We human beings are social ani­mals. It seems intu­itive (even for intro­verts!) that social con­tact has ben­e­fits. Obvi­ously we need other peo­ple to ful­fill basic needs such mak­ing sure that our genes out­live. Maybe less obvi­ously we seem to need other peo­ple to main­tain ade­quate lev­els of men­tal well being and motivation.

Even less obvi­ously, social con­tact may help us improve our brain functions…

Men­tal fit­ness seems to depend on a large part on being con­nected with other peo­ple. For instance peo­ple with low social sup­port seem to be more prone to men­tal ill­ness (McGuire & Raleigh, 1986). In 2007, Glad­stone and col­leagues stud­ied 218 patients with major depres­sion and found out that low social sup­port, espe­cially com­ing from the fam­ily, was asso­ci­ated with chronic depression.

Merely imag­in­ing lone­li­ness can neg­a­tively affect our behavior…

Baumeis­ter et al. (2005) showed that com­pared to peo­ple who were not told any­thing, peo­ple who were told that they would likely end up alone in life:

- were less able to make them­selves con­sume a healthy but bad-tasting bev­er­age
– quit faster in try­ing to solve hard and frus­trat­ing puz­zles.
Telling peo­ple that their future would be marred by a ten­dency to be acci­dent prone (injuries and the like) did not affect their behav­ior. This shows how much social con­tact is cru­cial for human beings!

A new study, pub­lished in 2008 by Ybarra and his col­leagues went even fur­ther by show­ing that social­iz­ing and men­tal exer­cises have very sim­i­lar effects in terms of improv­ing brain functions!

Down­load paper: Men­tal Exer­cis­ing Through Sim­ple Social­iz­ing: Social Inter­ac­tion Pro­motes Gen­eral Cog­ni­tive Func­tion­ing (PDF)

Ybarra hypoth­e­sized that social inter­ac­tion could facil­i­tate cog­ni­tive functioning.

First, they col­lected data from 3600 peo­ple aged 24 to 96. They assessed how often these peo­ple talked on the phone with friends, neigh­bors and rel­a­tives and how often they got together with the same par­ties. They also assessed men­tal func­tion­ing of their sam­ple using the mini-mental exam.

Even after con­trol­ling for phys­i­cal health and daily activ­ity lev­els, they found that the more socially engaged peo­ple were, the higher their cog­ni­tive performance.

Great news, right? Stay con­nected and your neu­rons will stay healthy!

The lim­i­ta­tions of this type of study are numer­ous though. Most of all the result is a CORRELATION. That is, the result shows that peo­ple who are socially engaged are also doing well in terms of brain func­tion. This does not mean that being socially engaged results or CAUSES good brain functioning.

This cor­re­la­tion can be inter­preted in sev­eral ways:
a) being socially engaged results in good brain func­tion­ing
b) good brain func­tion­ing results in being socially engaged
c) being wealthy (for instance) may result both in being socially engaged and good brain functioning

For­tu­nately, Ybarra and col­leagues were quite aware of the lim­i­ta­tions of cor­re­la­tions. They pro­ceeded to con­duct another study to show that social inter­ac­tion indeed CAUSES bet­ter cog­ni­tive performance.

They ran­domly assigned par­tic­i­pants (aged 18–21) to three groups:
– a social group, in which the par­tic­i­pants engaged in a dis­cus­sion of a social issue for 10mn
– an intel­lec­tual activ­i­ties group, in which the par­tic­i­pants solved stim­u­lat­ing tasks (cross­word puz­zles and the likes) for 10mn
– a con­trol group, in which the par­tic­i­pants watched a 10mn clip of Seinfeld

After they par­tic­i­pated in the dis­cus­sion or watched the clip or solved the puz­zles, the cog­ni­tive func­tion­ing of all the par­tic­i­pants was assessed. Two tasks were used (for those you are inter­ested: these were a speed of pro­cess­ing task and a work­ing mem­ory task). 

Here is what Ybarra et al. found (see the graph)

Peo­ple in the intel­lec­tual activ­i­ties group did bet­ter in the cog­ni­tive tasks than peo­ple who merely watched a movie.
… this shows one more time that stim­u­lat­ing your neu­rons is a great way to boost your performance

Peo­ple who were in the social group did bet­ter in the cog­ni­tive tasks than peo­ple who merely watched a movie.
…. This is the first time that social inter­ac­tion is shown to directly CAUSE bet­ter cog­ni­tive func­tion­ing. This is a very excit­ing result. Remem­ber that par­tic­i­pants engaged in dis­cus­sion for only 10m!

The ben­e­fit from social inter­ac­tion was as great as the ben­e­fit from intel­lec­tual activ­i­ties.
What we would like to know next would be whether these types of effects are additional!

Why would social inter­ac­tion boost brain function?

Ybarra and col­leagues offer the fol­low­ing rea­son­ing. Social inter­ac­tion involves many behav­iors that require mem­ory, atten­tion and con­trol. These men­tal processes are also involved in many cog­ni­tive tasks. Thus social inter­ac­tion would act as a prime, it would “oil” these processes so that they are ready to be used when a cog­ni­tive task is to be solved.

This is a ten­ta­tive expla­na­tion that may require some refine­ment but the results are here! Social inter­ac­tion seems to ben­e­fit the brain. Let’s talk then! And limit TV time…

 

— This arti­cle was writ­ten by Pas­cale Mich­e­lon, Ph. D., for SharpBrains.com. Copy­right 2008. Dr. Mich­e­lon has a Ph.D. in Cog­ni­tive Psy­chol­ogy and has worked as a Research Sci­en­tist at Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­sity in Saint Louis, in the Psy­chol­ogy Depart­ment. She con­ducted sev­eral research projects to under­stand how the brain makes use of visual infor­ma­tion and mem­o­rizes facts. She is now an Adjunct Fac­ulty at Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­sity, and teaches Mem­ory Work­shops in numer­ous retire­ment com­mu­ni­ties in the St Louis area.