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Comment by rjh29 | Hacker News Reader

My mum is a teaching assistant and is 71. She seems as sharp as ever and mood is the same. I think it's key that she still works full-time in a very social environment and keeps active outside of work. It's pretty clear to me that mental health declines rapidly once you start isolating and staying indoors all the time.

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> My mum is a teaching assistant and is 71. She seems as sharp as ever and mood is the same. I think it's key that she still works

I agree.

I don't necessarily buy the "loneliness" argument for cognitive decline.

However I certainly buy the importance of keeping mentally and physically active.

Infact I would go as far as saying people who use the "loneliness" term are actually just using it as a lazy synonym for "lack of mental and physical activity". You don't necessarily need to surround yourself with people to achieve it.

Whether its still working in a job, or doing non-job activities such as gardening, travelling, photography, I think keeping your brain busy and your body moving is the key.

If you revert to the cliché retirement image of taking long naps during the day, stopping only to eat and watch daytime TV, then IMHO that's where the problems start.

I tend to disagree. Mental and Physical activities require intent and effort. At older stage, your willpower alone will not push you to make you get up and do it. But if you are socially surrounded, you will have something to get moving. Also, working out or doing other physical/mental activities themselves alone gets so boring after sometime, coz there's isn't much to looking forward to.

Yes pretty much, loneliness is a silent killer. Its so 'silent' that you won't even notice that you are declining but interestingly others will notice.

Although it has been difficult to ascertain exactly the relative weights of stress, anxiety, frustration, and so on due to the past two years, I think a large part of my current cognitive difficulties are stemming from social isolation. Do not recommend. It turns out that even extremely introverted people do very badly when isolated which I suppose is kind of an involuntary (for whatever reason) situation.

I am young, so I hopefully have not caused any permanent issues with my time of isolation - I shudder to think what it would do to me if I were 60 and facing the physical decline of old age.

Physical decline is hugely variable and arguably primarily a function of genetics. I would also argue some people's 'mental speed' was never that great - humans are hugely variable in performance, strength and weaknesses which makes me doubt the 'until after 60' concept. I have a 92 year old mother who is very good mentally for example compared to many people half her age...

It'd be a hugely unethical experiment to do, but I suspect we'll have quite a bit of data coming out of areas that did full lockdowns for extended periods of time (that were enforced) over the past two years. We should, if the theory that isolation causes cognitive decline is true, see a general decline in certain populations and it should diverge from matches around the world etc.

> It'd be a hugely unethical experiment to do

Hugely unethical, but also not scientifically sound.

COVID infection itself has already been demonstrated in various papers to cause mental decline (TL;DR there seems to be a correlation between how "sick" you got and the amount of decline).

There is also the unknown of long-term post-COVID-infection consequences on the brain.

So you would have a bit of a hard time trying to seek to attribute lockdowns to mental decline. Especially, as we know, COVID can manifest itself as an asymptomatic disease.

You then have the additional question of what are you going to count the infectious isolation period as ? It would not be ethical to count it as "lockdown".

Basically it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible to achieve any sort of statistical segregation between "lockdown" and "COVID".

Thus your input data would be messy, and per the GarbageIn-GarbageOut rule, so would your "conclusion".

I don't agree that it's not 'scientifically sound', it just depends on what signals the data actually shows. Natural experiments are never perfect and with something like isolation it's probably impossible to ever see such natural experiments without major confounders. I don't see why that makes you abandon the idea that anything can be learned at all.

I'm just saying that in this particular scenario there would be so many if's, what if's and buts that I think you would struggle to come up with a viable methodology, let alone a viable "conclusion".

"Lockdowns" are also inherently subjective, social and difficult to study in any sort of meaningful way. Not least because different governments implemented them differently, and different populations adhered to them differently. So you'll never really get a clean dataset - and that's assuming people tell you the truth anyway about how compliant they were with the rules.

I think a more reasonable perspective would be to wait until we know more about COVID and (especially) long-COVID. Once the world knows more about the cognitive effect of COVID, then would be the time for secondary analysis on lockdowns.

Afterall, it may well be that lockdowns were more preferable to getting infected with COVID in terms of cognitive decline. Or it may be that both "options" were more or less equal in terms of decline. But for all that we need more time to study COVID itself.

You seem to already have the assumption that covid is worse than isolation. I'm not sure if that's true. Would you want to bet that 5 years of isolation is better than a covid infection for cognitive function? I certainly wouldn't. Where I am, many people have been isolated for quite literally about 2 years (and many are choosing to isolate further despite the official rules mostly being relaxed). I don't think it's good enough to think of isolation as a secondary effect here.

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