Self-Organizing Social Mind : MIT Press Ltd : 9780262549134 : 0262549131 : 19 Sep 2023 : A proposal that the basic mental models used to structure social interaction result from self-organization in brain activity. A proposal that the basic mental models used to structure social interaction result from self-organization in brain activity. In The Self-Organizing Social Mind, John Bolender proposes a new explanation for the forms of social relations. He argues that the core of social-relational cognition exhibits beauty-in the physicist's sense of the word, associated with symmetry. Bolender describes a fundamental set of patterns in interpersonal cognition, which account for the resulting structures of social life in terms of their symmetries and the breaking of those symmetries. He further describes the symmetries of the four fundamental social relations as ordered in a nested series akin to what one finds in the formation of a snowflake or spiral galaxy. Symmetry breaking organizes