After all, we’re a brain embedded in this larger set of structures. You can call it culture, call it society, call it your family, call it your friend, call it whatever it is. It’s the stuff that makes people sign onto their Facebook a thousand times a day. It’s the reason Twitter exists. We have got all these systems now that really make us fully aware of just how important social interactions are to what it is to be human. The question is, how can we study that? Because that, in essence, is a huge part of what’s actually driving these enzymatic pathways in your brain. What’s triggering these synaptic transmissions and these squirts of neurotransmitter back and forth is thoughts of other people, what other people say to us, interacting with the world at large. As someone on the fringes of the field, part of the excitement to me is the fact that at this point there still are these different levels of description, and no one quite knows how they all fit together.
- - Chimeras of Experience, an interview with Jonah Lehrer published by Edge.org, May 21, 2009.
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