On the brain-boosting benefits of (healthy, productive) social engagement

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You have prob­a­bly read about the many cog­ni­tive and brain ben­e­fits of social stim­u­la­tion but, are all types of social engage­ment equal?

What mat­ters most with social inter­ac­tions – quan­ti­ty or quality?

Neu­ro­sci­en­tists have found that social engage­ment can ben­e­fit the brain by help­ing build cog­ni­tive and brain reserve and low­er stress lev­els, espe­cial­ly when social inter­ac­tions are healthy, cog­ni­tive­ly com­plex and productive.

Not sur­pris­ing­ly, the effect of social engage­ment can be observed direct­ly in the brain. A sem­i­nal study focused on the amyg­dala, a struc­ture in the lim­bic sys­tem that plays a major role in our emo­tion­al respons­es. Researchers rea­soned that the amyg­dala would be a like­ly can­di­date to be mod­i­fied (via neu­ro­plas­tic changes) by someone’s lev­el of social engage­ment, mea­sured the size of the amy­dgala of 60 adults, and assessed the size and com­plex­i­ty of their social net­works (i.e., how many peo­ple they were in reg­u­lar con­tact with and the num­ber of dif­fer­ent groups these con­tacts could be divid­ed into). What they found is that the larg­er and the more com­plex a person’s social net­work actu­al­ly was, the big­ger their amygdala.

You may be won­der­ing: does mak­ing more friends trig­ger growth in the amyg­dala over time, or do peo­ple with big­ger amyg­dalas to begin with tend to make more friends?

Try­ing to dis­tin­guish causal­i­ty vs. cor­re­la­tion, Oscar Ybar­ra and his col­leagues at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan ran­dom­ly assigned par­tic­i­pants to three groups: 1) a social group, in which the par­tic­i­pants engaged in a dis­cus­sion of a social issue for 10 min­utes, 2) an intel­lec­tu­al activ­i­ties group, in which the par­tic­i­pants solved stim­u­lat­ing tasks (cross­word puz­zles and the like) for 10 min­utes on their own, and 3) a con­trol group, in which the par­tic­i­pants watched a 10-minute clip of the tele­vi­sion show Sein­feld. After they par­tic­i­pat­ed in the dis­cus­sion, watched the clip, or solved the puz­zles, the cog­ni­tive func­tion­ing of all the par­tic­i­pants was assessed using a speed of pro­cess­ing task and a work­ing mem­o­ry (WM) task.

Results showed that peo­ple in the intel­lec­tu­al activ­i­ties group did bet­ter in the WM task than peo­ple who mere­ly watched a video. The same cog­ni­tive boost was observed in the social inter­ac­tion group. And the study sug­gest­ed, once more, that the aver­age TV watch­er would ben­e­fit from watch­ing less TV and spend­ing some of that “saved” time on cog­ni­tive­ly stim­u­lat­ing activ­i­ties. As Oscar Ybar­ra point­ed out, “par­tic­i­pat­ing in a dis­cus­sion involves using social cog­ni­tive process­es, such as infer­ring what peo­ple are think­ing, tak­ing some­one else’s per­spec­tive, mem­o­riz­ing and updat­ing infor­ma­tion, and inhibit­ing inap­pro­pri­ate emo­tions and behav­iors” … which align very well with the need for nov­el­ty, vari­ety, and chal­lenge dis­cussed in pre­vi­ous chapters.

From a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive, Lau­ra Fratiglioni and col­leagues have sug­gest­ed that the rela­tion­ship between social stim­u­la­tion and brain health can also be explained via the stress hypothe­ses, which states that indi­vid­u­als with more social con­tacts have more oppor­tu­ni­ties to engage with oth­er peo­ple and thus more oppor­tu­ni­ties to feel that they are well inte­grat­ed and social­ly com­pe­tent. This may increase their self-esteem and mood and low­er their stress lev­els, which in turn would pro­mote life­long neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty and low­er risks of cog­ni­tive decline. In oth­er words, any pos­i­tive, stress-reduc­ing social rela­tion­ship can be ben­e­fi­cial, regard­less of whether or not it involves a high lev­el of cog­ni­tive complexity.

In essence, then, sci­en­tists have found that more social engage­ment is often bet­ter than less, espe­cial­ly via inter­ac­tions that involve stress-reduc­ing sup­port, nov­el­ty, vari­ety, and chal­lenge. What­ev­er it is we are already doing, there are always new oppor­tu­ni­ties we could explore.

Through our work­places and careers–including those dif­fi­cult tran­si­tions: Giv­en extend­ed longevi­ty and rapid­ly evolv­ing work­places, our work environment/s play a very impor­tant role in our life­long brain health, pro­vid­ing (or not) brain-boost­ing ben­e­fits through decades of work–and social inter­ac­tions at work. It is also key to high­light the impor­tance of man­ag­ing stress and anx­i­ety dur­ing career tran­si­tions, so we can frame them as oppor­tu­ni­ties to social­ize and grow and not as threats. The longer we live, the more cru­cial this is going to be: recent stud­ies look­ing at the Unit­ed States and 12 oth­er Euro­pean coun­tries have found that the ear­li­er peo­ple retire, the more quick­ly their mem­o­ry declines.

Through social groups and vol­un­teer­ing: Anoth­er way to con­nect with peo­ple reg­u­lar­ly is to join groups, such as a sports or book club, a reli­gious group, or vol­un­teer­ing (at a library, hos­pi­tal, school, etc.), with a shared pur­pose. On top of the gen­er­al brain ben­e­fits from social engage­ment each activ­i­ty will come with its own spe­cif­ic ben­e­fits. A hik­ing club or a ten­nis club adds phys­i­cal health ben­e­fits, while a book club adds intel­lec­tu­al stim­u­la­tion. For exam­ple, when Michelle Carl­son and her col­leagues at the Johns Hop­kins Bloomberg School of Pub­lic Health con­duct­ed a brain imag­ing study to eval­u­ate the effects of Expe­ri­ence Corps, a pro­gram that helps seniors part­ner with schools to help chil­dren improve aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly and behav­ioral­ly, they found that par­tic­i­pants showed improved exec­u­tive func­tions com­pared to con­trols, as well as increased activ­i­ty in the part of the brain that sup­ports these func­tions (the pre­frontal cortex).

Remem­ber the Oh, the Places You’ll Go! book and mes­sage by Dr. Seuss?

We should add: Oh, the Peo­ple You’ll Meet!

– This is an adapt­ed excerpt from The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness: How to Opti­mize Brain Health and Per­for­mance at Any Age by Alvaro Fer­nán­dez Ibáñez and Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg.

To Learn More:

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