Paper code: BSMSNEU-S4-P1

Title: Social and affective neuroscience

Submitted by: Anuvinda Mani
Enrolment no.: 101BSMSNP2122012

The Future of Social Neuroscience Research Twenty Years from Now

Humans are social beings. The fact that mind, behavior and neural correlates of social
expression coexist and presumably affect each other clearly suggests the necessity of social
neuroscience at present and for the future. The negligible amount of research on the
aforementioned is an apparent concern when considering the fact that human behavior is the
most elementary yet imperative ingredient to the society. A wide range of research topics are
examined within social neuroscience including social interactions, agency, empathy, morality,
and social prejudice and affiliations.
Even though it's been around thirty years or so since theories and ideas about social
neuroscience has come up it's still in its infancy. There still needs to be a lot more done in
social neuroscience but the major limitations stand as expensive research especially in
neuroimaging, blood chemistry and providing incentives for the patient population. Another
issue about social neuroscience is its ecological validity of a lot of its experimental paradigms.
One crucial limitation is the proliferation of false positives due to lack of further research a
once they appear in literature, they are particularly persistent. A suggestive or tentative way
out all the limitations are to be made in order to bring about all of the underlying facts about
human behaviour in social settings. Neurosexism and neuroethics, hyper scanning, new tools
for aggregating and analysing fMRI data, pursuing the sub cortex and brain-AI interface are
few directions to the future that can overcome the existing difficulties.
Neurosexism and neuroethics: Neurosexism is an existing myth that men and women have
different brains. The concept is now widely used by critics of the neuroscience of sex
differences in neuroscience, neuroethics and philosophy. To study and research this deeply and
to find valuable conclusions is something to hope for in the future of social behavior correlating
to neuroscience. On the other hand, neuro ethics is an interdisciplinary field focusing on ethical
issues raised by our increased and constantly improving understanding of the brain and our
ability to monitor and influence it. It clearly is the study of both the ethics of neuroscience and
the neuroscience of ethics.
Hyper scanning: It is the recording of brain activity from multiple individuals which can be
hard to interpret. Integrating behavioural data and mutual prediction models into hyper
scanning studies can lead to advances in embodied social neuroscience.
New tools for aggregating and analysing fMRI data: Firstly, fMRI is expensive. Second, it can
only capture a clear image if the person being scanned stays completely still. And third,
researchers still don't completely understand how it works. New tools are prerequisite for a
totally reliable fMRI outputs of the brain to study its working in the social environment.
Pursuing the sub cortex: Subcortical structures are a group of diverse neural formations deep
within the brain which include the diencephalon, pituitary gland, limbic structures and the basal
ganglia. They are involved in complex activities such as memory, emotion, pleasure and
hormone production. Even with all of this, the sub cortex is still under studied and this calls in
for necessary research. Hopefully in the distant future articles could come up with the finding
that a person born without a working a caudate cannot make a conversation in public, you never
know!
Brain-AI interface: The beneficial relationship between AI and neuroscience is reciprocal, and
AI is now rapidly becoming an invaluable tool in neuroscience research. AI models designed
to perform intelligence-based tasks are providing novel hypotheses for how the same processes
are controlled within the brain The future of interaction between brain and the artificial neural
networks in the artificial intelligence mechanism is the most anticipated. In the possible future
either the brain is going to replace a computer by being able to control anything and everything
that it does or the AI mechanisms will simple replace human actions in social settings.
I am to the opinion that future is always uncertain and this precariousness is where the
beauty of research lies. We are never traversing through things that we already know but rather
things we would want to comprehend. The future of social neuroscience is unambiguously iffy
and unpredictable. All that we know of is a direction and that is to make use of a multi-method
and multi-disciplinary research approach combining genetic, pharmacological, computational
and developmental aspects. On an end note, I’m reminded of this great proverb that goes ‘The
best way to predict the future is to invent it; to simply create and research is the way out of this
obvious principal concern.