THE BRAIN OF PRESENCE
Where does sociality begin?
What if the human brain never functioned entirely on its own?
For several years, various studies have shown that the mere presence of others can modify cognitive performance, neuronal recruitment, or even certain forms of synaptic plasticity.
At the same time, social neuroscience and the concept of the social brain have profoundly renewed our understanding of human mental life, seeking to understand how processes such as empathy, theory of mind, mentalization, or more broadly social cognition emerge and are supported by the brain.
The question posed here is different.
It consists of asking whether, in this theoretical framework, sociality is not addressed a little late, once more fundamental processes are already at work.
Because before any communication, before any interaction, sometimes even before any explicit awareness of the other, the brain must already have an answer, however approximate, to a fundamental question:
"Is there anyone else here besides me?"
In an empty room, the answer is easy, almost instantaneous. But this is an exception. Most of the time, the presence of others isn't observed directly; it's inferred. A noise in the next room, the feeling of being watched without being certain, a silhouette glimpsed out of the corner of your eye—in these ordinary situations, the brain doesn't have a binary response. It maintains a continuous, constantly updated estimate, accompanied by a varying level of confidence: someone might be there, probably is, definitely is—or not.
The Presence Brain proposes to explore this hypothesis: this assessment of the presence of others is not a mere prelude to social life, triggered and then forgotten. It runs continuously, like a background against which attention, cognition, and behavior are organized—just as much, for example, as attention itself. It is precisely because it is continuous that it deserves the status of a foundational condition, and not simply a contextual factor.
This same zone of uncertainty—where presence must be inferred rather than observed—is also where the model intersects with clinical practice. Underestimating a real signal of presence, overestimating it, or applying a chronically biased weighting: these are avenues for understanding certain experiences of derealization, hypervigilance, or social anxiety. These avenues are not a separate development from the theoretical hypothesis; they are a direct extension of it.
This hypothesis is still under development. The texts gathered here offer its initial foundations, at the crossroads of neuroscience, psychology, clinical practice, and everyday human experience.
To join the project
This page is the entry point to the Brain of Presence project. To explore it, you can consult the following pages in order:
- The Manifesto — the general thesis.
- The birth of an idea — the personal and scientific journey.
- The social brain — why this theory extends social neuroscience.
- The dimensions of presence — phenomenology, biology, development, civilization.
To go further
A full presentation article of the project — including neuroscientific evidence, the different dimensions of
presence, and the link to the scientific publication — is available on the blog.
présence, et le lien vers la publication scientifique — est disponible sur le blog.
présence, et le lien vers la publication scientifique — est disponible sur le blog.
Read: “The Presence Brain: When Neuroscience Rediscovers Something Obvious” presence, and the link
to the scientific publication — is available on the blog.
vers la publication scientifique — est disponible sur le blog.
vers la publication scientifique — est disponible sur le blog.
Driss Boussaoud
Emeritus research director at the CNRS and neuroscience researcher at the Institute of Systems Neuroscience of Aix-Marseille University and INSERM.
Scientific references
Boussaoud, D. (2026, June 25). The Brain of Presence: A Foundational Framework for Social Neuroscience. Retrieved from osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/tpnze_v2
Demolliens et al. (2017). Social and asocial prefrontal cortex neurons: a new look at social facilitation and the social brain. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2017, 1241–1248
Bennani, A., El Ahmadi, A., Channouf, A., et al. (2023). Social facilitation and bilingual cognitive advantage: Bridging social psychology and psycholinguistics. Heliyon, 9, e13239.
Charaf, K., Agoub, M. and Boussaoud, D. (2024). Associative learning and facial-expression recognition in schizophrenic patients: Effects of social presence. Schizophr. Res. Cogn., 35, 100295.
Esmaeili, A., Demolliens, M., Viersen, M., et al. (2025). Probabilistic inference of social presence across brain scales reveals enhanced synaptic efficacy. Common. Biol., 8, 1608