The social networks we form add up to a giant "human superorganism."<br /><br />Question: What do you do on a day-to-day basis?Nicholas <br /> Christakis: I'm a professor of medicine and professor of medical <br />sociology at Harvard Medical School and a professor of sociology in the <br />Faculty of Arts and Sciences and I do what I would call network science, <br /> so I, for the last ten years, have been studying how and why human <br />beings come to be embedded in social networks. Not the kind of online <br />kind that people might think about all the time nowadays, but the kind <br />of ancient kind that we have formed for hundreds of thousands of years. <br />And I study how we humans come to form these very elaborate networks and <br /> what these networks come to mean for our lives, and the sort of the <br />field as it were of medical sociology is concerned with all sorts of <br />phenomena, social processes and social phenomena that influence health <br />and health care. But I'm focused primarily on I would say a subset of <br />that or not a subset, but a different field. Let's say network science.Question: <br /> What kind of research went into your book "Connected"? Nicholas <br /> Christakis: We have done work on the social, psychological, <br />mathematical and biological rules that govern how human beings come to <br />form social networks—the structure of networks—and then we've also <br />examined the kind of social and psychological rules or attributes of how <br /> social networks function. So how do we form social networks and how do <br />they affect our lives, and it's what we would consider to be the anatomy <br /> and the physiology of a kind of human superorganism. In a very <br />fundamental way we are like ants or actually kind of like fungi too, <br />where individual human beings assemble themselves into these elaborate <br />complex structures and we're... James Fowler and I, my coauthor, are <br />deeply concerned with how and why we form these structures and what they <br /> mean for our lives. So in the book we present about... We talk a lot <br />about our own research, but we also pull in the research of many other <br />scientists who have been looking at a variety of phenomena, and we talk <br />about the role of social networks in human emotions. We talk about the <br />role of social networks in human romantic and sexual behavior, in <br />health, in politics and in economics, and then we also talk a little bit <br /> about the genetics of human social networks and the sort of modern <br />online variety of social interactions, and then we close with an <br />argument in the book about why we form social networks and what in a <br />very deep sense they mean for our lives.Recorded March 31, 2010 <br />Interviewed by Austin Allen
