Nervous System Mastery: Beyond the individual, social interaction and its beautiful complexity
Humans are not born preassembled to navigate the world. We are born helpless. Our ability to move, communicate, meet basic & complex needs, love and trust are all underpinned by social interactions with primary caregivers, wider family, lovers, foes, friends, acquaintances or strangers. Social interaction has been traditionally viewed, by psychology, as a process taking place in the mind, cognitively loaded. This never sat well with me, hence my passion for neuroscience. Psychology enskulls whereas neuroscience enskulls and embodies, it is more aligned to face the frontiers of human complexity.
Psychology, ecology & going beyond conscious awareness
As with all aspects of nature, social interaction does not happen in isolation. Akin to biologists studying fungi the living organism cannot be understood without embracing ecology- the relationship between living organisms. Equally any human trying to understand human complexity has to obviously factor in ecology. But also just as physicists face the same challenges with dark matter, psychologists have, what I call dark memory to contend with.
Putting to one side dark memory, lets first explore social interaction and neural activity:
Hyperscanning allows for the recording of simultaneous neural activity (via fNIRS, fMRI, EEG) from two or more individuals, carrying out natural social interactions like conversation or joint attention. Basically you could be chatting or cooperating in a task with someone and your brain activity is being measured. The data extrapolated from this growing field indicates that social interaction extends beyond the individual brain and inter-brain synchrony is taking place, with a distinct marker of neural coupling.
Now researchers want to delve even deeper, with the charge being led by Italian neuroscientist Giada Lettieri. They want to introduce a framework incorporating not just neural activity but autonomic physiological data (e.g. heart rate, skin conductance) and interoceptive (e.g. what am I sensing internally? ) processes. Social interaction engages our predictory capability, by engaging many networks throughout the nervous system. But beyond our sense of self it is interacting with the neurobiology fluctuations of others too.
Now you maybe thinking -so what, how does this relate to me?
Well, ultimately our sense of self is at the mercy of our sense of safety (physically and psychologically). Which in turn is heavily influenced by the patterns our nervous systems create from the get go including dark memory. We can realign, readjust our behaviour in relation to others and if that synchrony works that’s great. But imagine if we are not even aware we are realigning or readjusting and its to our own detriment. Or if we are unsure why synchrony cannot be created. Try to remember that all the sensory data (internal, external) we are streaming 24/7, along with neural & autonomic physiology data is made sense by our memories and experience. For many reasons (such as - trauma, poor attachment/attunement, negative cultural influences, inequality, rejection, loss) this can be corrupted. However, the dynamism of the nervous system means change is always possible and when we change the experience, we can change the prediction model.