I’m still fascinated by passages I read in Stanley Coren’s, How Dogs Think. I finished the book, finally, after having interspersed about a half dozen other books during the process. (This one being so dense and interesting, I’ve savored it slowly). He has a section in the book titled “The Social Brain.” Dogs are pack animals, and so it seems, are humans. He describes the “Social Brain Hypothesis” which says that “one of the major reasons intelligence evolved and became more complex in the first place was that it was designed to solve social problems. The more complex the social organization in which an animal lives, the more intelligence he needs and the more his brain is oriented toward social issues. Humans, of course, are social animals and spend most of their time exchanging personal and social information.”
Coren goes on to say two British psychologists sampled conversations and found that “more than two-thirds of our conversations are taken up with social and emotional matters. Typical topics dealt with who is doing what and with whom, and perhaps commentaries on whether that is a good or bad thing. Other topics include who is a moving up in the world and who is moving down and why.”
In a study that Coren conducted, monitoring over a hundred discussions between his colleagues at the university where he teaches he “never found a technical discussion that went on for more than seven minutes without lapsing, at least for a while, back into social conversation. In fact, only about one-quarter of the time was spent on technical matters overall.”
Leaves one pondering. As my mother used to say: apple pie without the cheese is like a kiss without the squeeze.
Posted by leya at December 15, 2005 04:45 PM