The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter

Susan Pinker

Sep 2014 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Donna Postel

About this audiobook

From birth to death, human beings are hardwired to connect to other human beings. Face-to-face contact matters: tight bonds of friendship and love heal us, help children learn, extend our lives, and make us happy. Looser in-person bonds matter too, combining with our close relationships to form a personal "village" around us, one that exerts unique effects. Marrying the findings of the new field of social neuroscience together with gripping human stories, Susan Pinker explores the impact of face-to-face contact from cradle to grave, from city to Sardinian mountain village, from classroom to workplace, from love to marriage to divorce. Most of us have left the literal village behind and don't want to give up our new technologies to go back there. But, as Pinker writes so compellingly, we need close social bonds and uninterrupted face time with our friends and families in order to thrive-even to survive. Creating our own "village effect" can make us happier. It can also save our lives.

About the author

Susan Pinker is a developmental psychologist, journalist, and award-winning author. Her first book, The Sexual Paradox, won the William James Book Award, the American Psychological Association's most prestigious literary prize, and has been published in seventeen countries. Susan lives in Montreal, Canada, with her family. Visit her at susanpinker.com.

Donna Postel is fascinated by all kinds of stories and loves telling them. From memoir and biography to literary fiction, romance, mystery, and suspense, Donna uses her innate curiosity, talent, and decades of experience on stage and in the recording studio to bring books to life.