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Eric Michael Johnson, Scientific American
New research confirms that social complexity enriches cognitive growth. Could having more Facebook friends actually make you smarter?
Let’s face it, as a species we’re obsessed with ourselves. The vast majority of us spend our days at work or school where a considerable amount of time is taken up not discussing the important issues of the day, but rather the juicy details of one another’s personal lives. Then we go home only to sign on to social network services like Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ and continue where we left off. In this respect we’re fairly typical primates. Most of our simian relatives, particularly our great ape cousins the chimpanzees and bonobos, like nothing better than keeping a watchful eye on what other members of their troop are up to. But our species has taken this preoccupation one step further.
Human beings are the most social of the primates and have the largest group sizes of any species in our order. For about 90% of our existence we lived in hunter-gatherer societies with populations that likely clustered around 150-200 individuals. By way of comparison, baboons come in a distant second with an average of about 50 group members. Now, thanks to modern industrial agriculture, our species has pushed that range well into the millions, a development that has resulted in considerable stress on our slightly above average primate brains. Of course, all organisms need to successfully predict and navigate their environments in order to relay their genes on to the next generation. It’s just that this becomes increasingly complicated when there are many individuals all interacting in the same environment simultaneously. Merely keeping track of these relationships requires a considerable amount of time and energy, not to mention brain power.
Image: “The Social Network” by Nathaniel Gold, via Scientific American
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