Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel.
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
Nat Hum Behav. 2018 Sep;2(9):624-636. doi: 10.1038/s41562-018-0384-6. Epub 2018 Aug 6.
It has long been assumed that social animals, such as humans, are born with a brain system that has evolved to support social affiliation. However, the evidence does not necessarily support this assumption. Alternatively, social animals can be defined as those who cannot survive alone and rely on members from their group to regulate their ongoing physiology (or allostasis). The rather simple evolutionary constraint of social dependency for survival can be sufficient to make the social environment vitally salient, and to provide the ultimate driving force for socially crafted brain development and learning. In this Perspective, we propose a framework for sociality and specify a set of hypotheses on the mechanisms of social development and underlying neural systems. The theoretical shift proposed here implies that profound human characteristics, including but not limited to sociality, are acquired at an early age, while social interactions provide key wiring instructions that determine brain development.
长期以来，人们一直认为，像人类这样的社会性动物生来就具有一种进化而来的大脑系统，以支持社会联系。然而，这一假设并不一定成立。相反，我们可以将社会性动物定义为那些无法独自生存，而依赖群体成员来调节其生理机能（或体内平衡）的动物。对于生存而言，这种简单的社会性依赖的进化限制，足以使社会环境变得至关重要，并为社会塑造的大脑发育和学习提供最终的驱动力。在本观点中，我们提出了一个社会性框架，并对社会发展和潜在神经系统的机制提出了一系列假设。这里提出的理论转变意味着，包括但不限于社会性在内的深刻的人类特征是在早期获得的，而社会互动则提供了决定大脑发育的关键布线指令。
