People who are isolated from others do worse on cognitive tests: new research

The entire human body responds to moderate stress by improving itself. Studies have shown that fasting, exercise, and "cognitive taxation" aka learning through practice improves related areas and there is causative connections here.

I think this, plus the correlation from the study is effectively strong evidence for isolation being causative to lower intelligence.

We'd have to run an actual causative experiment here to establish this with any sort of finality though.

Obviously there are some people who may have conditions that make it impossible or require medical intervention to perform certain physical or social activities. The vast majority of people can do these things and don't have extreme social or physical complications. It's more a matter of some willpower or having a smooth introduction and gradual or manageable increase of discomfort.

If you are on HN you would believe that all studies are wrong due to trivial sample issues, but the researchers are usually aware of the issues and try to control for it. For your analogous study nobody would mistake the cause for the effect like that.

I was diagnosed with BPD about 10 years ago, and I think I'm mostly "cured". Two key turning points for me were:

1) drugs -- a great realization that the way you feel can be changed and to some degree you CAN be in fact in control by taking certain drugs. I absolutely do not encourage people to take drugs -- it just worked in my case (perhaps precisely because I was systematic in rotating drug types as to avoid getting dependent/tolerant)

2) therapy in general, but Schema Therapy's conclusion that for BPD it is crucial that the patient learns to combat the "punitive parent" inner voice. The first few times I learned to stand up to that punitive inner voice was again, a life-altering experience.

Before I felt completely trapped by the vicious loops of self negating my emotional needs, vicious punitive/critical voices, self-harm, rage and then complete detachment; after I had actual proof that things can get better, things did indeed start to get better.

To determine causation we'd have to have a set of isolated people and a set of social people and for each set we deliberately pick half and raise the isolated people to be more social while making social people become more isolated. Then we record IQs. Only this experiment will determine causation.

It's the other way, in my experience.

People tend to be friends with other people of similar intelligence and since intelligence follows the normal distribution, people with most friends are of average intelligence.

Income also (mostly) follows intelligence, meaning less intelligent people have it tougher, meaning it is harder for them to set boundaries at work. This in turn makes them accommodate wildly differing opinions as they can not pick their coworkers and some degree of harmony is a must in the workplace.

Meaning they are trained to get along with college graduated engineers as well as flat earth crackpots. Thus they draw from a much wider pool of potential friends.

It is handy to be friends with an old landlady, despite her believing in the healing power of minerals in your pocket. She still has the cash and the spare room to throw the party.

Especially when she regularly hires your flat earther husband to paint her flats as the college student tenants graduate and move on.

But that's the rub; it's the forced isolation of those that prefer to be around others that aren't going to fare well. Based on your observation these folks are already not the most intelligent of the bunch, I suspect it goes downhill from there when pushed into solitude.

How so? It seems pretty obvious to state that if you don't make use of certain mental capabilities, they decay.

There were studies that people generally get happier with more socialization with the exception of smart people that get unhappy with too much of it. But there are also exception to this rule. You might prefer alone time and you might still be dumb as a brick.

"Many hackers have noticed that mainstream culture has shown a tendency to pathologize and medicalize normal variations in personality, especially those variations that make life more complicated for authority figures and conformists. Thus, hackers aware of the issue tend to be among those questioning whether ADD and AS actually exist; and if so whether they are really ‘diseases’ rather than extremes of a normal genetic variation like having freckles or being able to taste DPT. In either case, they have a sneaking tendency to wonder if these syndromes are over-diagnosed and over-treated. After all, people in authority will always be inconvenienced by schoolchildren or workers or citizens who are prickly, intelligent individualists — thus, any social system that depends on authority relationships will tend to helpfully ostracize and therapize and drug such ‘abnormal’ people until they are properly docile and stupid and ‘well-socialized’."

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/weaknesses.html

> Affected individuals may be unable to form intimate attachments to others and simultaneously possess a rich and elaborate but exclusively internal fantasy world.

> stilted speech

> a lack of deriving enjoyment from most activities.

> feeling as though one is an "observer" rather than a participant in life.

> an inability to tolerate emotional expectations of others,

> a degree of asexuality.

>idiosyncratic moral or political beliefs.

> Symptoms typically start in late childhood or adolescence.

Jesus, TIL I might have a Schizoid personality disorder.