Abstract: Social bonds live in our biology. To understand the computations that allow our brains to form social bonds, my lab studies monogamous prairie voles. Unlike laboratory mice and rats, these rodents often mate for life, parenting together and defending a shared home. We have found that social information is organized at multiple scales in the brain's reward center—from stable encoding in individual neurons to coordinated ensembles—to enable bond formation. Once these bonds are formed, they lead to an alignment of brainscapes between partners, evident in patterns of neural activity and molecular alignment. Ultimately, this work delineates how social relationships change the brain beginning with their initial encoding mechanisms and then establishing a framework that facilitates connectedness and may help pairs effectively navigate the world together.
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