Final Report Summary - SOCIAL BRAIN (Fitting The World to Minds: Brain Basis of Sharing and Transmitting Representations of the Social World)
The main goal of this project was to build a model of processing, storage and transfer of social information across interacting humans. To that end, we used state-of-the art brain signal analysis tools in highly naturalistic brain imaging experiments and mapped how social and emotional information is represented 1) in individual brains and 2) across interacting brains. We discovered that social information is represented in a distributed cortical network, whose activity becomes synchronized across individuals when they engage in social interaction. The degree of such synchrony can be used as an assay for interpersonal attunement or similarity of mental states across individuals. Using pattern recognition and novel “bodily sensation mapping” analysis we established that emotions are represented as discrete activity patterns in the brain, body, and also in the subjective awareness. emotions coordinate social interaction by managing the degree to with different individuals’ brains become synchronized during social interaction. This principle helps us in understanding both positive (e.g. affiliation) and negative (e.g. aggression) intragroup processes. Altogether these findings help us to elucidate how the brains parse and process our most important environment – the other people and their relations with us.