Friends Give Your Brain A Little Cognitive Tickle

Have you ever felt as if hanging out with your friends, your co-workers, or maybe even your family members gave you a mental boost? Not just a “happy, mood-elevating” kind of boost, but an “I feel a little bit smarter just being around you” kind of boost.

Haven’t we all?

Well, according to researchers at the University of Michigan, this is very possible, and they outline such possibilities in their article Mental Exercising Through Simple Socializing: Social Interaction Promotes General Cognitive Functioning published in the February issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

The results don’t necessarily focus on feeling smarter when you hang around highly intelligent people, or people who seem to be more intelligent than you. (Good thing, too, because as a teen-aged and wide-eyed college freshman, there were many, many times I felt quite unintelligent when surrounded by older, more experienced students. And my professors.) Rather, researchers focus more on how “more social factors, like simply engaging in social interaction, can also play a role in helping people stay mentally sharp.”

In addition to the numerous ways social interaction and relationships add to people’s
quality of life (promoting well-being while potentially keeping people from being prone to mental illness, depression, and self-regulation deficits), we may now be able to add the facilitation of cognitive functioning, “including long-term and short-term effects on performance.”

As an example, the researchers list a number of ways just having a conversation with another person helps keep us mentally sharp. The people having the conversation must (with interpretations in parentheses added by me):

• Pay attention to one another. (As opposed to other stuff – stuff irrelevant to you – going on at the same time: another group talking and laughing nearby, a kid screaming for his mom to buy him something in the checkout line, etc.)
• Remember the conversation topic and what each person, including him/herself, has contributed. (Which kind of goes right along with paying attention.)
• Take into consideration the different perspectives presented. (Thoughtfully considering another’s point-of-view rather than immediately discrediting his/her perspective.)
• Interpret the beliefs and desires each conversation participant has. (Thinking of reasons why the other person feels/thinks/believes the way s/he does.)
• Assess any situational constraints that may be acting on each conversation participant at the time. (Is there something in the environment, in the “situation,” that is leading to the other person’s contributions/ways of thinking/beliefs/etc.?)
• Refrain from acting irrelevantly and inappropriately during the conversation. (Laughing during what is clearly a sad story, slapping a person who disagrees with you, belting out a Spanish version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” simply because it was on Prison Break last night and you absolutely, no matter how hard you try, cannot get it out of your head.)

Wow! That’s a lot for our brains to manage at one time, huh? While the researchers admit that many of these processes are automatic, they also point out that some of them “depend on limited-capacity cognitive resources often subsumed by the term executive functions, which include capacities such as attention, working memory, and cognitive control.”

Again, you can find a copy of the entire article online (don’t fret – it’s only around 13 pages long in .pdf format), or you can check out Science Daily’s summarized report Does Socializing Make Us Smarter?

Now, how does this research affect you? Which takes us back to the original question I posed: Have you ever felt as if hanging out with your friends, your co-workers, or maybe even your family members gave you a mental boost?

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