. Erica Boothby. So we think people don't like us as much as they do. Number two, we underestimate the benefits of socializing. We think that it's, you know, when everyone's been there Friday night, you're like, do I go to this party or not? it's likely that when you're thinking what am I going to get out of this, whatever you expect is an underestimation of the actual positive emotions you will experience.

In addition to that, people tend to think that they are worse at socializing than they really are. Number four, we also overestimate the likelihood of being socially rejected. And number five, we expect that as a conversation goes on for longer, it will get progressively worse, which is also not true. It just kind of stays pretty stable. Of course, there's an upper end of that. You can't talk for, you know, 60 hours and still have a good time. But, you know, all of these things together basically push us toward, I don't really know if it's worth going to the dinner. I think it's maybe just be easier and more energizing to sit on the couch and watch TV or something else.

So try whenever you experience any of those miscalculations, try to think for a second, is this actually true? and what a good place to start also is actually on the other side of it after you come out of an interaction try to do like a little bit of a self-inventory do I feel good right now and most of the time as long as it was a you know regular healthy interaction you'll notice that you feel pretty terrific it's you know actually I tend to think of it like um like exercise like if people didn't have the idea that going to the gym lifting weights or whatever is good for them I feel like we could easily overlook the fact that it makes us feel really good to exercise but when you come out of the gym, you're like, man, I just did the best thing for my health I could possibly do. I feel great. Like I'm sweating. I'm dirty. Doesn't matter. I feel awesome. Right. And if you start to tune into it, you actually will notice that interactions make you feel pretty good as well. Someone who read my book, she actually works at a bookstore. She told me that after reading my book, it totally changed the way she interacts with her job because people come into the bookstore all day. And, you know, small talk. It's retail. And after reading my book, she realized that connecting with a customer made her feel

so good. And so she started putting more intentionality into these interactions and noticing that she was uplifting them as well. And now she, like, loves her job again because she's enjoying these interactions she gets. So try not to fall prey to those, uh, those social traps. Six years ago during COVID, uh, this podcast went virtual. And for a variety of reasons, we have not gone back in person except rarely. And I've started recently upping the in-person quotient quite significantly, and I like my job again. It's not like I've hated my job. I love that I have this show, but it is so much more enjoyable to host a show and conduct an interview when you're doing it in person, as we did in the early days of this show. I would not have anybody on the show who couldn't come to the studio. And I think I'm

kind of heading back toward that. And it's, I'm a little embarrassed that it took me six years to truly wake up to this, but it is now thunderously obvious to me. Well, that's great. I mean, and that aligns with the evidence, right? More lifelike interactions are more pleasant. And I've always noticed interacting in person, especially for something like this, like a thoughtful conversation, you know, you're, you really want to dive in. It's, it just seems to be better in person. Having said that this is going great and we're virtual. So it, it doesn't mean it can't be done. Okay, but there's a third thing you were going to recommend when it comes to practical strategies for getting more interaction to our lives. Yeah, so my number three suggestion is I like to think about connection, social connection, as a pool.

And I specifically think about it. And this is kind of silly and ridiculous, like as a neuroscientist saying this, but I think about it as a pool of oxytocin. The reason for this is because oxytocin specifically, I mentioned before that it, and it makes us feel good, it stimulates dopamine and serotonin. There's another thing there. Oxytocin has all of these great health-promoting benefits. It's been shown to be neuroprotective, anti-inflammatory, could boost immune function, bone growth, wound healing, all these amazing things.

And so I think of it as if every time we connect with someone, we take a swim in this pool of oxytocin. As you can with a regular pool, you can swim at any depth if you want. You can dive into the deep. and you can connect with your best friends and have a, you know, long night together. Or you can swim in the shallow end. You could just walk around, have the water up to your waist, and you can talk to a grocery store or cashier on your way out at the store.

Or if you really don't have time, you can simply dip your foot in and wave to your neighbor as you're walking by their house or, you know, walking the dog. All of these depths of swimming will have some level of benefit. And of course, some will be more measurable than others. You know, swimming in the deep end, definitely better for you than waving at your neighbor. But I think it's important that we don't forget to like engage with the pool at some level. And I think part of the problem, too, that people don't is because when they hear about connection and they think about, you know, how do I embed this in my life, they're only thinking about the deep end. They're only thinking about the kind of high barrier, long, you know, time consuming feels the most energy draining kind of interactions.

But even just going in the deep end and just talking to the cashier, whatever you may do, is also very effective. And there's a bunch of evidence that, you know, talking to strangers or even having short interactions can can provide a pretty significant boost in mood. And so I think, you know, the way I phrase this in summary is connection is a pool, not a plunge. You don't always have to plunge all the way in. You can just dip your toes in. And I actually encourage, like, you should always try to think about, like, if you have the opportunity. just take a little dip and then get back to whatever you're doing because it's going to be better for you if you do. If I was never really or rarely engaging in profound interpersonal connection, but I was doing a lot of talking to strangers,

what would be the implications from my brain health? It's like exercise. Anything is better than nothing, right? Walking is better than being sedentary. So socializing with strangers, I actually is pretty good. The more you can do generally the better. There's a researcher, Dr. Nicholas Epley at University of Chicago, has done these amazing studies. I'm obsessed with them because he goes into like real world environments instead of doing everything in the lab.

And for instance, he'll go to the train station and ask people, hey, will you go have an interaction on your commute into work today? And, you know, instead of just sitting alone. And what he found is that one, this is actually where that a couple of those things I mentioned earlier that people overestimate the likelihood of projection. he found that people expected like 50% or more of the strangers to reject their invitation to talk. Turns out zero percent of the strangers turn them down. And then people also expected that they wouldn't really benefit from the interaction. Turns out they enjoyed their commute much more.

They ended up reported learning more, even more so than people who like just had a normal commute or also those who specifically sat in solitude. So anyhow, he's replicated this across. a handful of different places, not just trains, but also like buses and like taxis. And so there's this growing body of evidence that strangers are a very good, reliable source of kind of a mood boost. And the way I see it is like we have this like ripe fruit all around us, you know, we go out in the public and we don't interact with anybody and we kind of keep to ourselves.

But on the other side of that barrier that we're kind of self-creating is a fruitful interaction that can make this feel better. So I'm an extrovert. I talk to people all the time. I love it. I really enjoy it. I'm one of those people who will just start a conversation with you randomly. And usually it ends up going pretty well.

I'm an extrovert too, but I was for much of my life kind of a snobby dick and not really talking to people, you know, trades men and women who will come through our apartment or now our house or, you know, people I've on, you know, in airports or whatever. And now I'm much more, in part because I've seen the research and, you know, I've been hosting this show for more than a decade. So I think I probably started as a result of hearing about the research. But now I do it. It doesn't matter what the research shows. I know what it's happening. What is happening in my end of one sort of inner laboratory. The pleasure centers are lighting up most of the time I'm having these interactions as I move through the world.

A million more questions to ask you about interaction. Should we be placing a lot of emphasis on? eye contact. Only if it's comfortable. I mean, for most people, eye contact is, can be uncomfortable. You know, there's kind of a threshold. For some people, as soon as you make eye contact, it's like, no, thank you. This is awkward. Other people, you know, it's like, you can do it for a while, and then you start to notice, like, gosh, I've been holding my eye contact for too long and now you don't know what to do. But eye contact is a strong builder of affiliation. Not only is it helpful for reading and understanding another person's emotions, but also there's some study.

showing that the longer you hold eye contact, the more someone reports respecting you. It also seems to be important for triggering interbrain synchrony, which is this idea of kind of your brain synchronizing in certain ways with the person you're interacting with, which can be supportive for like collaboration and teamwork. So eye contact definitely important. However, you know, this is kind of like my stance on on all things science and medicine related. if it's stressful, don't do it. You're told to do something on social media because it's good for you. And then you try it and it's really uncomfortable.

That's probably not going to be a thing that's supportive for your health if it triggers a stress reaction. So the good news, though, is that there's this one study where they came up with this like eye contact illusion. I don't even know why they tested this, how this came about. But they basically found that when people were three feet apart, if you were looking at the other person's mouth, they have, they cannot. tell you're looking at their mouth. If you ask them, they will think, yes, you're looking at my eyes. I remember reading that study and then going upstairs out of my office and going out to my wife and just staring at her mouth and talking to her for a while and just like starting laughing. And she's like, what is it? And I'm like, nothing. Anything seem off about me? And she's like,

no, what? And she didn't notice. So I have used it a little bit because people don't really, it's normal to look at someone's mouth because you often do that to figure out phonetically what they're saying. So if you do feel uncomfortable making eye contact, there's a little cheat code. One of the other things I think you recommend in terms of upping our interaction quotient is to give more compliments and express more gratitude. Say more. Well, first off, it's just a good thing to do, of course, but it's also, it's good for us.

It's another one of those mood boosters, which I think is fascinating that being nice to others makes us feel good. Why is that? I don't know. Is it because we're gaining some form of social credit? you know, or building our social capital. I'm not sure, but it is a reliable way to, you know, boost your mood and well-being.

And, I mean, gosh, if there's anything out there that you can do that makes you feel good and also makes someone else feel good, I think those are the things we should be focusing on to, you know, not only boost our own health and wellness, but also kind of heal our fractured society. Another recommendation is to speak more and ask questions. I think a lot of people feel like speaking more and asking questions or things you shouldn't do if you want to be polite. So this is from the chapter on likability.

There's a bunch of research on likeability and what makes people likable. Yeah, we typically think that we should kind of speak less. There's a kind of general assumption that people like to talk and like to talk about themselves. And so you should give them the space to do that. So there was a study where they had college students interact and they told them beforehand, basically, this is how much you're going to get to talk. They kind of governed it with a timer. And so people were sometimes assigned like 30% of the time or 70% of the time.

And what they found was that actually the people who spent more time speaking were reported as more likable. So there's an upper limit again. You know, you don't want to overspeak in that you're spending too much time talking. You also don't want to speak over someone and interrupt them. But generally this, you know, the impulse. to hide yourself and kind of remain quiet to preserve your reputation, maybe misguided. It may actually be better to open up and share. And that's also been shown that sharing things about yourself, being vulnerable, those are

great ways to build connection and deepen bonds. You mentioned that there's research around likability. What does the science say we can do aside from what you've already just mentioned to make ourselves more likable? Some things are obvious where someone's like, oh, I watched the same show. and you're like, my gosh, it's my favorite show. Like, of course, having things in common is a great one. But some of these, I'm more fascinated by some of the, like, less obvious things.

For instance, mimicry, super fascinating. It's very common in interaction to model the body position of who you're interacting with. And I, ever since I read these studies, I notice it all the time. If, you know, do this, I cross my arms in a conversation. And then all of a sudden, a minute later, the other person crosses their arms. Happens all the time. it turns out it's like an affiliative kind of subconscious behavior that when you're just like when you say oh we watch the same TV show it's like hey look at this our bodies go in the same

position and when you're noticing kind of subconsciously that you're sharing a position you're doing the same thing you're speaking the same way as someone you're making the same facial expressions it makes you more likable also uh the brain seems to extrapolate whatever it's seeing to generalize to a person's reputation or to a person's personality. So that's why like smiling, if you're, if you're seen smiling, you're deemed like more trustworthy and more affiliative and more likable. Whereas on the other side of this,

there's no scientific word for resting bitchface, but for those who suffer from resting bitchface are often judged as being like kind of, you know, that it's you know that must be what their personality is so you know being being being expressive sharing your emotions smiling you know having things in common or just a few of the things that make people likable it's so interesting that there's like science here and we can follow a recipe it's like the thing most of us want ever since like school we want to be popular we want to be liked and actually there are things you can do to make yourself more

likable. That's just really good news. Yeah, I don't necessarily want people or hope people that will read the book and say, oh my gosh, here's my recipe for success, right? Although likeability is important. It definitely is. The more liked you are, you know, people treat you better. But rather, I hope it will be a guide for anyone who reads it and says, oh, I don't do that very well. Maybe that's something I should work on. Rather than a, let me completely, you know, artificialize myself into this hyper likable, you know, key that goes in the line. lock and turns it. Because the other thing to consider is that authenticity is important. So if your proceed is inauthentic, then your likeability drops. So if you try to make yourself something

you're not to be likable, it may not work. These don't scan to me as manipulation or tools or a recipe for falsity. There are little hacks like eye contact and giving compliments, but at root, the recipe is to be yourself, but to do it strategically, like to be vulnerable in the right dose and at the right time, for example. I completely agree. Yeah, it's about being yourself, but also sometimes noticing when yourself may not be likable, you know, like maybe if your natural instinct is to interrupt people all the time and, you know, be really outspoken and, like, voice opinions that are controversial and stuff like that. Like, you know, maybe it's, it's worth noticing, okay, hey, likeability is

important. That's a quality I have that may be unlikeable. And so maybe that's, I should work on for myself. You know, it's it's about understanding yourself and and really ultimately bettering your relationships because relationships are so important. We've established that interaction is important for the brain, perhaps the most important intervention. And yet we are in an era when we have this technology that's called social media. Can we get any of the benefits of social interaction via social media? Okay, I'm generally net negative on social media. I think that if something happens, all the Silicon Valley servers shut down and there were no longer any social medias or social media formats out there, I think that people's mood and productivity and sleep and depression levels and anxiety levels, they would all go in the direction we hope they go in.

And there's evidence for that. You know, it's people who spend more time on social media, higher risk of anxiety, depression. they have poorer sleep, they sleep less. Whether this is a place where you can have a meaningful interaction is a totally different question. And I think there's a time and a place for it. I think for people who have trouble connecting in person or for people who, you know, are geographically restricted and wants to connect with people in a different area, I think it's terrific.

But for the average person, if we were to remove all in-person interactions and replace them with social media interactions, horrible consequences, in my opinion. You know, one thing I've noticed is this. Empathy, something that I was, you know, leaving research at Stanford on the biology of empathy, is not something that we see a whole lot of online. When we post, maybe you've seen this in your social channels and, you know, anybody who posts social media content has seen the what happens in the comment section. And you don't know, you can scroll on any post and look at the social channels and look at

the comment section. And what you will find is a ridiculous level of hostility and anger and division and arguments. And people start arguing with each other in the comments. It's really out of control. And this actually like hit me when I was doing this research and I would go to the lab, do experiments on empathy, come home, post videos on social media, debunking misinformation, etc. And seeing that and it clicked for me this one day that like, oh my gosh, as I mentioned earlier, the way that your brain knows you're interacting with someone is by observing their social cues, facial expressions, vocal tone and all that, we don't have any of those things on social media. And that is the way that the brain activates these empathy systems,

to help you understand what someone is feeling and help you feel what they are feeling. And so, like, for instance, if I said something really mean to you right now, Dan, and it really upset you and you started crying, I would feel bad because I'm sitting here observing your emotion, and naturally my brain starts to soak those up and I feel what you feel. This is empathy. But if as soon as we signed off from this, I mailed you a letter saying the exact same thing and you open the letter and you sob and you feel horrible, I feel nothing because I'm not there. I'm not observing it. I'm not witnessing the reaction I caused. And so how can we feel empathy for each other when we're leaving mean comments and then closing our phone and going away and

forgetting it happened and we're not seeing each other. We're not interacting with each other. So like I said, I think there's a time and a place for it, but I think on average, the interactions we have online are not realistic. They are more hostile. They are less productive. And people generally kind of don't behave naturally. They behave in a very kind of disconnected, sort of like animalistic way that's, I don't think good for humanity. Setting aside what social media does to our empathic capacities, what do we know about what it does to the brains generally of heavy users? Yeah, so there's some research I remember reading a few years ago about social media addiction. I mean, social media platforms are designed to be as captivating as possible, right? They are fighting for your attention. and this is also something that's been increasingly acknowledged.

Are they more addictive than cocaine? No, I wouldn't say so. Unless they, you know, starts stimulating those dopamine pathways directly. But, I mean, that's kind of what they're approximating, right? They are trying to make something a product that is as tailored to your interests as possible and just basically as addictive as possible. I mean, in fact, I think about this all the time. If you look at any of these social media platforms, kind of what they look like.

There's a video that pops up in your... your feed. You watch it. You have some dopamine reaction. You know, is this good? Is this interesting? Do I like this? If not, swipe. How's this one? Swipe. Boom. This one's amazing. Oh, my gosh. Okay. On to the next one. Hunting for that next hit, right? And the rewards, the good videos are delivered kind of randomly, right? It's not like every other video. It's like you go three and then boom, there's a really good one. This is called a variable schedule of reinforcement that the, like if you have a mouse, picture of mouse, like pressing a lever and getting a little treat, the, the best way to get a mouse to press a lever is to have random increments of rewards

delivered. They press it once, they get one, five presses later, they get one, and then two presses later, and then 12 presses later, just random. It's totally unpredictable. This is the exact same mechanism that social media uses to make you keep swiping. And also, I've noticed this on the creator side, arguably even worse. You post a video, you're hoping it goes viral, Well, not this one. Post another one. Not this one. Post another one. Boom. Virality. Amazing. Oh, my gosh. I need to post 20 more videos. You post the 25th video viral. And you end up hunting and hunting and hunting. And I mean, I don't know. I would imagine like these are smart people behind these platforms. They know how to, I don't want to say control, but influence human behavior. And so when you have that system paired with a hyper-personalized algorithm,

recommendation algorithm, what you get is an intensely rewarding experience that's hard to look away from. There is some evidence about social media addiction, and there's been some even some neuroscience done. From what I remember reading, the brain changes that are seen in social people who are diagnosed with social media addiction are very much resemble the brain changes of drug addiction. And so the question there for me is, is there a. brain signature of someone who is prone to becoming addicted to something.

And that's why there's a correlation between those two types of brains. Or is it that social media, you know, is a drug, basically? That was all fascinating. Just in terms of how we as individuals should think about interacting with social media, if I'm hearing you correctly and please correct me if I'm making the wrong extrapolation here, it feels like your argument is, hey, look, a little bit of social media is not going to kill you and maybe it could even be fun or enjoyable on some level, and that's, that's okay. You don't need to be a Luddite.

You don't need to, like, disconnect from this thriving for better or worse aspect of human affairs right now. However, if you are doing too much of it or if you're not actually getting IRL interaction, that could be quite problematic. Yeah. The only thing I'll add to that is there are literally clinical trials. that had been done where the drug or whatever, the intervention that was tested was a break from social media. And so they asked people to, you know, for a week or two weeks to limit their social media use or to completely stop it, which, by the way, they find, they often find that it's

impossible to get people to actually stop using social media. So they usually end up having to limit it. And when people do that, their depression levels, their anxiety levels, both go down. you know, they started sleeping better. So, yes, I agree with that. I think that as long as you're limiting it and you're kind of monitoring it, it's okay. Because, I mean, let's face it, social media is pleasant, right? You love going on and seeing something. Some people cannot disconnect. In fact, I cannot tell you the number of times where, you know, I meet someone and someone says, oh, you know, this guy does TikTok or whatever. So how TikTok comes up. And I cannot

tell you, probably 90% of the people I talk to say, oh, I can't have TikTok. I get addicted to it. I literally had to delete it from my phone because I was losing days of my life. And now, Instagram, YouTube, even like LinkedIn, all these platforms are becoming more TikTok-esque. And I think there's a good reason for it because it works really well. I remember a member of Congress calling TikTok digital fentanyl, which struck me as a quite vivid description. For people who are socially anxious, is alcohol an effective and appropriate social lubricant? Well, I don't want to like, prescribe alcohol here, but I mean, can it, can it be helpful? Of course. You know, I think I remember a study finding that for every one drink consumed, social anxiety reduces by 4%, which,

you know, 4%'s not a whole lot, but you have five drinks and all of a sudden you're down 20%. That's pretty strong. Yeah, and you're also naked and peeing in the corner of the bar. Right. Yeah, so my take on this is alcohol is not something that's healthy for you. That has been increasingly talked about recently, which is good, I think, because we've built an entire world around alcohol as a social lubricant. It's also very much worth noting that alcohol makes us feel more comfortable socially, but it actually does not make us better interactors. It makes us much worse interactors. And like you said, you're naked peeing in the corner. I mean, the reason why that example makes sense is because when we start getting drunk, we stop caring about what other people

think. This is very well established both, you know, in the world and also in neuroscience, that people kind of turn off their mental models of what others are thinking. They're worse at understanding. understanding other people's opinion or perspectives and stuff. They actually, there's a study showing that tipsy people showed less activity in the amygdala, the emotional reaction kind of area, to negative social content. And so the way I think about that is you're drunk at a bar and you make a super inappropriate joke towards one of your coworkers. And everyone's like, oh, my gosh, like, how could you say that?

in that moment, your brain's very likely having a weaker reaction because it's like, oh, I don't really care. You know, the amygdala is not firing up as well. And so you're like super not socially anxious, but you're also doing things that are not conducive for building connection and also, you know, struggling with empathy. And so it's good that humanity has found this kind of system that allows us to connect through alcohol, but I do wish it were a different drug that we were all using to get together. Well, like which drug, MDMA?

I honestly didn't mean anything specific by that, but probably if I had to pick one, I'd probably go MDMA, although that's also not something you want to be doing all the time for your brain health. Yes, I have plenty. I have voluminous amounts of experience with MDMA, and I love it. And I would not readily recommend it because it can, you know, the days afterwards can be, As a friend of mine has said, you are borrowing happiness from the future. Yeah, I love your transparency on this show, Dan.

I really appreciate it, honestly. I've mentioned this on the show many times. So loyal listeners, I apologize. I'm going to say something I've said many times before. I'm a super extrovert, and I've also, like, as a consequence of hosting the show for so many years, I've been highly sensitive to the benefits of social interaction and benefits I was overlooking for many years because of workaholism and other stupid behaviors. I have many, many standing dinners and lunches with friends.

And one of them is with three women who I'm friends with. And one of them was saying made a comment to me. And this is the relevant piece to your talking about how open I am. She described my business as an empire built on my own vulnerability. And, you know, I'm not a researcher like you. And I, so I'm not an expert in anything. I'm not a meditation teacher. All I have is my ability to,

take from contemplative history and modern psychology and neuroscience and refract it through the lens of my own personal experience in service of the audience. Oh, well, it's probably what makes you so likable. Well, I appreciate that. Yeah. It doesn't always work. I have found you, sir, to be extremely likable. And this conversation to be very, very fun. Final question for you is, can you just promote your book and your social media channels and your website and everything that you want us to know about? My book, it's called Why Brains Need Friends. And for international listeners, it's published in like 16 or 17 languages.

It's really a neuroscientist's attempt at trying to solve the loneliness crisis by infusing as much neuroscience understanding as possible, written at a level that anyone can understand. But, you know, the brain is a organ shrouded in mystery and darkness. My goal with the book is to basically help people understand what they cannot see. What is really going on inside the brain? What sort of benefits can you experience from connection? What things have you maybe never considered that you should consider, like drugs and likability and empathy and all of these facets of our lives that influence our brains, influence our health, influence our connections, and we may have never considered before.

So if that's your jam, I appreciate anyone who's interested in reading it. We'll put links in the show notes. If anybody wants to buy, we'll put links to your website and your, social media accounts, if anybody wants to get more from Dr. Ben Ryan. In the meantime, Ben, great job with this. Great to meet you. Thank you for work. Thanks for your time. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It's been honestly a great conversation. I appreciate it. Thank you so much to everybody who works so hard to make this show. 10% happier is produced by Tara Anderson, our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People.

Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer, DJ Kashmir, is our executive. producer and Nick Thorburn of the great indie rock band Islands wrote our theme. One last thing I want to say before you go. If you enjoy this show, please do me slash us a solid. Follow the show and leave a rating and a review on whatever platform you watch or listen to us on. It only takes a minute. It's free and it really helps new people find us and spread the good news that the mind is trainable. Thank you. Sincerely, I mean it. Thank you.