The Neuroscience of Likability, Social Connection, and Brain Health | Ben Rein

**Dan Harris** (0:04)
Hello, everybody, welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. I, as you probably know, think a lot about brain health, not only because I want to be healthy and happy for as long as possible, but also because I have a dad with dementia and that's been pretty hard to watch. If you pay any attention to brain health, you've probably run into what I call neuro-bullshit online, expensive, unproven interventions that people are peddling on Instagram. But it turns out there's actually one really big secret for keeping your brain healthy, and it's completely free.
Which brings me to my guest today, Dr. Ben Rein, who's a neuroscientist at Stanford and has written a book called, Why Brains Need Friends. Dr. Ben Rein, welcome to the show.

**Ben Rein** (0:51)
Thank you so much for having me.

**Dan Harris** (0:52)
I want to talk about your book in great detail. But let me just start with one of the ways in which you've made a name for yourself. You've got quite a large online following. One of the things you've done online, which I find very helpful, is debunk a lot of what I was calling neuro bullshit. And so I'm just curious before we get into why brains need friends, what are some of the top offenders these days?
What are you seeing online that worries you?

**Ben Rein** (1:18)
Well, first off, I deeply appreciated that intro. As soon as you said neuro bullshit, I was like, this is perfect. Because, I mean, yeah, I've seen that it all started for me years ago. And I kind of went viral on accident and was like, do I want to do this or not? Is this worth it? Is this good for my career? And then I started engaging with the social platforms more and discovered that so much of what people consider like scientific education online is actually far from scientific education. It's just a ton of misinformation out there. And it's just pretty bad, honestly. So that's why I kind of started doing what I was doing with the debunking and fact checking, because for me, it's very simple. It's like someone makes a claim online. They're probably referencing some data. Let's find the data and let's see if it's true. So, I mean, when it comes to the most common offenders, gosh, of course, like we all know about the the big ones that have been circulating a lot these days, you know, autism and vaccines and all that as a person who did my Ph.D. in the Neurobiology of Autism and, you know, when I was doing my Ph.D., I had people coming to me and saying, gosh, I hope you start looking into vaccines. And, you know, I learned pretty early in my Ph.D. the first time someone said that to me. And I looked up in the literature that there's been studies with millions of children showing that autism is not linked to vaccination. So, of course, now we have Tylenol and a lot of other offenders coming out these days. But, you know, I think probably the thing I see the most is like it used to be psychology says do this, you know, for happiness or whatever. And now it's neuroscience says, or I'm a neuroscientist, and this is what I think you should do.
And I think probably the most common is supplements because maybe coincidentally, they are an easy way to they're an easy item to be sold on social media. And so when you're giving someone a basically a prescription and then there's a 10% coupon, you know, it's a pretty easy way to make money if you're framing yourself as a neuroscientist. So something I recently started doing actually was this video series where I call it, Do Supplements Really Work? And I go through supplement by supplement and break down, like, here's the actual evidence. Here's what people say it does. Does it actually do it?
At least in some clinical trials hasn't been shown to do that. And, you know, take that as you will. If you want to use it, go for it. But here's what the evidence says.

**Dan Harris** (3:30)
Is there anything you found that actually might help the brain?

**Ben Rein** (3:34)
I have to admit, I've been a little bit surprised by some of them because there's so many supplements out there and so many claims for each supplement that it feels like the whole supplement space is kind of garbage and doomed. When I started looking into it, I was actually a little bit surprised. For instance, Ashwagandha, people say it's good for stress. I looked it up. There are some studies showing it reduces cortisol levels. OK, that's a good sign.