我们的亲密友谊如何帮助我们茁壮成长

我们的亲密友谊如何帮助我们茁壮成长

Lydia Denworth wants you to make more time for your friends.

莉迪亚·登沃斯希望你多花点时间和朋友在一起。

We don't fully appreciate our friendships, says the science writer and author of the new book Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental Bond.

这位科学作家、新书《友谊:生命基本纽带的进化、生物学和非凡力量》的作者说，我们没有充分认识到我们的友谊。

If we did, we'd take cultivating those intimate bonds as seriously as working out or eating well. Because, she writes, a new field of science is revealing that social connections play a vital role in our health.

如果我们真的这么做了，我们就会像重视锻炼和健康饮食一样重视亲密关系的培养。她写道，因为一个新的科学领域正在揭示，社会关系在我们的健康中扮演着重要的角色。

On average, people have only four very close relationships, Denworth finds, and very few people can sustain more than six. But the effect of these few core relationships extends beyond our social lives, influencing our health on the cellular level — from our immune system to our cardiovascular system.

登沃斯发现，平均而言，人们只有四段非常亲密的关系，很少有人能维持六段以上的关系。但是，这几个核心关系的影响超出了我们的社交生活，在细胞水平上影响我们的健康--从我们的免疫系统到我们的心血管系统。

Denworth spoke with NPR about the science of friendship and its underestimated value to kids and adults and even for other species like sheep and fish. (Although she's frequently asked about human-animal friendships, Denworth sticks to bonds within one species in the book.)

登沃斯在接受美国国家公共电台采访时谈到了友谊的科学，以及它对儿童和成人、甚至对羊和鱼等其他物种的低估价值。(虽然她经常被问及人类与动物之间的友谊，但在书中，登沃斯坚持认为人类与动物之间存在某种联系。)

What is most misunderstood about friendships?

关于友谊，人们最容易误解的是什么?

Very few people understand that your social relationships can actually change your health. They can change your cardiovascular system, your immune system, how you sleep, your cognitive health. How could this thing that exists entirely outside the body affect whether you're likely to catch a virus? And yet that's exactly what we now know that social connection does.

很少有人明白你的社会关系实际上可以改变你的健康。它们可以改变你的心血管系统，你的免疫系统，你的睡眠方式，你的认知健康。这种完全存在于身体之外的东西如何影响你是否有可能感染病毒?然而，这正是我们现在知道的社会关系的作用。

We thought of loneliness as this difficult emotion, but just an emotion. And we think of friends as this lovely thing — but it is actually a matter of life and death. And there's this evolutionary drive to connect. People think all the time about competition and survival of the fittest, but really it's survival of the friendliest.

我们认为孤独是一种困难的情绪，但只是一种情绪。我们认为朋友是一件可爱的事情，但实际上这是生死攸关的问题。这是一种相互联系的进化动力。人们无时无刻不在想着竞争和优胜劣汰，但实际上这是友善的优胜劣汰。

Is friendship just something humans do, or do we see it in other species?

友谊只是人类才会做的事，还是我们在其他物种身上也能看到呢?

What has been surprising to evolutionary biologists is just how much friendship exists across species. They have found something that looks like friendship in dolphins, and elephants, and horses, and zebras, and hyenas and all kinds of species. Even fish — their brains respond to familiar fish versus strange fish in ways that look a lot like what goes on in our brains.

令进化生物学家惊讶的是，不同物种之间存在着如此多的友谊。他们在海豚、大象、马、斑马、鬣狗和各种物种身上发现了一些看起来像友谊的东西。即使是鱼-它们的大脑对熟悉的鱼和陌生的鱼的反应方式看起来很像我们大脑中发生的事情。

Understanding that tells you there's this much larger story than just human culture. And that's what people thought friendship was: a product of human culture and language. But now we understand that it is universal.

理解这一点告诉你，这不仅仅是人类文化的故事。这就是人们所认为的友谊：是人类文化和语言的产物。但现在我们明白，它是普遍存在的。

Are bonds with friends different from bonds with romantic or sexual partners? Or bonds with family?

与朋友的关系和与恋人或性伙伴或家人的关系有什么不同吗?

I don't actually think that it's all that unique. We generally think of friends as people we don't have sex with and to whom we're not related. But the truth is that in this new science and in fact the way we live our lives, those lines are blurred.

我其实并不认为这都是独一无二的。我们通常认为朋友是与我们没有性关系的人，也是与我们没有血缘关系的人。但事实是，在这门新的科学中，实际上在我们的生活方式中，这些界限是模糊的。

I think of friendship now as a template for all your relationships, because if you think about the sort of basic definition of friendship — it makes you feel good, it's positive, a long-lasting stable relationship, and it has some cooperation and reciprocity to it — that's what you want to be striving for in your closest relationships.

我现在认为友谊是你们所有关系的模板，因为如果你思考一下友谊的基本定义，即它让你感觉良好，它是积极的，它是一段持久的稳定的关系，它会合作和互惠，这就是你想在你最亲密的关系中努力追求的。