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Credit: Lauren JN Brent; A grooming chain of adult female rhesus macaques on an island off the coast of Puerto Rico

What's the link between social life and brain structure? A team of researchers is one step closer to understanding that connection for rhesus macaques.

In work published in Science Advances, the scientists found that for these nonhuman primates, the number of social connections predicted the size of key groups of neurons and other tissue in parts of the brain responsible for empathy and social decision making.

The researchers determined that in macaques with more grooming partners, the mid-superior temporal sulcus and ventral-dysgranular insula were larger. They found no such link between brain structure and other variables like social status. The research was supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

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One of the most influential voices of the 20th century – Claude Levi-Strauss – has made his path through the unordered world of ancient cultures and myths to become the founder of Structuralism. Although he hadn't had formal education in Anthropology, he managed to raise the discipline to a completely new level of understanding of the essential processes of human nature, thought, and society. The concept of structure as Levi-Strauss stressed it grew into one of the most significant intellectual movements, which went a lot beyond the borders of Anthropology. Structural analysis was implemented into social studies, literary and cinema studies, philosophy, and many more. Among some of the names that more or less adopted his approach were Roland Bart, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, and others.