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

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Ten Percent Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. I, as you probably know, think a lot about brain health, not only because I want to be uh healthy and happy for as long as possible, but also because I have a dad with dementia, and that's been pretty hard to watch. Uh if you pay any attention to brain health, you've probably run into what I called neuro bullshit online, um, expensive unproven interventions that people are peddling on Instagram. But it turns out there's actually one really big secret for keeping your brain healthy, and uh it's completely free. Uh, which brings me to my guest today, Dr. Ben Rine, who's a neuroscientist at Stanford and has written a book called Why Brains Need friends.

Doctor Ben Ryan, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I want to talk about your book in great detail, but let me just start with uh one of the ways in which you've made a name for yourself. Uh you've got a quite a large online following. One of the things you've done online, which I find very helpful, is debunk a lot of what I was calling neuro bullshit. And so I'm just curious before we get into why brains need friends. What are some of the, you know, top offenders these days? Uh what are you seeing online that worries you? Well, first off, I I deeply appreciated that intro. As soon as you said neuro bullshit, I was like, this is perfect. Because I I mean, yeah, I've seen that It all started for me years ago and I kind of went viral on accident and was like, do I want to do this or not? Is this worth it? Is this good for my career?

And then I started engaging with the social platforms more and discovered that so much of what people consider like scientific education online is actually Far from scientific education. It's there's a ton of misinformation out there and it's just Pretty bad, honestly. So I that's what I kinda started doing what I was doing with the debunking and

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