Is Our Brain to Blame If We’re Not Sociable? | Newsweek Voices - Sharon Begley | Newsweek.com

There must be something deep in the human soul that makes us blame fate, birth, our parents and all sorts of other things beyond our control for how we turn out, and scientists are no less guilty of this. Case in point: a study published in the European Journal of Neuroscience this week concludes that something about the way the brain develops from birth or earlier leads some of us to be people persons—socially gregarious, enjoying the company of others—and some of us to be more aloof.

True, the scientists hedge their bets by making the requisite acknowledgement that people’s experience and behavior might act to alter their brain structure, something for which there is ample and growing evidence. My favorites: London taxicab drivers develop a larger hippocampus that’s the site of spatial memory, a good thing to have to navigate London streets and violin players develop larger somatosensory cortexes in regions devoted to the digits of their fingering hand. But the title of this latest bit of research tells it all: “The brain structural disposition to social interaction.” Translation: brain structure comes first, and the result is that you are either a warm, friendly people person who delights in the company of others or a detached, independent, antisocial loner.