Social Nature
Chapter 6
Social Nature of Intelligence*
• Hyper
– Rich social experience (over million years) hyper
social instincts (memory, language, empathy,
sympathy, collaboration, and reasoning)
• Facilitate meeting of minds
• Expectant
– Capacity to think, learn and achieve is expectant
(depends) of the social experience that
constructed it
• Cultivate common purpose
• Dependent
– Social experience is the greatest provocateur of
thinking and learning
• Cultivate common purpose
* Interrelated
• Extended
– Invention of a variety of media that
extends social interactions beyond faceto-face encounters
• Extended the mind’s reach
• Virtuous
– Instinctive moral orientation to prosocial
behavior
• Achieve behaviors that would benefit the group
• Human brain evolved from rich social
experiences
• Physiological architecture of the brain is the
platform in which your intelligence performs, but
social experience is an influential architect
and operator of the platform
• Social definition as living together or as
interrelated interdependent elements
• The beginning of the universeorganized
simple structures into complex and evolving
systems = brain is a system that is disposed to
interact with like brain systems
Selfish gene theory = individual life forms
consistently do things to benefit the survival
of genes
The History – The Experience
 Ancient primate, 50 million yrs. ago began to develop
the size of their brain as result of cost benefit
calculations on how to get food
Benefiting life in social communities – vigilance against
enemies
So they began to refine their sensory processing of
visual and auditory information to be attuned to
any type of communication or warning—those who
were better at it became leaders of the communities
And hierarchies in the social group were developed
Stability
 Emotions began to develop within the social group by
social observation skills as result of keeping
homeostasis within the group
 With emotions became the development of awareness
and the ability to infer, predict, and planmental
capacity to anticipate events
 And approximately 2.5 millions years ago, humans put
together a neural pattern for tool making = social aspect
of learninginventions are usual contributions of a few
working together
 Language emerged from social experience (intimacy)
 Broca area and Wernicke’s area were developed in the
brain to deal with this behavior
• What are the implications for the future
using the evolution information that we
have discussed?
• In other words, based on what we are
currently doing in our lives, how do you
see the human being as a social entity in
the future?
Collateral Development
Collateral Development
•Walking erect – 2
•Hand dexterity to make
footed balancenew
and use tools
brain circuitry
•Reduced exposure to
•Upright posture –
the sun
better perspective for
visual scanning
Linear Development
Evolutionrefinement of
what already been changed
Cognitive fluidity = Swiss Army Knife
Social heritage of brain’s evolutionary experience is displayed in:
•Its size and organization
•Emotional acuity (security)
•Capacity to create and manipulate mental templates (executive functions)
•And, figure things out
Cells and molecules
opened to environmental
influences
Facing Environmental Influences
• Highly evolved neural
mechanisms
– Syntactic and & semantic
language
– Evolved neural mechanisms for
social interactions
• Muscle endings in their facial
skinfacial expressions
• Verbal messages include
expressions, tone
• And at times smell, taste & touch
• Gut feeling
• Consciousness = meaning,
memory, emotion, & reflection
– Reflective manipulation of
informationexecutive skills
– Awareness and management of
emotions to good effect
• Let’s refine our previous answers….
– Do you see any future linear evolutionary
changes as result of your past answers?
– How about collateral development?
– Do you think that we will expand our present
state of consciousness as result of the
changes that you mentioned?
• Social unfolding of its potential
– Ontogeny (development)
– Philogeny (evolution)
– Fundamental work of the brain
occurs through the flow of
electrochemically encoded
information at the neural cell
– The growth of the cell is both
environmentally and genetically
directed
– As the primitive brain began to face
more complicated tasks, specifically
neural networks were developed
(evolution)
– These networks progressively
influenced the genetic adaptations
– These genetic adaptations needed
the influence of the environment to
flourish
The Human Brain is Experience Expectant
and Experience Dependant
• Experience Expectant
– At certain developmental
periods on the human life,
there is a genetically
generated excess of neural
networks
– Occurs from birth to
adolescence
– Dendritic & axonal
extensions ready
– Pruning also occurs
– Expectations of certain
stimulation cues occur
– Plasticity
– Life long process
• Experience Dependant
– Brain is ready to have
environmental interaction in
order to grow and mature
– “Use it or lose it, but do not
abuse it”
• The Human Brain Seeks Ways to Expand
Opportunities to Interact With Other Brains
– 50,000 yrs. ago written language graphics
– Now, communication technologies, radio,
photography, movies, television, & Internet
• Social Experience Actualizes Human
Intelligence
– Brain was made to interact with other brains
– Social interaction since early childhood are the
bases for adulthood intellectual capacities