10/7/13 10:56 AM Print: » The neuroscience of Facebook: It makes our brains happy » Print - Salon.com Page 1 of 3 http://www.salon.com/2013/10/05/the_neuroscience_of_facebook_it_makes_our_brains_happy/print http://www.salon.com/2013/10/05/the_neuroscience_of_facebook_it_makes_our_brains_happy/ SATURDAY, OCT 5, 2013 5:00 PM UTC The neuroscience of Facebook: It makes our brains happy Our brains are wired to connect -- so it's no surprise we spend 56 billion minutes a month on the social network BY MATTHEW D. LIEBERMAN Excerpted from "Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired To Connect" The popular conception of human nature emerging from psychology over the last century suggests that we are something of a hybrid, combining reptilian, instinct-driven motivational tendencies with superior higher-level analytic powers. Our motivational tendencies evolved from our reptilian brains eons ago and focus on the four Fs: fighting, fleeing, feeding, and fooling around. In contrast, our intellectual capacities are relatively recent advances. They are what makes us special. One of the things that distinguishes primates from other animals, and humans from other primates, is the size of our brains—in particular, the size of our prefrontal cortex, that is, the front part of the brain sitting right behind the eyes. Our big brains allow us to engage in all sorts of intelligent activities. But that doesn’t mean our brains evolved to do those particular things. Humans are the only animals that can learn to play chess, but no one would argue that the prefrontal cortex evolved specifically so that we could play the game of kings. Rather, the prefrontal cortex is often thought of as an all-purpose computer; we can load it up with almost any software (that is, teach it things). Thus, the prefrontal cortex seems to have evolved for solving novel hard problems, with chess being just one of an endless string of problems it can solve. From this perspective there might not be anything special at all about our ability and tendency to think about the social world. Other people can be thought of as a series of hard problems to be solved because they stand between us and our reptilian desires. Just as our prefrontal cortex can allow us to master the game of chess, the same reasoning suggests that our