Social isolation and the brain in the pandemic era | Hacker News Reader

Social isolation and the brain in the pandemic era

nature.com

62 pointsrntn35 comments

That's a strange article. They seemed to have started with a conclusion and looked for supporting data.

They don't seem to have controlled for reduced physical activity. They even seem to claim obesity is a result of reduced social contact. That's a stretch.

That doesn't seem like the correct reading to me. The health consequences of isolation appears to have its own body of research. The article summarizes and cites these, but doesn't appear to be intended to engage with the question of what the health consequences of isolation are, since those are argued or established elsewhere.

So the question is how bad were lock downs for health, not if they were bad.

And anyway, reduced physical activity is one such consequence and it's not clear why you would control for it.

As an individual, your social isolation and your physical activity are both independently under your control. So it's useful to know their relative impacts on mental health.

Suppose it turned out that, when controlling for physical activity, isolation had no effect on health. Then, in the next pandemic, you should mostly focus on exercise. Or if isolation is more important, then you should focus on that.

Agreed. Over a million dead and zero processing time to grieve, and morgues overflowing such that temporary freezers are used to store the dead.

[sarc] Not sure what about that could cause anxiety or depression in anyone, they just needed to hang out more. [/sarc]

This seems to be less a study of behavior than a hunt to justify a feeling.

Social isolation has been an increasing part of the culture since we started replacing human interaction with 'social' media. When combined with the short duration of most pandemic isolation it seems more like people are trying to conflate loneliness with some external force rather than accepting that it is a normal human state.

I agree. It also, it's too political to take one thing seriously on its own. After so many people have nailed their egos to the belief that social distancing and isolation, as well as mask wearing, etc. are very definitely good and that anyone violating those rules is very definitely bad, it's hard for them to accept that it might have been harmful. Similarly, for their opponents who were offended by those measures, it's hard not to go hunting for reasons why they were bad.

As a technology native, a quiet environment is the same feeling as chilling in the zone (if working on something interesting). Its not a shared experience for sure.

I enjoy golf the same way (chlling in the zone during a good workout, similar to a runners high).

I also happened to enjoy over 20,000 one-on-one interactions with work experience and technology, with the majority of it face-to-face.

Being "all people'd out (not tired of people, just not seeking empty calories for the sake of it)" is a 21st century perk.

The 1st world has always enjoyed "peace and quiet" for their own personal reasons :)

You don't think that the pandemic, the measures taken to mitigate it, the fiscal and monetary policies made in attempt to avert the disaster, the realized impact, and the hyper-political ultrapolarized interpretations of the goings-on, and the paranoia instilled at the social and individual level (and etc......) couldn't possibly manifest into the future?

This isn't an isolated thing, it had and continues to have runoff impacts. A lot of wild reactivity originated, you can see that in all the economic data. It's not a "short duration" it's borderline cataclysmic, maybe you're just too insulated to see it.

I don't think BLM protests or the January 6 capitol attack would have happened if people hadn't been cooped up with nothing to do but read their favorite brand of outrage news.

Humans have millions of years of evolution searing into our DNA the impulse to be social creatures. And it always struck me as actually anti-science to be very hush-hush or even outright ignorant of the profound negative consequences of social isolation. Even worse that the least vulnerable should be forced into social isolation.

The entire causal relationship of lockdowns and social isolation doesn't sit right with me, I'm sure there are anxious people that decided to spend more time isolated but my uncle couldn't do that after a few months, got covid and died. I didn't even attempt to isolate insofar friends had the same mindset and none of them isolated or reduced interactions exept bars were closed. So its not clear to me that people are capable of suvervising their own social interactions. Maybe threatening to 'reduce social interaction' had the opposite effect of creating scarcity which induced demand. This would have been stating the obvious if we're talking economics.

This is an extremely US-centric view while Nature is an international journal.

My country in Europe forced everyone to stay at home all the time for three months with a one hour allowance per day to go shopping in 5km radius and while that wasn't in place there was a 9pm curfew. Visit to hospitals and retirement homes were banned for months.

Pandemic <> quarantine.

Cue the requisite hacker news hurfing and durfing about how this is actually good due to being introverted.

I think in this case it will get subsumed under the more robust HN consensus of "the worst thing about covid is the consequences of the mitigation measures."

Population density through out history has been far lower with far fewer people around and much more spread out. People didn't typically live in cities.

Travel was difficult and dangerous. Frequently forbidden when not impractical (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement).

If you think lockdowns in say, China, are harsh:

Russian Serfs were only freed 1861. Less than a century after Joseph II decided to end feudalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom_Patent_(1781).

Some form of social isolation was the norm for most of human history. So I don't think you are doomed to grow crazy if you stay by yourself, we're just not used to it. No longer the norm.

Being left alone with a smartphone and "social" media apps however might cause a person to spiral.

The paper is discussing a hyper isolation that hasn’t often been seen historically. As stated, 1 in 10 Europeans didn’t see any friends or family outside of their household for an entire year.

I do agree with you that it’s ultimately apples and oranges to compare our current social state to our ancestors’.

For a long long time 9/10 of Europeans didn't leave their village for a multitude of reasons. If the village is small and remote enough that's functionally the same thing.

When you did leave you might not see your family and friends for years if you even managed to come back alive.

If you lived in a viking settlement or out in the wilderness of the Wild West or some secret monastery at the top of a mountain range in Tibet that's pretty damn isolated. Or a lighthouse. Or an island. 'etc.

What about those of us trapped somewhere with no friends or family in the local area? Serfs had their spouses, children, and parents to socialize with, even when cut off mostly from the rest of society.

Some percentage of us experienced an alone-ness that really has no historical precedent. For some, it persisted many months.

I fall into that percentage. I got stuck in a very severe lockdown whilst traveling. It was unpleasant to say the least.

However we should disentangle the stress of the situation, the uncertainty about the future, the arbitrary restrictions on previously taken for granted personal freedoms and the abrupt change to a lifetime of normalcy from the bummer of being alone.

Solitude and loneliness are not the same thing.

Some people actually thrived during lockdown. Others choose to isolate with no relation to it. All I am saying is that it is not written in your DNA that your mental health must deteriorate due to lack of socializing.

It is not so much unprecedented as it is unusual and involuntary.

Can you point to any research that supports your extraordinary claim?

> If the village is small and remote enough that's functionally the same thing

No it isn't. Interacting with with 120-150 neighbors[1] on a daily basis is a richer form of social interaction than is available to most people in the West today. For most of history people lived in groups of up to a few hundred, being isolated wasn't the norm.

[1] https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/news-wires-white-papers...

My grandparents lived on a farm there was nobody around for some distance.

And many 'villages' in Europe were just 2 or 3 households, not really villages.

I think the OP's point is reasonable for context.

You’re talking about a completely different time period. This is also historically abnormal. Premodern farmers almost universally lived in villages of 100 or more people. Check out some sources I linked.

Widely dispersed freeholding is super unstable and even more so without modern tools and techniques.

My condolences, as it is apparently clinically impossible for them not to have developed severe psychological issues as a result. ;)

The discussion here is clearly about COVID isolation and the wild bullshit claims you’re making about history. Being in a community of even 3 households isn’t remotely similar to a single adult in COVID isolation and that should be obvious.

You’re doing a great job ignoring any criticism of your claims.

Yeah I spent much of my childhood around there it's a different kind of social system but I have not a single worry for them. I think they're more normal and happy than urban types who are a bit untethered, depressed, overly busy, unfulfilled a bit directionless. They have big families and know a lot of people for a long time. Regular people have funerals where 300 people come to the wake. My grandfather had to have three days of open casket there were so many people. He was a man of few words, he just owned a store and so got to know a ton of people.

You’re speaking to my point. A household of 4-5 and a typical village have extremely different social dynamics. Similarly the groupings (villages, tribes, etc.) of primal humans were much larger than a household of 4-5.

(Your examples of lighthouses and religious hermits are too rare to be seriously compared to the average person. These extreme examples are probably similar to what I’m talking about, though. We just don’t know as much about them as we do a typical village.)

Pandemic aside, we live in a world where it is much more possible to live in this hyper isolation than ever before.

Well back then all of your friends and relatives were probably living in the same village. Now they might be spread-out over hundreds of kilometers or even much more.

Seems like fundamentally different situations to me.

> If you lived in a viking settlement or out in the wilderness of the Wild West or some secret monastery at the top of a mountain range in Tibet that's pretty damn isolated. Or a lighthouse. Or an island. 'etc.

That was a statistically insignificant proportion of the population even back then (assuming by 'viking settlement' you mean in Greenland or something like that)

It was actually fairly rare for people to spend their entire lives in their villages during the medieval era. People would regularly travel within their region, and it was typical for a person to undertake multiple longer journeys within their lifetime, often to religious sites.

I'm sorry, this is nonsense. Serfs worked fields in small groups in housheolds of 5-8 individuals[1] and communally feasted dozens of times per year not to mention attending religious services. Hunter gatherers spen(d)t hours a day just gossiping[2] and engaged in communal rituals[3].

We also know from studying prisoners that isolation breaks peoples' brains[4].

[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...

[2]https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12052-010-0306-1

[3] https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/97804294...

[4]https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2020.0084...

Looking at population density at a global level, or at a national level, is going to be giving you misleading results. If your goal is to evaluate whether people in history lived close to other people, you need a very different metric: Population density of the neighborhood where the median person lives.

For instance, if you look at population density overall, Germany has a far higher population density than Spain. This is, however, because most of Spain is empty. Even when you look at rural areas, what you see is not American style homesteads, but people living in a relatively dense village, and traveling to their farm. In that environment, social isolation is very difficult: Just buying food and going to some kind of workplace leads to being very close to a whole lot more people than, say, your average American does.

So when we go back in time in most places, we might not see that much cross-settlement travel, but how dense are the settlements? How much can you avoid other human beings? Just like travel was dangerous, living in a place that was a long distance from your next neighbor was also dangerous: The best protection against attack was to have enough neighbors very close, as to make it really difficult to get away with attacking you. We have ruins of many settlements, going back well before writing, and it's normal to see places that might have housed a dozen or so families, all in screaming distance.

Therefore, I don't see how we can support that some form of relative social isolation was the norm everywhere. If anything, it's the modern American suburb, where in practice we don't need to exchange a word with the neighbors, and most retail transactions are impersonal, is what happens to be historically novel. The pandemic just made it more extreme.

I like this reply and agree with most of what is written.

> So when we go back in time in most places, we might not see that much cross-settlement travel, but how dense are the settlements?

Depending on when and where sometimes not very dense at all.

> How much can you avoid other human beings?

You don't need to avoid anyone but going days and weeks without speaking to people was not so inconceivable as it is now.

> If anything, it's the modern American suburb, where in practice we don't need to exchange a word with the neighbors, and most retail transactions are impersonal, is what happens to be historically novel.

That's the slightly different lament of not knowing your neighbors. The loss of togetherness and sense of community. The bad vibes. I agree with all that, you can feel more alone surrounded by an ocean of people than being part of a small tight knit group of people surrounded by an ocean. Conversely, mental health problems have been on the rise for a long time prior to the pandemic. No doubt it brought these issues to the forefront and didn't help things.

All I pointed out is that there is no shortage of precedent or examples of isolation and it does not necessarily imply that your mental health has to deteriorate.

Forced isolation or alienation from neighbors on the other hand is far more likely to be harmful. So is substituting actual social relationships with parasocial interactions online and apps.

There really is very little historical precedent for people being totally alone, all of the example you cited are of right communities, which is the opposite of alone.

In fact the overwhelming weight of researcher points to isolation wrecking your mental health. I pointed to a meta-analysis of investigations into solitary confinement earlier. There’s no shortage of research showing similar results for contemporary non-carceral isolation. Here is an analysis pointing to increased deaths from drinking and drugs due to COVID isolation[1], point the opposite direction of your conclusion.

[1] https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/19/12835

I believe you’re confusing meeting new people and isolation.

Living alone was extremely rare until recent history [1]. Not having freedom of movement, or not living in a city does not mean social isolation. Villages back in history used to celebrate holidays together, families were much larger, everyone knew everyone since birth etc…

I just woke up but don’t feel like pulling up the sources but I believe the exact opposite of your statement. Social isolation is a modern phenomenon that was extremely rare before in history. It was incredibly difficult to survive just by yourself.

[1] https://archive.org/details/goingsoloextraor00eric

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