interpersonal neurobiology

by Gary Borjesson

The happiest, most fulfilled moments of my life have been when I was completely aware of being alive, with all the hope, pain, and sorrow that entails for any mortal being. —Jenny Odell

Applied Philosophy
Back when I was a professor, I loved teaching intro to philosophy courses. Philosophy’s essence comes alive when working with people whose view of themselves and the world is still open and underway. One of the texts I used was Aristotle’s timeless exploration of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics. I hoped it would win the students over, showing them how interesting and practically minded philosophy could be. We spent a month exploring what’s known about friendship, how it is known, and why it matters.

We don’t have a month together, but think of this essay as an invitation to go deeper into this most familiar of subjects. I offer three big things worth knowing about friendship. First, it’s worth knowing why friendship matters, why we agree with Aristotle when he says that ‘even if we had all the other goods in life, still no one would want to live without friends.’ That friendship matters is obvious, which is why the current crisis in friendship (especially among men) is getting so much attention. Second, it’s worth knowing that there are three kinds of friendship; recognizing these can shed light on how our own friendships work. Finally, it’s worth knowing that friendship and justice go hand in hand. This may seem obvious; after all, when is it ever friendly to be unjust? Nevertheless, the implications of this provoked students, and no doubt will provoke some readers.

1. Why Friendship Matters: It Empowers and Enlivens
Aristotle opens his discussion of friendship by remarking that friendship—‘when two go together’—makes us more able to think and act. He’s alluding to a famous passage from the Iliad, where war-like Diomedes volunteers for a dangerous spying mission behind enemy lines, saying

But if some other man would go with me,
my confidence and mood would much improve.
When two go together, one may see
the way to profit from a situation
before the other does. One man alone
may think of something, but his mind moves slower.
His powers of invention are too thin.

Diomedes chooses resourceful Odysseus as his companion: “If I go with him, we could emerge from blazing fire and come home safe, thanks to his cleverness.”

This is our song as social animals, that by going together we are safer and our prospects for a good outcome improved. In evolutionary terms, friendship is empowering because cooperation is a non-zero-sum game that confers a greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts power to the friends. Having friends is a means of better adapting to the world.

But friends aren’t just an empowering means to an end, they can also be an enlivening end in their own right. Read more »

by Gary Borjesson

Digital technology and AI are transforming our lives and relationships. Looking around, I see a variety of effects, for better and worse, including in my own life and in my psychotherapy practice. My last column, The Fantasy of Frictionless Friendship: why AIs can’t be friends, explored a specific psychological need we have—to encounter resistance from others—and why AIs cannot meet this need. (To imagine otherwise is analogous to imagining we can be physically healthy without resistance training, if only in the form of overcoming gravity!) In this essay, I reflect on some research that drives home why our animal need for connection cannot be satisfied virtually.

*How I imagine it, with the help of ChatGPT*

I use and delight in digital technology. My concern here is not technology itself, but the so-called displacement effect accompanying it—that time spent connecting virtually displaces time that might have been spent connecting irl. As Jean Twenge, Jonathan Haidt, and others have shown, this substitution of virtual for irl connection is strongly correlated with the increase in mental disorders, especially among iGen (defined by Twenge as the first generation to spend adolescence on smartphones and social media).

The question—What is lost when we’re not together irl?—is worth asking, now and always, because the tendency to neglect our animal needs is as old as consciousness. I smile to think of how Aristophanes portrayed Socrates floating aloft in a basket, his head in The Clouds, neglecting real life. But even if we’re not inclined to theorizing and airy abstractions, most of us naturally identify our ‘self’ with our conscious egoic self. We may be chattering away on social media, studying quantum fluctuations, telling our therapist what we think our problem is, or proposing to determine how many feet a flea can jump (measured in flea feet, of course, as Aristophanes had Socrates doing). But whatever we may think, and whoever we may think we are, our animal needs persist.

You know all this, of course. But I want to speak to the part of us that, nonetheless, posts signs in shop windows and city parks saying “No animals allowed,” and then walks right in—as though that didn’t include us! This subject is a warm one for me, as I work with the mental-health consequences of neglecting our animal need for connections. Sadly, we therapists are not helping matters, readily embracing as many of us do the convenience of telehealth sessions without asking ourselves: what is lost when we’re not in the room together?

What’s lost can be lost by degrees. Read more »

Tag: interpersonal neurobiology

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