Figure 2. Three Views of the Social Brain.

(A) The original view elaborated a set of brain structures originally proposed by Leslie Brothers (Brothers, 1990).

(B) The current view ties subsets of these structures together into functional networks that subserve particular components of social cognition; both (A) and (B) are from Kennedy and Adolphs (2012).

(C) Hints of a future view in which brain networks are derived by mining large data sets (NeuroSynth; Yarkoni et al., 2011). Left: Lateral (top) and medial (bottom) views of a reverse-inference map (generated using 293 studies) indicate the likelihood that the term “social” was used in a study given the presence of activation, i.e., p(term|activation) (brain activity displayed using NeuroLens; http://www.neurolens.org). We compared this map to that of 200 independently identified Topic maps (Yarkoni et al., 2011; http://neurosynth.org) and identified those that were based on more than 30 studies and that either covered more than 50% of the “social” term map (middle) or were more than 50% covered by the “social” term map (right). Topic 116 was primarily concerned with emotion; Topic 135 with social games and interactions; Topic 143 with mentalizing; Topic 20 with fear and arousal; and Topic 30 with consciousness and awareness. Although these data-mining results should be considered preliminary, they suggest several intriguing patterns: dorsomedial prefrontal cortex appears to subserve a general role, appearing ubiquitously across the networks, whereas regions of the precuneus may be involved more selectively, distinguishing between emotion and social games. It is also interesting to observe that the amygdala is identified in all maps with the exception of Topic 143 (mentalizing). Approaches such as the example we show here should be used in future studies that make an effort to combine and reconcile data-mining results with the results of particular experimental studies.