“There are a lot of advantages,” she says, “to being together.”The Social Lives of MiceDulac has long been fascinated by social behavior. “Somewhere in this area of the brain there might be a bean counter of social interaction,” Dulac says. The new mouse, Dulac said, had been living in a group and was a former cage mate of the solo mouse. The green line, indicating activity in the isolation neurons, began to fall, suggesting that those neurons were now suppressed. She adds that the varying levels of social rebound found in different mouse strains might mirror differences in human levels of social need.