26. Sometimes, it comes as a glimmer

Hi friends,

Welcome to the twenty-sixth dispatch of How Humans Flourish, a research-informed newsletter on how humans thrive.

I’m so impressed we’ve been growing and learning together for six months! When I made the commitment to write this newsletter, I couldn’t have anticipated the profound conversations and relationships it would bring into my life. Thank you for reading, for sending your thoughts and questions, and for sharing these weekly dispatches with friends, colleagues, and loved ones. 

As a quick mid-year check-in, I’m curious if you’re still enjoying this format? Would you prefer shorter newsletters? Do you still want a weekly email? Please fill out the polls below so I can make sure this newsletter continues to be a value-add to you.

We’ve been getting into some pretty heady topics, but buckle up, because these next few weeks are sure to be our most exciting yet!

For the month of June, we’re digging into the research of Matthew Lieberman, Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab Director at UCLA, whose work inspired the launch of break*through and whose book Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect is…groundbreaking.

For the last 20 years, Lieberman and his colleagues have developed a new kind of science called social cognitive neuroscience which uses tools like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to test how the human brain responds to the social world. 

According to Lieberman, “Our brains are built to ensure that we will come to hold the beliefs and values of those around us…In my research, I have found that the neural basis for our personal beliefs overlaps significantly with one of the regions of the brain primarily responsible for allowing other people’s beliefs to influence our own. The self is more of a superhighway for social influence than it is the impenetrable private fortress we believe it to be.” (Lieberman, pg. 8 - Kindle)

This superhighway consists of three sets of brain regions that work together to create very specific social adaptations. 

These three brain regions, or what Lieberman calls social networks, “each have their own strengths, and they have emerged at different points in our evolutionary history moving from vertebrates to mammals to primates to us, Homo sapiens.” (Lieberman, pg. 10-11 - Kindle)

The social adaptations are:

1. Connection, the ability to experience social pains and pleasures. 

2. Mindreading, the ability to comprehend and perceive the actions and thoughts of others.

3. Harmonizing, the neural adaptations that allow group beliefs and values to mold our own.

Lieberman describes the seminal research that laid the foundation to understanding these adaptations.

He writes, “In 1997, Gordon Shulman and his colleagues at Washington University published two papers back to back in the same issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, a prestigious journal for neuroimaging research...The first of these papers examined which regions of the brain were commonly activated by different tasks, including motor, memory, and visual discrimination tasks (such as indicating when an image changed slightly). 

The results were a little disappointing: only a few regions showed increased activity across all the tasks, and they weren’t very interesting brain regions. In hindsight, we know that these tasks rely on relatively distinct brain networks, so it makes sense that there wasn’t much overlap across these tasks. 

In the second paper the scientists asked the question, ‘What is more active in the brain when one is not doing one of these cognitive, motor, or visual tasks?’ It was an unusual question. Typically neuroscientists have been interested in brain regions that are ‘switched on’—that become more active—when performing a task, identifying regions that help us accomplish it. 

Asking what in the brain becomes more active when you stop performing a task was a surprising approach. Thankfully, Shulman asked the question anyway. And he found a set of brain regions that were reliably more active when people were at rest, doing nothing, than when they were performing any of the specific tasks…”

This set of brain regions is called the “default network,” or “default mode network,” and it refers to “what psychologists call social cognition, which is simply another way of describing thinking about other people, oneself, and the relation of oneself to other people.”  (Lieberman, pg. 15-18 - Kindle) 

We’ll spend the next few weeks digging into how this impacts our ability to thrive—from why evolution pushes for our sociality, even at the expense of immense heartbreak, to the biochemical reason people discriminate against different ethnicities.

But, for today, I’d like to leave you with this thought:

Over the last few months, I’ve been getting to know Dr. Jean Bosco Niyonzima, the Executive Director of Ubuntu Center for Peace based in Rwanda. He is also the Global Clinical Governance Advisor to Save the Children International, but if you asked him what he does for work, he’d simply say, “I’m a healer.” 

He has spent his life working in challenging regions, and has developed a communal based healing modality that leads cohorts of patients through a 6 week intensive that combines mind, body, breathwork; community based talk therapy; and local ritualistic practices that allow for shared bonding. 

His outcomes are powerful: 77% decrease in anxiety, 79% of clients report not feeling depressed, 43% see a decrease in PTSD, there is a 75% decrease in children school dropouts, and a 96% decrease in conflicts with families.

It’s humbling to think that even in post-conflict countries with high levels of mistrust and suspicion, healing is not only achievable, but is accessible and scalable. 

Dr. Jean recently spoke at the American Psychiatric Association’s annual conference and made a bold proclamation. He argued, while western psychology has done a lot to advance individual psychotherapy, there is a collective element that stands unaccounted for. If the collective– a community, a school, a nation– has experienced something devastating together, how do we expect individuals to heal when they are still immersed in the social experience of it all?  

He shared with me that after his talk, a psychotherapist approached him and shared he was one of the therapists who supported parents and children after Sandy Hook. While he felt his work was important, he couldn’t help but feel he and his colleagues had missed something. 

He felt, in that particular circumstance, talk therapy wasn’t quite enough, and while listening to Dr. Jean, he realized that they had missed the collective element. The community had experienced the tragedy together, and so they needed a tool or framework to heal together.

This, of course, raises many questions.

And to those questions I would say, there are some profound answers, but similar to Blue Zone principles, they come from the least expected places.

Let’s dig in…

With gratitude,

p.s. Curious about Dr. Jean’s work? You can read the academic findings of his work here.

p.p.s.

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