Minding the Social Brain by Jay Harris
Coming soon from IPBooks! Minding the Social Brain: A Real World Text for Social Neuroscience by Jay Harris.
The impulse to tell one’s story doesn’t die easily; it is baked into the brain’s cake by evolution. But storytellers we rely on for prioritizing our collective survival policies may be fortune-tellers who hold our social globe in itchy palms. Commercial media tell stories for gain, and then poll us on the same questions of political, social, and economic policy. Using social neuroscience findings, this book aims for more reliable perspectives on the world we share. Minding the Social Brain shows origins of social institutions in brain structure. The text tells its story in two ways: scientifically explaining how the brain transforms its process into socialized mind; and why we mind (obey) social power. Thus, it explores why we reflect on experience and narrate our story to others as fact and myth.
Our exchanges incrementally add to the historical saga of social construction. Each brain’s social world develops to encompass both the inherited legacy of survival threats and the ongoing challenges of losing loved ones. Trauma imposed by others induces loss of self. Even seemingly halcyon lives present passages in maturation that makes survival all too stressful. Narrating our life experience to one another adds personal myth to the social myths of our ‘real world’. With this perspective, Minding the Social Brain aims to clarify and reframe the interaction between social values and the conduct of psychotherapy. In their communication, therapist and patient both have to contend with an identity mélange that provides the setting for contemporary social life.
Reconciling a Freudian frame with social neuroscience findings, I challenge the prevailing belief that the frame is mere metaphor, not a model of the brain’s structure. Like early Homo sapiens peering into the sky for survival clues, we need a root metaphor and reliable perspective to understand our relation to the cosmos. Social neuroscientists have opened luminous portals into our brain’s social structure that reveal constellations–distributed networks that bring self and other into focus in their indwelling social domain. Matching brain networks with psychological functions, researchers seek a world view that reconciles our social brains’ evolution with the contemporary social world.