Sep 23, 2024 Wendy LawtonPROVIDENCE, R.I.[Brown University] — Each person is just six or fewer social connections away from anyone else in the world. That’s the social psychology concept of six degrees of separation, an idea born around a century ago when telephones and airplanes dramatically shrank the distance between people — and rapidly expanded social networks.But how are social networks represented in the human brain? With mental maps, according to new research led by Oriel FeldmanHall, an associate professor of cognitive and psychological sciences and affiliate of the Robert J. and Nancy D. Carney Institute of Brain Science at Brown University and Apoorva Bhandari, assistant professor of cognitive and psychological sciences at Brown University.For the first time, FeldmanHall and her team show that people create mental maps of the connections between people in order to navigate their social worlds. Social navigation, the team found, is similar to spatial navigation. Nature Human...
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