See Also: Book Notes, Conceptual Spaces Cheat Sheet, Swarm Intelligence, Blank Slate, Clock of the Long Now, Info Viz & Perception, Consciousness: a user's guide, On Intelligence, The Quest for Consciousness, The Space Between Our Ears, The Stuff of Thought. Origin of Human Emotions

The Neuroscience of Human Relationships:
  Attachment and the Developing Social Brain

by Louis Cozolino, 2006, W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN: 13:978-0-393-70454-9

This book is absolutely Brilliant! Cozolino presents the social brain and the "social synapse". Quote #1:

Gaze, pupil dilation, facial expressions, posture, proximity, touch, and mirror systems are all reflexive and obligatory systems that work below conscious awareness. These and other systems yet to be discovered create a high-speed information linkup between us, establishing ongoing physiological and emotional synchrony. (p.337)

[not to mention the emotion laden information rich audio communication][ or smell - pheromones, etc. ] image HuberFacialMuscles.jpg

GPFPTM Cheat Sheet

GazeInterpersonal communication - (See below)fight, sex or both. Tribe survival - predator alert.
The whites of our eyes make this effective.
Pupil
Dilation
Pupils are smaller when we scrunize, larger when we accept and appreciate what we see.
(not dialate) di- lattitude - spread - move sideways.
Facial
Expression
Hardwired to emotions. Common to all humans: fear, surprise, disgust, anger, ... [Huber Image to right]
PostureHow you look, stand, walk and gesture. ( gestures are abstract and symbolic like language]
Touch and
Proximity
Obvious? Intimate? Is sex subsumed by touch?
How much higher can the bandwidth be - initmate is high bandwidth.
Mirror
Systems
Helps us understand emotion in others because our facial muscles simulate the emotion.

Notes

The book has six parts: making the social animal case, brain hardware, the "social synapse", faces, disorders and the final wrap up section called Social Neural Plasticity. Each of the 23 chapters starts with a dense block of technical information - and each has a clear table that makes the amount of information a little less intimidating. Sprinkled thru-out are vignettes from the author's psychotherapy practice that exhibit various pathologies and mechanisms and how they can healed. The text is 343 pages with 76 pages of references and 20 pages of index. This is a feast of well researched details woven into a single narrative.

Making the case for the social animal talks about some of the evolutions that help the group/tribe by giving away the internal state of the individual. The two that really struck me are "the whites of our eyes" and blushing. The sclera is black in all other great apes. In humans, it is white and our eyelids show the entire width of our eyes. It is obvious what the person you are talking to is looking at. This is a specific human evolution. See: wikipedia:Cooperative_eye_hypothesis. We are the only animal that blushes. If there are only other people on our left side, we only blush on our left side!

p.162: "Like pupil dilation, blushing is a visual readout of the state of our autonomic arousal. Blushing is caused by the dilation of the small capillaries of the face triggered by sympathetic arousal (Gerlach et al.. 2003). We blush in situations in which (1) our social identity is threatened, (2) we are being scrutinized, (3) we are being overpraised, or (4) we are told we are blushing even when we aren't (Leary et al., 1992). Blushing, a social signal unique to humans, demonstrates that we are aware that others are aware of us (Crozier, 2004). In fact, it has been found that staring at one side of a person's face while she is singing results in more blushing on that side of the face (Drummond & Mirco, 2004). The fact that blushing almost always occurs in the presence of others speaks to its role as a form of social communication. Because blushing can't be controlled voluntarily, it cannot be used for conscious deception. "

The brain hardware section focuses on those engines that participate in social processing the "social brain". The main structures are: orbital medial prefrontal cortex (OMPFC), Somatosensory Cortex, Cingulate Cortex, Hypothalmus, Insula Cortex, Hippocampus and Amygdala. There are several other systems that are discussed. One of which is the vagus, aka tenth cranial nerve - under the heading Social Engagement System. "The vagus extends from the brainstem to multiple points within the body, including the heart, lungs, throat and digestive system." (p.60) Also, Corticotrophin releasing factor - neat; vomeronasal organ, aka Jacobsen's organ "social smells".

Regulation systems:
Stress Regulation ( the HPA (hypothalmic-pituitary-adrenal) system of hormone regulations) [HPA needs to be in the index]
Fear Regulation (OMPFC-amygdala balance)
Social Engagement (the vagal system of autonomic regulation)

Social Motivation can be divided into three categories: 1) bonding and attachment (regulated by peptides, vassopressin and oxycontin), 2) attraction (dopamine and other catecholamines) and 3) sex drive (androgens and estrogens) (p.62) Table 8.1 (p.121) Biochemistry of Social Motivation summarizes. (p.120) "When you depend on a substitute for love, you never get enough"!!!

Multiple systems of memory: implicit, explicit, implicit social, explicit social.

The fight or flight mechanism depends on the sympathetic pathway of the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) (p.88) [ANS should be in the index]

Right: Illustrations from Netter's (see below) image NetterNeuro.jpg
Netter's Atlas of Human Neuroscience (Netter Basic Science) David L. Felten MD PhD (Author), Ralph Jozefowicz (Author)

p.146 Table 10-1, Attachment Research, mother and child. If the mother is:
Free-Autonomous, the child is Secure - seeks proximity, easy to soothe
Mother is dismissing, the child is Avoidant - denying, minimizing
Mother is enmeshed-Ambivalent, the child is Anxious-Ambivalent, not easy to soothe, not quick to return to play
Mother is Disorganized, the child is disorganized, chaotic, self-injurious

p.157, "If people maintain eye contact for more than a couple of seconds, they will either fight, have sex, or both."

p.177 facial expressions and emotions are so hard wired that we imitate a persons facial expression to get more insight into there emotions. Awesome illustration of facial muscles from Huber 1931. Also, I thought there was a bit on microexpressions in here, but, I can't find it and it is not in the index. 20 pages is not enough for this book.

p.187 "The structures of mirror neurons are not special in and of themselves; they serve this mirroring function due to their location. The reside in association areas of the frontal cortex where networks converge to process high level information. Mirror neurons lie at the crossroads of the processing of inner and outer experience, where multiple networks of visual, motor, and emotional processing converge."

Table 13-1, Brain Regions involved in Perceptual-Action Mirror Systems. Theory of Mind (TOM) p.195

p.249 Fear (Amygdala) vs. Anxiety (Bed Nucleus of the Stria Terminalis) Seven similar physical reactions...
Amygdala and hippocampus and cortex. Fast system vs. slow system.

p.328 "We have witnessed the enegry evolution has devoted to reading the minds of others and how little attention is has paid to self awareness."

From Neurons to Narratives. Wonderful emphasis on the importance of stories. Expanded Quote #1!

The unifying functions of stories and the healing reflected in changing narratives rests upon the underlying physiological changes that occur during healing relationships. Gaze, pupil dilation, facial expressions, posture, proximity, touch, and mirror systems are all reflexive and obligatory systems that work below conscious awareness. These and other systems yet to be discovered create a high-speed information linkup between us, establishing ongoing physiological and emotional synchrony. (p.337)

This book would REALLY benefit from better brain illustrations. The Netter image is top notch! Netter's Atlas of Human Neuroscience (Netter Basic Science) David L. Felten MD PhD (Author), Ralph Jozefowicz (Author)

Instead of rereading this book, I will probably read: The Healthy Aging Brain, SUSTAINING ATTACHMENT, ATTAINING WISDOM (2008)

https://www.jch.com/jch/notes/cozolinonhr.html 2009.11.22 jch