DR DEAN BURNETT
The country-wide lockdown is vital for slowing the spread of COVID-19. But why is it so tough for us to stay at home and what are the consequences?
Why is social isolation so hard? Neuroscientist and author Dean explores how our brains weren’t built for life alone.
Stay at home. Don’t visit friends and family, and don’t have them visit you. Keep clear of strangers. These don’t sound like particularly challenging instructions. Except, if you look at the news, at social media, or even out of the window at times, it’s clear that a lot of people are struggling with the whole ‘social isolation’ thing. Why? What could be difficult about not going to work and not engaging with others?
As it happens, everything. We humans are an incredibly social species, arguably more so than any other on Earth. Our brains have evolved for socialisation in a variety of different ways, which means this social isolation instruction is a pretty big ask, with a number of consequences.
OUR BRAINS HAVE EVOLVED FOR SOCIALISATION
Why do humans have such big, smart, resource-hungry brains at all? There are a lot of theories around this, but one of the more prominent ideas is the ‘ecological dominancesocial competition model’. This argues that early human tribes were so communal, so cooperative, so successful that they neutralised all the natural factors that usually drive evolution. Predators? Finding food? Or mates? When you were born into a human tribe, none of these things were an issue, others took care of it, so they weren’t a threat to your survival, so ‘traditional’ natural selection is disrupted.
What did determine an individual’s chances of success was how well we performed within the tribe. How good you were at forming relationships, cooperating, communicating, influencing, even deceiving; these were the things that dictated human success now. These things required greater intelligence. Running from a predator requires physical skill. But keeping track of all your friendships, your commitments, your debts and responsibilities, in a group of individuals all as smart as you? That requires cognitive processing power. And thus, the human brain increased dramatically in size and power, particularly over the last two million years.
That’s one theory. Not everyone agrees with it. But it’s hard to dispute that a lot of parts of the brain seem to exist largely to facilitate social bonding and communication.
The chemical oxytocin, aka ‘the cuddle hormone’, has a range of functions in the brain that enhance interpersonal bonds. We have a part of the visual cortex, the fusiform gyrus, dedicated to detecting and reading faces. Other parts of the brain, like the anterior insular cortex, are responsible for empathy, the ability to detect someone’s emotional state and experience it ourselves. There are even emotions themselves, like embarrassment and guilt, that only make sense when you take other people’s reactions and viewpoints into account.
Our brains are clearly social in nature. Depriving them of social contact may be fundamentally unsettling. For example, studies have found that even the most fleeting social interaction can cause the brain to experience low-level pleasure. And while most other social species bond via grooming, prominent
anthropologists suggest that the human equivalent is gossiping, and that may even be a big factor in why we evolved language in the first place; it would take hours each day to groom everyone in a large human tribe, but you can say nice things to all of them at once.
Psychologists have deemed solitary confinement to be a literal form of torture. As stated, the human brain has seemingly evolved for socialisation. So, denying it social contact is depriving it of something it deems vital. Indeed, studies have revealed that a socially isolated person shows brain activity that’s very similar to literal hunger, even after a mere 10 hours of no social contact (see p26).
Studies like these show that the human brain is reliant on social interactions and gets a lot from them. Cutting these off abruptly isn’t going to be pleasant or easy, so it’s no wonder people are finding it difficult.
‘I WON’T GO OUT’ VS ‘YOU CAN’T GO OUT’
It’s not that the human brain needs constant, neverending socialisation. Much as we enjoy it, social interactions do still take time, energy and effort, and the brain can’t sustain this indefinitely. That’s why, as social as we are, research suggests we still need privacy as well, in a fundamental way.
Now, we’ve arguably got more privacy than we could ever want. And nobody seems happy about it, with countless people chomping at the bit to mingle, or live streaming their every waking moment to anyone who’ll listen.
A lot of this can be attributed to a sense of autonomy. One thing the human brain finds typically reassuring and rewarding is a sense of control, the ability to make decisions and determine one’s own actions and situations. That’s why there’s a big difference between choosing to stay at home, and being told to stay home.
It’s a well-known human phenomenon, that of ‘reactance’, which is where when humans are told they can’t have or do something, they’re instinctively motivated to want it more. We’re a contrary lot, but it does mean that being told we can’t socialise will directly lead to an increased desire to do so. And that desire was already pretty strong.
IS SOCIALISING ONLINE AN ACCEPTABLE SUBSTITUTE? Can social media and video-streaming software fill the gap, or satisfy the craving, that results from a loss of physical social contact? People have been using them in interesting and creative ways, admittedly. But is it enough? That’s harder to say.
So much of human communication and interaction is non-verbal, relying on body language, eye contact, expressions, tone of voice, and so on. How many of these are conveyed by remote communication? Not all of them, undoubtedly.
And the human brain is extremely quick and sensitive to even minor discrepancies in communication. We’re good at recognising a fake smile or laugh, and when something is very close to the human norm, but not quite right in terms of all the subtle cues and traits, it tends to freak us out, hence the ‘uncanny valley’ effect that’s seen in human-like robots.
But even if social media and other forms of remote communication aren’t giving our brain everything they’re used to, it’s still surely better than nothing. They’re likely to be staving off the more tangible problems of social isolation, and surely that’s no bad thing.
“The human brain is reliant on social interactions and gets a lot from them. Cutting these off abruptly isn’t going to be pleasant or easy”
by DR DEAN BURNETT Dean is a neuroscientist and author. His latest books Why Your Parents Are Driving You Up The Wall And What To Do About It and PsychoLogical are perfect lockdown material for those experiencing stress and frustration.