Minding the Social Brain

A generation of social neuroscientists uses acronyms to identify the structural neural networks revealed in the NIH Human Connectome Project. They know that a medial brain hub of nodal networks, the Default Mode (DM), uses most of the brain's activation energy. Responding to the unexpected, it adapts the brain's predictive capacity by learning - modifying its own synaptic structure. During syndrome formation in brain damage, depression, traumatic anxiety, or psychosis, the DM maintains familiar mental fantasy and reverie - even when its core networks should be processing new data for adaptive problem-solving. Alzheimer's disease decimates all the nodes of this hub.

Just as industry alongside government generated our genome code, researchers worldwide in the private sector and government are already exploring how a brain's emergent property unifies its mind. Alert to perspectives that determine their future, workers in the social field have to develop their own emergent learning. Dr Harris here provides a Rosetta Stone for exploring neural networks, mental hubs, mind/brain synthesis-and institutions that externalize these structures. Extending Freud's discovery of a person's dynamic unconscious, he depicts a dynamic social unconscious mediating social, economic, and political policy. From this perspective he presents contemporary and historical social syndromes. Collective PTSD, for instance, manifests in global criminal economies, widespread poverty, media escapism, and political denial. This is a compelling analysis of individual and collective syndromes that have their own emergent sources in both social process and brain process.

'Every page is a treasure trove of novel and integrative ideas. Dr Harris artfully draws from cutting-edge neuroscience to contemporary culture; from classical psychoanalysis to social and political movements and back through theanatomy and chemistry of the brain. Looking for the neural substrates which link such things as mythology and history to developmental and quotidian human behaviors, this innovative thinker blazes new trails in our journey toward understanding where mind meets brain, creatively locating that junction within concentric circles of social context.'

- Virginia L. Susman, Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry, Weill Cornell