Friendship Beyond Borders

I met Eli almost exactly three years ago on a study abroad trip to Dharamsala, India. Tall, lanky and endearingly awkward, he was an easy target to befriend. Over the course of spicy tandoori and excessive amounts of naan, we became dear friends, friends in which comfort equates to honesty and judgment lacks. Despite our busy schedules, we always made time to see each other a few times a semester until of course he had to graduate. A year older and a fellow neuroscience major, Eli decided to take his talents overseas to the University of St. Andrews to complete his masters. Throughout the course of the year, we facetimed until one fateful day I told him of my upcoming plans to study in Paris. Excitedly, we planned to a day to see each other—-two months in advance.

The fateful day arrived this past Sunday, and my excitement could not be understated. I had been experiencing some unexpected culture shock and missing home, so I hoped our meeting would provide some ease and comfort as I continued adjusting to the city. We ended up in the Jewish quarter of Paris. Bakeries lined with challah and plates of hummus surrounded us, and my middle eastern self was having a field day. Eli recommended a falafel place with an exorbitant line which seemed promising. A brief exchange of broken Hebrew and soon we were walking to the Siene in with the biggest falafel sandwiches I had ever seen. The afternoon was spent eating delicious food, lying by the water, and talking about everything and nothing simultaneously. After lunch, we went to a crowded café and indulged in overpriced coffee and refreshing sorbets. And before I knew it, our day had ended. I walked him to the train, bid him au revoir, and left for home with newfound contentment and peace. Sunday brought back a realization I had made at graduation; having close friends is one of the most important and gratifying experiences of life. But what makes a close friend? Is it matter of respect and admiration of differences or similar worldly paradigm that draws us together?

Recent research led by Dr. Carolyn Parkinson set to solve these questions by testing whether within a social network the neural response to naturalistic audiovisual stimuli were more similar amongst close friends. Was my perception of the Parisian skyline more similar to Eli? Was this the real foundation of our friendship?  Parkinson et al., 2018 used 279 first year graduate students to test their theory and constructed a visual social network display for all for them, aka the social spider web (depicted below). Analysis of this image holds a variety of information due to self-reporting but, none was more interesting than the reciprocity rate, the rate in which two people name each other as a friend. A whopping 47.2%, which means probably over half of the “friends” we have aren’t friends (Parkinson et al., 2018).

Delving to the neural level, a subset of these students was placed into an fMRI machine and shown various movie clips in a predetermined order. Would the minds of friends show similar audio and visual firing patterns? If so, could we determine friendships merely by looking at these scans? Response patterns were gathered from 80 anatomical brain regions (Parkinson et al., 2018). Several brain regions such as the nucleus accumbens, inferior parietal cortex, and superior partial cortex showed statistically significant neural significance. The increased correlation with these areas is particularly interesting because the nucleus accumbens is linked to motivation, learning, and affective processing and the reward network while the inferior parietal cortex is playing a role in attentional allocation. These finding provide further scientific evidence of close friendships being rewarding and requiring a high degree of attention.

An additional point of interest is whether there were factors beyond friendship driving similar neural responses. In the control group, the weighted average of neural response similarities and dissimilarities were compared for five factors: nationality, handedness, gender, ethnicity, and age. Age and ethnicity surprisingly showed little similarity in neural responses, while nationality, handedness and gender all were statistically significant in correlation with neural response similarity (Parkinson et al., 2018). The fact that amongst close friend’s nationality has more influence on how they interpret the world over ethnicity is mind boggling. Yet, I would be lying if I don’t perk up when I hear English in the subways. The stark differences in Parisian and American culture has proved to me the substantial role culture plays in determining our behavior and world view. Coming from the South, I have come to expect bubbly greetings upon entering restaurant and now I meagerly whisper a “Bonjour” through a tight smile and quickly avert my eyes. Perhaps of the comfort of Eli’s Sunday’s visit was less to do with us as individuals but in how we saw Parisian life similarly, how in awe we were at the leisurely lifestyle, and how little French we understood. And for four short hours with the Eiffel Tower overlooking, I was home.

Eli back row with grey collar, Me last on left 

From the study

Citation:

Parkinson C, Kleinbaum AM, Wheatley T. Similar neural responses predict friendship. Nat Commun. 2018;9(1):332. Published 2018 Jan 30.

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