Social, by Matthew Lieberman

SocialWhat It’s About: Explains the how our brains are made to connect with one another and some stunning implications of recent brain research, particularly in education. Not about language learning, but has important ideas that apply to teaching language.

Quotable Quotes: “70 percent of the content in our conversations is social in nature.” p. 20

“Food, water and shelter are NOT the most basic needs for an infant. Instead, being socially connected and cared for is paramount… this restructuring of Maslow’s pyramid tells us something critical about ‘who we are’. Love and belonging might seem like a convenience we can live without, but our biology is built to thirst for connection because it is linked to our most basic survival needs.” p. 43

“I believe the real solution is to stop making the social brain the enemy during class time and figure out how to engage the social brain as part of the learning process.” p. 283

“In study after study, the folks making sense of the information socially have done better on memory tests than the folks intentionally memorizing the material.” p. 284

Bonus Points For: Describing how emotional pain shows up just like physical pain in the brain. Emotional pain really does hurt, and all the more so because we can’t point right at it. Our old childhood taunt was wrong; words CAN hurt us.

Two Images That Could Sum Up This Book: 1) A car on a dark road with dim headlights in front, but disco ball energy pulsating behind the windows. 2) A plastic model of the brain that lights up, but the prefrontal cortex at the front of the skull (the part we have assumed to be the most important in learning) shines less brightly than the wildly active social nodes throughout the brain which are constantly pulsating with interconnected messages.

Read This Book If… You want to begin to learn how to use the social parts of your students’ brains to get them to earnestly connect with one another, with their learning and with their world.