How the Brain Remembers Complex Relationships
Have you ever wondered how people can remember the structure of the complex social relationships that surround them? Matthew Brashears, a researcher at Cornell, determined that the brain doesn’t remember huge social networks, rather it “cheats” and remembers small components of the network, such as triadic closures, and uses these to reconstruct this complex network. In his study, Brashears asked participants to recreate social networks that contained many triadic closures as well as networks that resembled a long chain of connections. Additionally, he used social networks where relationships were labeled vaguely, like “friends”, or specifically, like “sisters”. He found that participants were much more successful at recreating large social networks when relationships were labeled with specific descriptors, and, more relevantly, contained many triadic closures of three people who all know each other. Thinking about this result, I realized that this is also how I think about the relationships among the people I know. If you ask me to describe the relationship of a certain person to other people I know, I first associate the person with a group, either with their family or their closest friends or even their enemies, and then it is much easier to describe the relationships this person has within this smaller group.
This research and topic is relevant to our course material because of the essential role that triadic closures play in the ability of the brain to break down and remember complex social networks. Not only is the ability to reason about triadic closures useful in the more theoretical and abstract area of computer science, but recognition of these structural aspects of networks around us is “programmed” into our brains and has been for likely hundreds of years.
http://www.livescience.com/28095-brain-relationship-memory-shortcuts.html