On October 29, 2024, Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute held a symposium titled “The Neuroscience of Social Connections” at the Jerome L. Greene Science Center at 130th Street and Broadway.  The event featured faculty speakers and a series of presentations by PhD students highlighting the biological and psychological mechanisms of social interactions.

The inaugural Local Circuits Symposium opened with remarks from Dr. Katrina Armstrong, Columbia’s Interim President and the Chief Executive Officer of the Irving Medical Center. 

The first segment of the day highlighted talks from Columbia faculty, beginning with Kevin Ochsner, PhD, who researches social structures and the factors that contribute to them. He explained his lab’s research into the relative differences in popularity and leadership in a group–does being more popular lend you more power? His research also found that people who are more attuned to social structures are more susceptible to being influenced, especially by more popular members. Ochsner highlighted the importance of this research when examining how social media impacts peoples’ decisions.

The second speaker, Ishmail Abdus-Saboor, PhD, researches the neurobiology of social touch “from mice to molerats.” Humans have dedicated neurons in their skin that register social cues, and these neurons are critical for happiness and well-being–consider the impact of skin-to-skin contact with a newborn baby or a simple hug. Similar neurons were observed in mouse skin, and using gene editing, researchers introduced blue-light sensitive proteins into these neurons. By shining blue light on the back of a mouse, the neurons were activated, causing the mouse to bend their back, a reaction similar to if it was being petted. Further studies also showed that the mice enjoyed this blue-light-activated neural firing. However, when these social-touch neurons were removed from mice, female mice would become more aggressive towards male mice.  Additionally, there was a drastic decrease in social interactions, and dopamine receptors were downregulated (meaning that the mice’s ability to feel satisfaction from positive social experiences was reduced). Abdus-Saboor used the studies to emphasize the importance of social touch, particularly in early development.

The research then switched test subjects because, according to  Abdus-Saboor, “mice were not ugly enough,” and they “had to find an uglier animal,” which they feel they did with the naked mole rat. Naked mole rats are extremely pro-social animals, which means that they consistently show intent to share and cooperate. Mole rats also live in ant-like organizations with a queen, breeding mill, and workers. Naked mole rats, living entirely in dark, quiet underground tunnels, rely on touch as their main way of sensing and interacting with the world around them. A causal link between their dependence on touch and pro-sociality remains largely unresearched, but there seems to be a strong connection. Abdus-Saboor introduced a study his lab conducted into naked mole rat social structures and how they relate to social touch. When naked mole rats encounter each other in their subterranean tunnels, the more dominant rat has to crawl over the less dominant rat. However, studies have also shown that 100% of the time, the two rats touch faces before making a decision on hierarchy, which solidifies a connection between their social behavior and touch.

Kevin Bath, PhD, an Associate Professor at the Irving Medical Center, served as the third speaker. His research delved into how changes in early environments can impact the development and behavior of young mice. Bath explained how the changes in behavior and development that mice experience in response to changes in their environment could be attributed to adaptation or overreaction. Regardless of the reason, though, Bath and his team examined how stressors on the mother mice impact the behavior and responses of her pups. They created two environments for the mother: one had plenty of bedding, and the other had almost no bedding. The pups of the mother who had almost no bedding experienced early life adversity (ELA). The mother mice in the cage with (ELA) were more erratic. They provided more high-energy care that was less predictable in type, duration, and quality. This created an uncertain and constantly changing environment for the pups, which ended up leading to accelerated development of the pups’ hippocampi and amygdalae, which process memory and fear, respectively. The pups also experienced delayed maturation of their visual, prefrontal, and motor cortices, which impacted the age at which their eyes opened, the development of reasoning skills, and even social skills. The applications of this research could potentially extend to the stressors young children experience and how they impact the development of children’s brains.

The final speaker in the first series was Katherine Keyes, a Professor of Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health. Keyes focuses on how the sample composition of a study impacts the findings’ applicability to different populations. When answering research questions like “Does this drug work?” or “How does changing this gene impact the subject?” representative and diverse sampling of test subjects can actually be a detriment. There is a reason that when we study mice in labs, they are genetically very similar and live in identical environments–we want the only difference to be the experimental variable. When looking to apply findings to a wider population, however, sampling representation does matter. For example, in an MRI study looking at the development of cortical volumes in children, the sampled groups did not accurately reflect the American population; it included a disproportionately high level of highly educated parents. When the data was adjusted to reflect the broader population, the peak age of cortical volume was found to be almost a full year younger than in the unadjusted results. Keyes underscored that while representative sampling is not always necessary, it is essential for studies to be applied broadly, as representative sampling can drastically impact the study and its conclusions. She urged researchers to consider the purpose of their study before deciding what type of sampling to carry out.

After Keyes’ presentation, the symposium broke for tea and coffee and then returned twenty minutes later to a “Trainee Data Blitz” with talks from Anna Vannucci, Jonathan Kasdin, John Andrew Chwe, and Pegah Kassraian, PhD, as well as presentations by Dr. Andrés Bendesky, MD, PhD, and Meghan Meyer, PhD.

The symposium highlighted just some of Columbia’s groundbreaking research into the biological foundations of social interactions, from neurobiological structures of social touch to societal impacts of early life adversity. The combination of faculty and students provided a diverse view of modern neuroscientific research and highlighted the importance of our diverse and ever-evolving understanding of social connections.

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