How isolation can change your brain.
By: Austin Nguyen
Tags: Brain, Isolation, Personal Development, Social Skills

We know that Human is deeply social creatures what happen when you are alone for a long time?

Back in 1980, the man Neil Ansell who live in a squat with 20 people in London. Someone made an undeniable offer that he could not refuse: a cottage in the Welsh mountains with rent of just 130$ per year. However, this place in a remote area. The night sky is continuous of stars and the neighbor is just a pair of ravens who lived in the tree for 20 years. He did not have a phone and lived there by himself for 5 years, no one ever walked by his house.

“I became so used to being on my own that I recall going to the village shop one day and my voice cracking, as I asked for something at the counter,” he says. “I realized I hadn’t spoken in two weeks, not a single word. And that became quite normal for me.”

When you’re alone, you start to lose your sense of who you are.

By the time he returned to civilization, he had to adapt to himself and it was challenged because the social world is a bit of shock.

“What I found difficult was the amount of talking. I’m not an antisocial person, but I did struggle with that.”

Another thing that Ansell noticed is that his identity had gradually started to slip away.

“When you’re alone, you start to lose your sense of who you are, because you don’t have an image of yourself reflected in the way that other people react to you”.

So I think to some extent when I returned I had to rediscover who I could be in a social setting,” he says.

With the pandemic, many of us had spent more time at home. How does this affect your brain ? and how do we socialize when things return normal?

As human beings, we are deeply social creatures. This is obvious from the way we live.

It turns out there is a link between the size of the brain and the size of the communities it is able to form. The bigger the brain you have, the greater extent of its social world.

The power you have is limited by the number of relationships that you maintain and over millions of years, the species that have more relationships will evolve in the larger brain. In other words, lacking socialize can make your brain shrink.

Last year, German scientists discovered the brain of nine explored who worked in Antarctica at the research station has shrunk 9 % after 14 months of being isolated. By looking at MRI scan before and after on average the c shaped region which is responsible for forming new memories has diminished 7 % on the course of the expedition.

Along with the reduction in the brain volume, the explores also do worse on two tests: one for spatial processing which is the ability to tell where is the object in space, and one for selective attention which is the ability to focus on the subject for a long period of time.

Loneliness vs Solitude

The questions of how a pandemic could affect your social skill are tricky to answer but there are some thoughts here.

Psychologists did not concerned about how many people you should have access to. Indeed, most researchers focused on how you view your situation. “ Solitude” involves being alone without being lonely, similar to the situation of Ansell. Loneliness is very different in which people feel isolated and they need more social contact.

Research has shown that even when lonely people have the opportunity to socialize, it impairs their ability to contact normally with other people.

Isolation can lead to a loneliness loop. It can lead to a toxic combination of low self-esteem, social anxiety, stress.

Even rats that live on their own also make less appealing companions with other rats to extent that they avoid more contact with other rats and that shared positive experience is critical because it will create more bonding for other animals.

When rats raised alone, their brains are smaller and their behavior is so altered. Meanwhile, ants that are isolated from birth have smaller brains and behave differently to their peers, while social fish are less cooperative when they are reared in isolation.

Positive solitude

But while there are well-documented drawbacks to social isolation, the good news is that it’s not all bad.

Ansell found his experiences with solitude and the importance of adopting the right attitude. “I think that people struggle, very often, because they don’t do it for long enough,” he says. He saw the opportunity to live alone in the Welsh mountains as a challenge, to see how self-sufficient he could be.

In the end, Ansell says he continues to benefit from his five years of solitude. In the end, he knows that if everything goes wrong and he ends up alone, in a crumbling cottage in the middle of nowhere — well, things could be worse.

Sources:https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201022-how-solitude-and-isolation-can-change-how-you-think