The Social Brain
November 13th, 2008
I had the opportunity to attend a great talk by Professor Clive Gamble at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology:
“Breaking the Mind Barrier: The Archeology and Evolution of Our Social Brain” with Professor Clive Gamble, Co-Director British Academy Centenary Project, Thursday November 13, 2008 6:00 PM, The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, http://www.museum.upenn.edu/gamble
Ideas I collected from the presentation
Restated (maybe misstated) by me, not quotations by the presenter.
Socialization mediated by tools / technology. Emotion as a basis for social cohesiveness. Getting group size to 150 required language. Developed along with increase in brain size. Childhood development; 3-year-olds think that other minds are thinking the same as theirs. Five-year-olds recognizes the existence of other minds that think differently. Understanding the existence of other minds that think differently is necessary for the development of empathy, guilt and next order emotions. These emotions are what create group cohesiveness. Therefore in order to have a group size of 150 the mind must be developed to recognize the existence of other minds that think differently. This is a higher order development above self-awareness.
- Self-Awareness
- Three-year-old children who recognize the existence of another mind. (This is why 3 year-old children can’t lie).
- Five-year-old children who recognize the existence of another mind that thinks differently than their own.
My Thoughts
One consequence of this evolutionary development is the importance of the affective aspects of social computing. Technology mediated socialization is based on the emotions that hold people together. MySpace and Facebook have obvious affective components for maintaining cohesiveness of a group. This is particularly evident in adolescents’ use of the system for socialization. Complaints from friends that I should stop posting work stuff and only post fun stuff to Facebook is consistent with this. In posting work-related content I am inconsistent with the more affective kinds of bonds that form around personal content. How can this inform the design of collaborative support for open-notebook science?
Chemistry sites are potentially less emotive than Facebook style collaboration for users who treat them as pure reference systems yet chemistry sites are potentially more emotive than Facebook for users who are moving the field forward. To make scientific collaboration successful it may be necessary to engage users in a personal level in debates and opinions.
Visualization and knowledge maps can support this kind of engagement with the content by helping to make the debates more explicit. This will allow users to situate themselves within the group’s emotional structure rather than simply the hierarchical or relation-clustering structures. Ultimately this can lead to users having stronger feeling about their contributions in the group. How does the limit of 150 relationships fit into this? It was interesting to see this number 150 come up three days in a row: Tuesday while reading the November issue of Communications of the ACM, Wednesday during the meeting with Professor Bradley, Thursday on the slides during this presentation. It is probably worth digging deeper to see if this number is being used correctly or if it has taken on a life of its own in scientific discourse.