Editor’s Note: We are pleased to bring you this arti­cle by Sian Beilock, thanks to our col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Greater Good Mag­a­zine. (Pic by Leigh Wells)

Ever won­der why some peo­ple have more friends than oth­ers? Why some run in large and com­plex social cir­cles while oth­ers have a small group of acquain­tances? There are no doubt a vari­ety of fac­tors that influ­ence the extent of our social net­works. New research shows, how­ever, that one fac­tor we may not have con­sid­ered before is right inside our head.

In a paper pub­lished recently in Nature Neu­ro­science, researchers showed that the num­ber of friends we have could be pre­dicted by the size of our amygdala—a small, almond-shaped region located deep inside our brains. Read the rest of this entry »

Let us first announce an upcom­ing Vir­tual Book Club Dis­cus­sion focused on Brain Fit­ness, to take place on Mon­day March 14th in honor of Brain Aware­ness Week 2011 (March 14-20th). Let’s dis­cuss burn­ing issues together: Why care about neu­ro­plas­tic­ity and the pos­si­bil­i­ties it offers to enrich our qual­ity of life? What does cog­ni­tive reserve research mean to the way we learn, work, play, live? What is Brain Train­ing — and what is not? All the con­ver­sa­tion be vir­tual, via social media tools. You can learn more here.

This edi­tion of Sharp­Brains monthly eNewslet­ter brings many arti­cles on those top­ics. Enjoy! Read the rest of this entry »

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…

Read the rest of this entry »