The lines between states and even countries are pretty arbitrary: The ties you have with people 50 miles away aren’t going to be too-much affected by some imaginary line drawn up 200 years ago. What if you could remap the United States — not by geography, but rather social ties?

MIT’s Senseable City Lab has done just that, by analyzing mobile-phone calling patterns across the country. By looking at calls between cellphones, they’ve revealed states and cities that are closely connected — and similarly, regions which aren’t nearly as closely connected as you’d think. Here’s their main result, color-coded by regional affiliation:

You see all sorts of super-states emerge: Arizona and New Mexico are closely bound, as are Western Pennsylvania and West Virginia, The Carolinas, Louisiana and Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, New York and New Jersey, and all of the New England states.

With the biggest states, it’s something different. California really is split into two distinct regions: Northern and Central California, and Southern California, which is more closely aligned with Nevada and Western Arizona.

You might think something like that would happen in Texas, with several sub-regions clustering around the big cities of San Antonio, Dallas, and Houston. (Think of how different San Antonio and Houston are, culturally and ethnically.) But they managed to cohere into one connected region. But Texas really is like its own country, as Texans say it is — It’s not strongly connected to any of the states around it.