A deep understanding of any social species requires a neurobiological understanding of how and why brains interact. In this culminating seminar, we will critically examine the social contexts that forged and continue to shape human intelligence. We will be considering evolutionary, comparative, game-theoretic, computational, developmental, and pathological aspects of our social intelligence from a neurobiological perspective. The goal is to gain insight into how humans became such big-brained other-regarding apes, and how our brains developmentally construct and pathologically lose socio-cognitive faculties, as seems to be the case in certain psychiatric and neurological disorders. Students will be expected to read and critically assess the neuroscientific literature and explore empirical opportunities for new insights into the neurobiology of human social intelligence.
Welcome to Neurobiology of Social Intelligence, where we will critically examine the social contexts that forged and continue to shape human intelligence.
The course consists of weekly readings across different theoretical and empirical domains of research. We will collectively discuss these readings with the aim of synthesizing new, cross-domain insights on human social intelligence. On Tuesdays, you will in small groups summarize and present the assigned readings in class. On Thursdays, you may be called upon to share what you learned from a recent empirical paper that you found in the literature related to the topic of the week. In the final two weeks, you will be expected to present and complete an empirical paper on a hypothetical study of choice related to social intelligence, considering the various domains and approaches covered in class.
For our first class, I recommend reading the below chapter from the late Nicholas Humphrey, featuring a great analogy in the opening paragraphs between natural selection and the production line of the Model T Ford.
This week, we will take an evolutionary stance to see what we can learn from the main hypotheses surrounding our relatively large brains. Special attention will be given to the cognitive challenges facing a social organism in an ever-evolving cultural niche.
To find other literature on this topic, I recommend entering keywords into websites like Google Scholar, JSTOR and PubMed, besides looking at the reference sections of the target articles below. Moreover, PubMed can display more recent work citing these articles in the Cited By section.
This week, we will examine the functional neuroanatomy of the social brain, assessing which brain areas are particularly sensitive to the cognitive demands of a large social community.
This week, we will discuss the Nobel prize-earning framework of Game Theory, which aims to explain real-world attractor states of heightened competition (e.g., race to the bottom), but also raises the question of why most people spontaneously choose to cooperate instead. We will also discuss the cooperative breeding hypothesis, an account of how humans became such other-regarding apes.
This week, we will focus on the cognitive hardware and software that allow us to make sense of each other and ourselves in terms of mental states, a prerequisite for booststrapping oneself into a human social world.
This week, we will zoom in on theories and data on Autism Spectrum Disorder, a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by social-communication deficits we still understand very little about.
This week, we will look into what neurological accidents and neurodegenerative diseases like frontotemporal dementia can teach us about human brain organization and social cognition.
Communication is often explained in terms of sending and receiving messages, presupposing that people already share the same set of rules for inserting and extracting meaning from those messages. This may hold true in the animal world, where a South African honeybee signaling the location of a flower patch would be immediately understood in a New Zealand beehive. As we will see this week, human communication is different. We employ our words and gestures in virtually infinite ways, frequently in a vague or nonliteral manner. Yet our conversation partner can usually grasp the intended meaning of our utterance at its first occurrence, thanks to its context of use in an ongoing interaction. How people define what counts as context, and how context determines the meaning of an utterance, are questions that mark a fundamental gap in our understanding of how humans communicate.