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What is the relevance of this to the story of the social nature of humankind? Our research findings have led me to believe that we all have made Eddington’s error in the way we have thought about, studied, and tried to deal with an invisible force that motivates us to seek and maintain our connection with others — including the loneliness one feels when we feel important social connections are threatened or absent. Historically, the scientific perspective on loneliness was not only that it was a painful and miserable state, but that it was an aversive state with no redeeming features. All one needs to do is to reflect on the last time one felt terribly lonely, and one can appreciate the seemingly self- evident truth of this characterization. But as Sir Arthur Eddington’s story shows us, the obvious and intuitive can sometimes be very misleading. It is now widely recognized that many structures and processes of the mind operate outside of awareness, with only the end products sometimes reaching awareness. Humans have evolved to seek connections with and validation from other minds, and these social connections represent an important set of invisible forces operating on our brain and biology. The need for social connection extends beyond kin relations and beyond face to face relations to include felt connections with superorganismal entities such as teams, political parties, nations, and God. The unseen forces compelling these connections can be quantified and investigated objectively independent of one’s spiritual beliefs. Underlying these aspirations are selfish genes that have produced a social brain which activates reward regions of the brain when we cooperate effectively with others (33) or punish the perpetrators of social exploitations (34), and which activates the pain matrix in the brain when we feel rejected by others (35). When people Page |27 feel socially isolated (i.e., lonely) compared to when they do not feel lonely, they are more likely not only to perceive nonhuman objects as human- like but to believe in the existence of God (3/, 36). To understand the full capacity of and forces operating on humans, we need to appreciate not only the memory and computational power of the brain but its capacity for representing, understanding, and connecting with other individuals and with the emergent structures, fictional and real, that the brain can represent. That is, we need to recognize that we have evolved a powerful, meaning- making social brain and a need for social connection. References 1. Dawkins R. The Selfish Gene. 1976. 2. Williams GC. Natural Selection, the Costs of Reproduction, and a Refinement of Lack’'s Principle. The American Naturalist 1966; 100:687-90. 3. Wilson DS, Wilson EO. Evolution "for the Good of the Group". American Scientist 2008;96:380-9. 4. Holldobler B, Wilson EO. The superorganism: The beauty, elegance, and strangeness of insect societies. New York: W. W. Norton; 2008. 5. Bowles S. Did warfare among ancestral hunter-gatherers affect the evolution of human social behaviors? Science 2009;324:1293-8. 6. Haidt J, Patrick Seder J, Kesebir S. Hive Psychology, Happiness, HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_021273