Why we hold hands: Dr. James Coan at TEDxCharlottesville 2013

[Music] [Applause] [Music] hello thank you very much for coming out to see all of us today I'm going to tell you about a question that sort of obsessed me for the past 10 years or so it's a weird question the question is why do we hold hands you might wonder why I would be obsessed with something like that many people are I'm going to tell you that one of the things that that happens in from my pursuit of this question is that I've fundamentally changed the way I understand the human brain both its design and how it may have evolved over time and I also want to tell you a little bit of the story about where the idea came from because it's really interesting and it's it's something that maybe we would be able to relate to more my obsession with the question of why we old hands sort of burst forth a Big Bang like from a clinical experience I had about 11 years ago I'm a clinical psychologist at the time I was working in a Veterans Hospital and I was doing a specialty in treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder and I had a referral from for a guy who was suffering from some pretty severe symptoms this man was a world war two era veteran who had not been suffering from many symptoms previously but they were starting to come on as he as he got older he came to my office and I told him what the treatment entailed and what we were going to be doing and he was very skeptical and a little bit grouchy I'll be honest and he said here's the thing I want my wife to come I want my wife to come with me to these whatever these things are nobody ever asked me to do that before I had no reason to say no so I said well okay sure sure sure and she did and and in my in my infinite clinical wisdom I immediately began treating her like a like a sort of a observer like maybe he was watching through the TV or something just somebody there I wasn't really talking to her thinking of her as part of the session I was really still focused on him obviously he's got these PTSD symptoms and I told him what the treatment Eila we're going to tell stories I want to hear what happened to him in the war and he said no well uh-huh this is what we got to do No okay so backing off we're going to do something called progressive muscle relaxation anybody know what this is this is very very useful is very simple tasking do with people who have forgotten what their body feels like when it's relaxed people who are anxious or spend so much time tense that they don't even know what the body feels like relaxing or so you teach them by having them clench and release and pay attention to what it feels like when they release so I asked him to do this he says no I know okay please you know it's really so I start I start you know I'll do it I'll do it with his wife reaches over and clasps his hand says I'll do it too and they're in front of me this couple both in their early 80s start clenching up and releasing clenching up now holding hands the entire time so we go through this for a number of sessions and we find out that it's it's really we're progressing towards a time where we need to start working on the exposure part of the therapy where we have him recount some of the things that happened to him in the war and we sort of worked through that and he says no and his wife reaches over and clasps his hand and he just starts talking he just starts talking she was doing the work I was like well I'll just leave the the thing about that was that this this moment was really clear this this clasping his hand really set him on the trajectory toward achieving the treatment goals that we were trying to achieve but also when we were all done the treatment Gant gains that we were looking for came much sooner than the typical patient that I worked with at the time and I can't make any causal associations there's just a single instance but I became very interested in this hand clasping that happened this hand holding that changed his behavior so much that we were able to move through some very difficult work and so I did what anybody really would do right I designed a brain Imaging study and I asked a number of couples to come into the laboratory and I put them into the scanner I wanted to create first a situation that resembled the the emotional labor that this person had to go through and the second allowed me a lot of experimental control so I put when I asked couples coming to laboratory I put one in the scanner and scanner is really uncomfortable so half my job was done there was an uncomfortable emotional situation you're in this tube and you're stuck there and it's going it's very loud and miserable but that wasn't good enough for me so I also put them under threat of electric shock which is not funny but it is it's a little it's a little bit it's a little bit funny it's a little bit funny but it's not really funny it's a little bit funny and so what we do is we show the person in the scanner either a red X or a blue circle over and over and over again if they saw the blue circle they knew that they were completely safe they saw the red X they knew that there was a 20% chance that they would get an electric shock on their ankle after a period of time so we're making them very anxious and the noise and the tube and so what we found we ran this repeatedly either while they were alone while they were holding the hand of a total stranger they never met before while they were holding the hand of the romantic partner and here's what we found if you're alone and you're in a tube and it's very loud and you're under threat of electric shock your brain sort of lights up like a Christmas tree wow it's got lots of things it has to do it's like I hate this I want to get out of here it's for mandating plans to get out of here and it's also controlling yourself so you don't do something which weirdly is socially inappropriate which is get me out of here right that's socially inappropriate in this context in no other context would that be socially inappropriate if you're holding a stranger's hand parts of your brain that are associated with the just the general physiological arousal the speed of your heart rate and mobilizing your body to take action seem to be less active okay it's like your brain says saying I don't need to outrun the monster anymore just that guy and so it adjusts its effort accordingly if you're holding your partner's hand we saw massive decreases in the way that the brain responded to the threat we saw these decreases in places like the prefrontal cortex which is a suit which is one of the locations in the brain that is strongly associated with how you regulate your own emotions so what we did what we knew is that people were feeling less threatened they told us so when they were holding their partner's hand but they weren't having to exercise the regions of the brain that they usually would have to exercise if they were self regulating the hand holding seemed to be taking care of that without their own efforts we also saw decreased activation in places like the hypothalamus which is responsible for the release of stress hormones into your bloodstream these stress hormones we already know can have a deleterious effect on your immune function especially over long periods of time so this region of the brain that's responsible for releasing stress hormones that sort of reallocate your body's metabolic resources from places like the immune system to your bloodstream so you can fight off the monster or whatever we're not becoming activated while they were holding hands this was very interesting to me in particular because we've known already for decades that the more socially isolated you are the more like you are to die of anything at any time no matter where you live or what culture you inhabit so we've already knew that but now we're trying we're starting to see the actual mechanisms in play in real time simple hand-holding simple hand-holding but we're also interested in what's going on with the hand holder ok sure you're holding my hand I'm under threat I'm getting all of this relaxation what's going on in your brain so we start shocking them - I'm not kidding haha we started shocking absolutely everybody at this point pretty soon I'll be getting shocked my Ras my students we're going to just shock every you might just watch out and what we found is something really mind-blowing to me personally very mind-blowing and it goes like this what we're able to do in this design we're able to look at the same brain when the shock is directed at the self and when the shock is directed at a stranger when the shock is directed at a friend if the shock if we're looking at how your brain is responding to a shock directed at a stranger it looks really different from the way that your brain looks from the shock is directed at yourself but if we look at how what your brain is doing when the shock is directed at your friend or your married partner your girlfriend or boyfriend it looks really similar it looks really similar creepily similar like if you use some kind of machine learning strategy to say which through where's where's the threat directed just by looking at the brain you'd have a hard time telling the difference and this is not only true in places that just register alarm and danger it's true in places that are associated in many studies with creating a neural representation of the self so uh and this includes regions of the brain that are associated with mapping the state of the physical body so it looks for all the world like what we what happens with familiarity is that the person who is becoming familiar what was almost like a definition of familiarity becomes mapped on to the self which is after all a task that the brain has to do it has to create the self from a bunch of neurons firing it says construct at the neural level and other people get absorbed into it as they become familiar and trusted so why do we hold hands well at a surface level we hold hands for all kinds of reasons right ooh you're cute or or come here come here come here don't run into the street we hold hands for lots of reasons right but at a deeper level at a deeper level at a deep sort of brain level at a deeper evolutionary time level we hold hands to send each other's brains a signal and that signal is really something like I am here with you I am here with you I am here with you and what we've learned is that with time with increasing levels of interdependence that signal grows in strength and gradually transforms into something more like I am you you are me and we are here we are here we are here now one of the things that this is this insight I I want to stress came from this couple who were doing incredibly painful laborious emotional work and he was able to do that work in part because his wife lent him her attention her own strength and her commitment to his change his his treatment goals that's what allowed him the the opportunity to make that emotional recovery so in a sense what we have is kind of an economic story as we grow to become one unit a larger unit than me or you we outsource neural processing to each other's brains and our brains become yoked together in that sense and start processing information for each other and that's what I've learned [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: TEDx Talks

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Id: 1UMHUPPQ96c

Length: 12min 59sec (779 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 25 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/GoddessoftheUniverse]

Once when I flew to California, an older Asian gentleman, very properly attired sat on my right. I could tell when we got ready to land, he was very tense and nervous. I hesitated but finally reached over and just put my hand on his. He turned his hand over and clasped mine. When the plane landed and pulled into the gate, he turned to me and just said "Thank you". It was our only verbal exchange, but I am grateful I took a chance and reached out.

[u/BigSisterof5]

Been there, done that. It sounds phony, but in fact it does work.