The Neuroscience of Likability, Social Connection, and Brain Health | Ben Rein

26:13These are shocking statistic. Probably this is colored by COVID. But from 2013 to 2021, the amount of time that people spent alone every month increased by 36 hours per month. There's almost an entire work week and maybe it is because people are working from home. Again, that may have been COVID related. But I mean, even still, like ever since then, the numbers have continued to be in the wrong direction. Like last year, there was a study finding that 69 % of Americans are lacking emotional support. It's clear that this problem exists, but we're not addressing it. And, you know, maybe we need to build more infrastructure for social connection.

26:50I think that's probably a big part of it. You know, people talk about third places. We've lost third places, which is this this idea of places besides your home and your work that you can go and spend time with friends. You know, people used to hang out in malls and all this. That doesn't really happen anymore. Now it's pretty much just bars. So I'd like to see more of that happen. I think we just need to build the infrastructure and give people good convincing reasons to step away from the TV and the phone and the computer and, you know, get back to face to face contact. So that's the kind of macro view.

27:26Let's talk micro because you have a lot of practical suggestions in your book. What do you just top line? What do you recommend if somebody is listening to this and thinking, yeah, I care about brain health. You've talked me out of most supplements and you've talked me into social interaction. How do I get more of it? I have three suggestions. Number one, look to replace any virtual interactions with in-person interactions. And even if you can just kind of level up your virtual interactions. So if it's text message, phone call instead. If it's a phone call, video call instead. If it's a video call, in-person instead.

28:02My justification there is that the way that the brain detects that you are interacting with another human and has the, you know, stimulates those things like oxytocin and dopamine and serotonin is through the observation of social cues, right? You could see someone's facial expression. You can hear their tone of voice. You can read their body language. You could see the glassiness in their eyes, right? All of these pieces of information tell your brain you're interacting with someone. And so you would expect that as you kind of strip away that those pieces of information, that interactions would become less enjoyable because they're not so effective at stimulating doxytocin, dopamine, serotonin.

28:44And while the molecular biology hasn't been done yet, there is evidence that less lifelike interactions like texting are perceived as less pleasant and less enjoyable. So if you can, try to get back to something closer to resembling an in-person interaction. Number two, I think we often hold ourselves back from connection because of these what I call these bad social predictions. We it's normal to be anxious socially. You know, we talk about social anxiety as like a diagnosis. But really, everybody experiences some level of social anxiety. And specifically, there's a couple of things that have been well shown.

29:25One of them is that we actually think people don't like us as much as they really do. This is called the liking gap. It was discovered by a researcher, Dr. Erica Boothby. So we think people don't like us as much as they do. Number two, we underestimate the benefits of socializing. We think that it's, you know, when everyone's been there Friday night, you're like, do I go to this party or not? It's likely that when you're thinking, what am I going to get out of this? Whatever you expect is an underestimation of the actual positive emotions you experience. In addition to that, people tend to think that they are worse at socializing than they really are.

30:02Number four, we also overestimate the likelihood of being socially rejected. And number five, we expect that as a conversation goes on for longer, it will get progressively worse, which is also not true. It just kind of stays pretty stable. Of course, there's an upper end of that. You can't talk for 60 hours and still have a good time. But all of these things together basically push us toward, I don't really know if it's worth going to the dinner. I think it'd maybe just be easier and more energizing to sit on the couch and watch TV or something else. So try whenever you experience any of those miscalculations, try to think for a second, is this actually true?

30:42And what a good place to start also is actually on the other side of it. After you come out of an interaction, try to do like a little bit of a self inventory. do I feel good right now? And most of the time, as long as it was a, you know, regular healthy interaction, you'll notice that you feel pretty terrific. It's, you know, I actually, I tend to think of it like, um, like exercise. Like if people didn't have the idea that going to the gym, lifting weights or whatever is good for them, I feel like we could easily overlook the fact that it makes us feel really good to exercise. But when you come out of the gym, you're like, man, I just did the best thing for my health I could possibly do.

31:15I feel great. Like I'm sweating. I'm dirty. Doesn't matter. I feel awesome. Right. And if you start to tune into it, you actually will notice that interactions make you feel pretty good as well. Someone who read my book, she actually works at a bookstore. She told me that after reading my book, it totally changed the way she interacts with her job because people come into the bookstore all day and, you know, small talk, it's retail. And after reading my book, she realized that connecting with a customer made her feel so good. And so she started putting more intentionality into these interactions and noticing that she was uplifting them as well.

31:48And now she like loves her job again because she's enjoying these interactions she gets. So try not to fall prey to those social traps. Six years ago during COVID, this podcast went virtual. And for a variety of reasons, we have not gone back in person except rarely. And I've started recently upping the in-person quotient quite significantly. And I like my job again. It's not like I've hated my job. I love, you know, I love that I have this show, but it is so much more enjoyable to host a show and conduct an interview when you're doing it in person, as we did in the early days of this show. Like we would, I would not have anybody on the show who couldn't come to the studio.

32:35And I think I'm kind of heading back toward that. And it's, I'm a little embarrassed that it took me six years to truly wake up to this, but it is now thunderously obvious to me. Well, that's great. I mean, and that aligns with the evidence, right? More lifelike interactions are more pleasant. And I've always noticed interacting in person, especially for something like this, like a thoughtful conversation, you know, you're, you really want to dive in. It's, it just seems to be better in person. Having said that this is going great and we're virtual. So it, it, it doesn't mean it can't be done.

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36:36It's like walking on marshmallows. They also make underwear and t-shirts, the best base layers you'll ever own. Head over to Bombas.com slash happier and use the code happier for 20 % off your first purchase. That's B-O-M-B-A-S.com slash happier, code happier at checkout. out. Okay, but there's a third thing you were going to recommend when it comes to practical strategies for getting more interaction to our lives. Yeah, so my number three suggestion is, I like to think about connection, social connection as a pool. And I specifically think about it. And this is kind of silly and ridiculous, like as a neuroscientist saying this, but I think about it as a pool of oxytocin.

37:20The reason for this is because oxytocin specifically, I mentioned before that it makes us feel good. It stimulates dopamine and serotonin. There's another thing there. Oxytocin has all of these great health promoting benefits. It's been shown to be neuroprotective, anti-inflammatory, could boost immune function, bone growth, with wound healing, all these amazing things. And so I think of it as if every time we connect with someone, we take a swim in this pool of oxytocin. As you can with a regular pool, you can swim at any depth if you want. You can dive into the deep end and you can connect with your best friends and have a long night together.

38:00Or you can swim in the shallow end. You could just walk around, have the water up to your waist, and you can talk to a grocery store or cashier on your way out of the store. Or if you really don't have time, you can simply dip your foot in and wave to your neighbor as you're walking by their house or, you know, walking the dog. All of these depths of swimming will have some level of benefit. And of course, some will be more measurable than others. You know, swimming the deep end, definitely better for you than waving at your neighbor. But I think it's important that we don't forget to like engage with the pool at some level.

38:38And I think part of the problem too, that people don't is because when they hear about connection and they think about, you know, how do I embed this in my life? They're only thinking about the deep end. They're only thinking about the kind of high barrier, long, you know, time consuming feels the most energy draining kind of interactions. But even just going in the deep end and just talking to the cashier, whatever you may do is, is also very effective. And there's a bunch of evidence that, you know, talking to strangers or even having short interactions can provide a pretty significant boost in mood.

39:10And so I think, you know, the way I phrase this in summary is connection is a pool, not a plunge. You don't always have to plunge all the way in. You can just dip your toes in. And I actually encourage like you should always try to think about like if you have the opportunity, just take a little dip and then get back to whatever you're doing because it's going to be better for you if you do. If I was never really or rarely engaging in profound interpersonal connection, but I was doing a lot of talking to strangers, what would be the implications for my brain health? It's like exercise. Anything is better than nothing, right?

39:44Walking is better than being sedentary. So socializing with strangers actually is pretty good. The more you can do generally, the better. There's a researcher, Dr. Nicholas Epley at University of Chicago, has done these amazing studies. I'm obsessed with them because he goes into like real world environments instead of doing everything in the lab. And for instance, he'll go to the train station and ask people, hey, will you go have an interaction on your commute into work today? And, you know, instead of just sitting alone. And what he found is that one, this is actually where that a couple of those things I mentioned earlier that people overestimate the likelihood of rejection.

40:22he found that people expected like 50 or more of the strangers to reject their interest or their invitation to talk turns out zero percent of the strangers turn them down and then people also expected that they wouldn't really benefit from the interaction turns out they enjoyed their commute much more they ended up reported learning more um even more so than people who like just had a normal commute or also those who specifically sat in solitude so anyhow um he's replicated this across a handful of different places, not just trains, but also like buses and like taxis. And so there's this growing body of evidence that strangers are a very good, reliable source of kind of a mood boost.

41:06And the way I see it is like we have this like ripe fruit all around us, you know, where we go out in the public and we don't interact with anybody and we kind of keep to ourselves. But on the other side of that barrier that we're kind of self-creating is a fruitful interaction that can make this feel better. So I'm a, I'm an extrovert. I talk to people all the time. Um, I love it. I, I really enjoy it. And one of those people who will just like start a conversation with you randomly. And, uh, usually it ends up going pretty well. I'm an extrovert too, but I was for much of my life, kind of a snobby dick and not really talking to people, um, you know, trades men and women who will come through, uh, our apartment or now our house or, you know, people on, you know, in airports or whatever.

41:50And now I'm much more in part because I've seen the research and, you know, I've been hosting this show for more than a decade. So I think I probably started as a result of hearing about the research, but now I do it. It doesn't matter what the research shows. I know what it's happening, what is happening in my end of one sort of inner laboratory. The pleasure centers are lighting up most of the time. I'm having these interactions as I move through the world. A million more questions to ask you about interaction. Should we be placing a lot of emphasis on eye contact? Only if it's comfortable. I mean, for most people, eye contact is can be uncomfortable.

42:28You know, there's kind of a threshold for some people. As soon as you make eye contact, it's like, no, thank you. This is awkward. Other people, you know, it's like you can do it for a while. And then you start to notice like, gosh, I've really been holding my eye contact for too long. and now you don't know what to do. But eye contact is a strong builder of affiliation. Not only is it helpful for reading and understanding another person's emotions, but also there's some studies showing that the longer you hold eye contact, the more someone reports respecting you. It also seems to be important for triggering interbrain synchrony, which is this idea of kind of your brain synchronizing in certain ways with the person you're interacting with, which can be supportive for like collaboration, teamwork.

43:08work. So eye contact, definitely important. However, you know, this is kind of like my stance on, on, on all things science and medicine related. Uh, if it's stressful, don't do it. You're told to do something on social media because it's good for you. And then you try it and it's really uncomfortable. Like that's probably not going to be a thing that's supportive for your health if it, if it triggers a stress reaction. So, um, the good news though, is that there's this one study where they came up with this, like eye contact illusion. I don't even know why they tested this, how this came about.

43:40But they basically found that when people were three feet apart, if you were looking at the other person's mouth, they have they cannot tell you're looking at their mouth. They if you ask them, they will think, yes, you're looking at my eyes. I remember reading that study and then going upstairs out of my office and going out to my wife and just staring at her mouth and talking to her for a while and just starting laughing. And she's like, what is it? And I'm like, nothing. Anything seem off about me? And she's like, no, what? And she didn't notice. So I have used it a little bit because people don't really, it's normal to look at someone's mouth because you often do that to, you know, figure out phonetically what they're saying.

44:14So if you do feel uncomfortable making eye contact, there's a little cheat code. One of the other things I think you recommend in terms of upping our interaction quotient is to give more compliments and express more gratitude. Say more. Well, first off, it's just a good thing to do, of course, but it's also, it's good for us. It's another one of those mood boosters, which I think is fascinating that being nice to others makes us feel good. Why is that? I don't know. Is it because we're gaining some form of social credit, you know, or building our social capital? I'm not sure, but it is a reliable way to, you know, boost your mood and wellbeing.

44:56And I mean, gosh, if there's anything out there that you can do that makes you feel good, and also make someone else feel good. I think those are the things we should be focusing on to not only boost our own health and wellness, but also kind of heal our fractured society. Another recommendation is to speak more and ask questions. I think a lot of people feel like speaking more and asking questions are things you shouldn't do if you want to be polite. So this is from the chapter on likability. There's a bunch of research on likability and what makes people likable. yeah we typically think that we should kind of speak less there's a kind of general assumption that people like to talk and like to talk about themselves and so you should give them the space to to do that so there was a study where they had college students interact and they they told them beforehand basically this is how much you're going to get to talk they kind of governed it with a timer and so people were sometimes assigned like 30 percent of the time or 70 percent of the time And what they found was that actually the people who spent more time speaking were reported as more likable.

46:00So there's an upper limit. Again, you know, you don't want to over speak in that you're spending too much time talking. You also don't want to speak over someone and interrupt them. Uh, but generally this, you know, the, the impulse to hide yourself and kind of remain quiet to preserve your reputation, maybe misguided. It may actually be better to open up and share. And that's also been shown that sharing things about yourself, being vulnerable, those are great ways to build connection and deepen bonds. You mentioned that there's a research around likability. What does the science say we can do other, aside from what you've already just mentioned to make ourselves more likable.

46:41Some things are obvious where someone's like, oh, I watched the same show. And you're like, my gosh, it's my favorite show. Like, of course, having things in common is a great one. But some of these, I'm more fascinated by some of the like less obvious things. For instance, mimicry, super fascinating. It's very common in interaction to model the body position of who you're interacting with. And I ever since I read these studies, I noticed it all the time. If you do this, I cross my arms in a conversation. And then all of a sudden, a minute later, the other person crosses their arms. Happens all the time.

47:13Turns out it's like an affiliative kind of subconscious behavior that when you're just like when you say, oh, we watch the same TV show. It's like, hey, look at this. Our bodies go in the same position. And when you're noticing kind of subconsciously that you're sharing a position, you're doing the same thing, you're speaking the same way as someone, you're making the same facial expressions, it makes you more likable. also uh the brain seems to extrapolate whatever it's seeing to generalize to a person's reputation or to a person's personality so that's why like smiling if you're if you're seen smiling you're deemed like more trustworthy and more affiliative and more likable uh whereas on the other side of this.

48:00There's no scientific word for resting bitch face, but for those who suffer from resting bitch face are often judged as being like kind of, you know, a dick that people tend to think that it's, you know, that must be what their personality is. So, you know, being open, being expressive, sharing your emotions, smiling, you know, having things in common are just a few of the things that make people likable. It's so interesting that there's like science here and we can follow a recipe. It's like the thing most of us want ever since like school. We want to be popular. We want to be liked. And actually, there are things you can do to make yourself more likable.

48:43That's just really good news. Yeah. I don't necessarily want people or hope people that will read the book and say, oh, my gosh, here's my recipe for success. Right. Although likability is important. It definitely is. The more liked you are, you know, people treat you better. But rather, I hope it will be a guide for anyone who reads it and says, oh, I don't do that very well. Maybe that's something I should work on rather than a let me completely artificialize myself into this hyper likable key that goes in the lock and turns it. Because the other thing to consider is that authenticity is important.

49:18So if your proceed is inauthentic, then your likability drops. So if you try to make yourself something you're not to be likable, it may not work. These don't scan to me as manipulation or tools or a recipe for falsity. There are little hacks like eye contact and giving compliments, but at root, the recipe is to be yourself, but to do it strategically, like to be vulnerable in the right dose and at the right time, for example. I completely agree. Yeah. It's about being yourself, but also sometimes noticing when yourself may not be likable. You know, like maybe if your natural instinct is to interrupt people all the time and, you know, be really outspoken and like voice opinions that are controversial and stuff like that, like, you know, maybe it's it's worth noticing.

50:07OK, hey, likability is important. That's a quality I have that may may be unlikable. And so maybe that's something I should work on for myself. You know, it's it's about understanding yourself and and really ultimately bettering your relationships because relationships are so important. I've been a fully adult human male for many decades, but I've never really focused on shorts as something you can wear and actually be stylish. I'm trying to up my shorts game, especially as my family and I have a big beach vacation coming up in the next couple of weeks. And one of my allies in this endeavor, my primary ally, is Quince.

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53:42And there's evidence for that. You know, it's people who spend more time on social media, higher risk of anxiety, depression. They have poorer sleep, they sleep less. Whether this is a place where you can have a meaningful interaction is a totally different question. And I think there's a time and a place for it. I think for people who have trouble connecting in person or for people who, you know, are geographically restricted and want to connect with people in a different area, I think it's terrific. But for the average person, if we were to remove all in-person interactions and replace them with social media interactions, horrible consequences, in my opinion.

54:20You know, one thing I've noticed is this empathy, something that I was, you know, leading research at Stanford on the biology of empathy is not something that we see a whole lot of online. When we post, maybe you've seen this in your social channels and, you know, anybody who posts social media content has seen the what happens in the comment section. and you don't you can scroll on any post and look at the comment section and what you will find is a ridiculous level of hostility and anger and division and arguments and people start arguing with each other in the comments it's it's really out of control and this this actually like hit me when i was doing this research and i would go to the lab do experiments on empathy come home post videos on social media debunking misinformation etc and seeing that and it clicked for me this one day that like, oh my gosh, as I mentioned earlier, the way that your brain knows you're interacting with someone is by observing their social cues, facial expressions, vocal tone, and all that.

55:20We don't have any of those things on social media. And that is the way that the brain activates these empathy systems that help you understand what someone is feeling and help you feel what they are feeling. And so like, for instance, if I said something really mean to you right now, Dan, and it really upset you and you started crying, I would feel bad because I'm sitting here observing your emotions. And naturally, my brain starts to soak those up and I feel what you feel. This is empathy. But if as soon as we signed off from this, I mailed you a letter saying the exact same thing and you open the letter and you sob and you feel horrible, I feel nothing because I'm not there.

55:57I'm not observing it. I'm not witnessing the reaction I caused. And so how can we feel empathy for each other when we're leaving mean comments and then closing our phone and going away and forgetting it happened? And we're not seeing each other, we're not interacting with each other. So like I said, I think there's a time and a place for it. But I think on average, the interactions we have online are not realistic. They are more hostile. they're less productive and people generally kind of don't behave naturally they behave in a very kind of disconnected sort of like animalistic way that's I don't think good for humanity setting aside what what social media does to our empathic capacities what do we know about what it does to the brains generally of heavy users yeah so there's some research I remember reading a few years ago about social media addiction.

56:59I mean, social media platforms are designed to be as captivating as possible, right? They are fighting for your attention. And this is also something that's been increasingly acknowledged. Are they more addictive than cocaine? No, I wouldn't say so. Unless they, you know, start stimulating those dopamine pathways directly. But I mean, that's kind of what they're approximating, right? They are trying to make something, a product that is as tailored to your interests as possible and just basically as addictive as possible. I mean, in fact, I think about this all the time. If you look at any of these social media platforms, kind of what they look like, there's a video that pops up in your feed.

57:38You watch it. You have some dopamine reaction. You know, is this good? Is this interesting? Do I like this? If not, swipe. How's this one? Swipe. Boom. This one's amazing. Oh my gosh okay on to the next one hunting for that next hit right and the the rewards the good videos are delivered kind of randomly right it's not like every other video it's like you get you go three and then boom there's a really good one this is called a variable uh schedule of reinforcement that the like if you have a mouse picture a mouse like pressing a lever and getting a little treat the best way to get a mouse to press a lever is to have random increments of rewards delivered.

58:19They press it once, they get one, five presses later, they get one, and then two presses later, and then 12 presses later. Just random. It's totally unpredictable. This is the exact same mechanism that social media uses to make you keep swiping. And also, I've noticed this on the creator side, arguably even worse. You post a video, you're hoping it goes viral. Not this one. post another one not this one post another one boom virality amazing oh my gosh i need to post 20 more videos you post the 25th video viral and you end up hunting and hunting and hunting and i i mean i don't know i would imagine like these are smart people behind these platforms they know how to i don't want to say control but uh influence human behavior and so when you have that system paired with a hyper-personalized algorithm recommendation algorithm what you get is an intensely rewarding experience that's hard to look away from there is some evidence about social media addiction and there's there's been some even some neuroscience done and from what i remember reading um the brain changes that are seen in social people who are diagnosed with social media addiction are very much resemble the brain changes of drug addiction.

59:32And so the question there for me is, is there a brain signature of someone who is prone to becoming addicted to something? And that's why there's a correlation between those two types of brains? Or is it that social media, you know, is a drug, basically? That was all fascinating. Just in terms of how we as individuals should think about interacting with social media, if I'm hearing you correctly, And please correct me if I'm making the wrong extrapolation here. It feels like your argument is, hey, look, a little bit of social media is not going to kill you. And maybe it could even be fun or enjoyable on some level.

1:00:10And that's that's OK. You don't need to be a Luddite. You don't need to like disconnect from this thriving for better or worse aspect of human affairs right now. However, if you are doing too much of it or if you're not actually getting IRL interaction, that could be quite problematic. Yeah. The only thing I'll add to that is there are literally clinical trials that have been done where the drug or whatever, the intervention that was tested was a break from social media. And so they asked people to, you know, for a week or two weeks to limit their interact or their social media use or to completely stop it.

1:00:51which by the way they find they often find that it's impossible to get people to actually stop using social media so they usually end up having to limit it and when people do that their depression levels their anxiety levels both go down you know they start sleeping better so yes I agree with that I think that as long as you're limiting it and you're kind of monitoring it it's okay because I mean let's face it social media is pleasant, right? You love going on and seeing something. Some people cannot disconnect. In fact, I cannot tell you the number of times where, you know, I meet someone and someone says, oh, you know, this guy does TikTok or whatever.

1:01:33So TikTok comes up and I cannot tell you probably 90 % of the people I talk to say, oh, I can't have TikTok. I get addicted to it. I literally had to delete it from my phone because I was losing days of my life. And now Instagram, YouTube, even like LinkedIn, all these platforms are becoming more TikTok-esque. And I think there's good reason for it because it works really well. I remember a member of Congress calling TikTok digital fentanyl, which struck me as a quite vivid description. For people who are socially anxious, is alcohol an effective and appropriate social lubricant? Well, I don't want to like prescribed alcohol here.

1:02:12But I mean, can it be helpful? Of course. I think I remember a study finding that for every one drink consumed, social anxiety reduces by 4%, which 4 % is not a whole lot, but you have five drinks and all of a sudden you're down 20%. That's pretty strong. Yeah. And you're also naked and peeing in the corner of the bar. right yeah so my take on this is alcohol is not uh something that's healthy for you that has been increasingly uh talked about recently which is good i think because we've built an entire world around alcohol as a social lubricant it's also very much worth noting that alcohol makes us feel more comfortable socially but it actually does not make us better interactors it makes us much worse interactors.

1:03:02And like you said, you're naked peeing in the corner. I mean, the reason why that example makes sense is because when we start getting drunk, we stop caring about what other people think. This is very well established both in the world and also in neuroscience that people kind of turn off their mental models of what others are thinking. They're worse at understanding other people's opinions, their perspectives and stuff. There's a study showing that tipsy people showed less activity in the amygdala, the emotional reaction kind of area, to negative social content. And so the way I think about that is you're drunk at a bar and you make a super inappropriate joke towards one of your coworkers and everyone's like, oh my gosh, Like, how could you say that?

1:03:53In that moment, your brain's very likely having a weaker reaction because it's like, oh, I don't really care. You know, my the amygdala is not firing up as well. And so you're like super not socially anxious, but you're also doing things that are not conducive for building connection and also, you know, struggling with empathy. And so it's good that humanity has found this kind of system that allows us to connect through alcohol. But I do wish it were a different drug that we were all using to get together. Well, like which drug, MDMA? I honestly didn't mean anything specific by that, but probably if I had to pick one, I'd probably go MDMA.

1:04:35Although that's also not something you want to be doing all the time for your brain health. Yes, I have plenty. I have voluminous amounts of experience with MDMA and I love it. And and I would not readily recommend it because it can you know, the days afterwards can be as a friend of mine has said, you are borrowing happiness from the future. Yeah, I love your transparency on this show, Dan. I really appreciate it. Honestly, I've mentioned this on the show many times. So loyal listeners, I apologize. I'm going to say something I've said many times before. Or I'm a super extrovert. And I've also like, as a consequence of hosting the show for so many years, I've been highly sensitive to the benefits of social interaction and benefits I was overlooking for many years because of workaholism and other stupid behaviors.

1:05:20I have many, many standing dinners and lunches with friends. And one of them is with three women who I'm friends with. And one of them was saying, made a comment to me. And this is the relevant piece to your talking about how open I am. She described my business as an empire built on my own vulnerability. And, you know, I'm not a researcher like you, and I so I'm not an expert in anything. I'm not a meditation teacher. All I have is my ability to take from contemplative history and modern psychology and neuroscience and refract it through the lens of my own personal experience in service of the audience.

1:06:00Oh, well, it's probably what makes you so likable. Well, I appreciate that. Yeah, it doesn't always work. I have found you, sir, to be extremely likable in this conversation to be very, very fun. Final question for you is, can you just promote your book and your social media channels and your website and everything that you want us to know about? My book, it's called Why Brains Need Friends. And it's for international listeners. It's published in like 16 or 17 languages. It's really a neuroscientist's attempt at trying to solve the loneliness crisis by infusing as much neuroscience understanding as possible written at a level that anyone can understand.

1:06:41But the brain is an organ shrouded in mystery and darkness. My goal with the book is to basically help people understand what they cannot see, what is really going on inside the brain, what sort of benefits can you experience from connection, what things have you maybe never considered that you should consider, like drugs and likability and empathy and all of these facets of our lives that influence our brains, influence our health, influence our connections, and we may have never considered before. So if that's your jam, I appreciate anyone who's interested in reading it. We'll put links in the show notes.

1:07:17If anybody wants to buy it, we'll put links to your website and your social media accounts if anybody wants to get more from Dr. Ben Ryan. In the meantime, Ben, great job with this. Great to meet you. Thank you for your work. Thanks for your time. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It's been honestly a great conversation. I appreciate it. Thank you so much to everybody who works so hard to make this show. 10 % Happier is produced by Tara Anderson. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer.

1:07:51And Nick Thorburn of the great indie rock band Islands wrote our theme. One last thing I want to say before you go. If you enjoy this show, please do me slash us a solid. Follow the show and leave a rating and a review on whatever platform you watch or listen to us on. It only takes a minute. It's free and it really helps new people find us and spread the good news that the mind is trainable. Thank you. Sincerely. I mean it. Thank you.

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