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When you look out onto the world,
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it certainly appears the Earth is flat.
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The ground beneath you is stable and unmoving,
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and stars and sun circle the Earth.
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Hundreds of years ago,
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elaborate theories were developed based on these common sense observations
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to explain and predict the reach of the oceans
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and the movement of celestial bodies.
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When science demonstrated that these common sense observations were illusions,
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and depicted the Earth and the Universe in a completely different way,
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people slowly came to accept that the world was not as it seemed.
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Scientific measurements and sophisticated calculations
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have repeatedly demonstrated that
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what we think is intuitive, obvious and common sense
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cannot be trusted to be true.
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For that reason, modern science is based on the denial of common sense
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until apparently it comes to ourselves:
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when science confirms a particular way of thinking about our mind and behaviour,
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or depicts it in an unusual and a new way,
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we tend to be skeptical that such a science is worthwhile
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even if possible.
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And instead, we fall back on intuition, prior beliefs, and yes, common sense.
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For instance, if I told you,
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scientific research's demonstrated that opposites attract,
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wouldn't you tell me that we don't need a science to tell us something we already know?
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But what if I told you that birds of a feather flock together according to scientific research,
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wouldn't you say, we don't need a science to tell us something we already know?
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Or you may have realised already,
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of course, that these both may be self-evident truths,
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but they can't both be true
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since they are internally inconsistent.
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The science of mind and behaviour is full of such examples:
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self-evident truths that both can't be true.
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We know, for instance,
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that two heads are better than one
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and we know that too many cooks spoil the broth.
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The next time you hear a science report of some obvious result,
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remember that the obvious result was equally obvious,
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but it'd just been proven to be wrong.
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It's obvious there we're rugged individualists.
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True, true, true!
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We're born to the most prolonged period of dependency,
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but in our transition to adulthood, we achieve autonomy, independence,
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to become kings of the mountain,
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captains of our universe.
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It's easily (easy) to think about our brain,
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how's deep within a cranial vault, separated, isolated, protected from others,
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when we look out onto the social world
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other individuals certainly look distinct, independent, self vicinities
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with no forces binding them together.
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No wonder that we forget
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that we are members of a social species,
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born dependent on our parents, for our species to survive,
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these infants must instantly engage their parents in protective behaviour
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and the parents must care enough about these offspring to nurture and protect them.
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Even once grown, we are not particularly splendid specimens.
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Other animals can run faster
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see and smell better,
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and fight much more effectively than we can.
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Our evolutionary advantage
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is our brain and our ability to communicate, plan and reason and work together.
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Our survival depends on our collective abilities,
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not on our individual mind.
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We are connected across our lifespan to one another,
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through a myriad of invisible forces,
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they're, like gravity, are ubiquitous and powerful.
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After all, social species, by definition, create a merging structures
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that extend beyond an organism,
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structures that range from couples and families
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to schools and nations and cultures.
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These structures evolved hand in hand with neural, hormonal and genetic mechanisms to support them
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because the consequent social behaviour
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helps these organisms survive,
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reproduce and leave a genetic legacy.
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To grow to an adulthood for a social species, including humans,
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is not to become autonomous and solitary,
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it's to become the one on whom others can depend.
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Whether we know it or not, our brain and biology
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have been shaped to favour this outcome.
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The evolutionary biologist, David Sloan Wilson,
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notes that if you ask people:
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"What are the traits of a good person?",
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you'll hear traits such as kind, generous, compassionate and empathic.
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If you ask people what are the traits of an evil person,
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you'll hear traits such as
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cruel, greedy, exploitative and selfish.
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Said differently, the traits of a good person
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depict someone who cares about themselves and others,
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and an evil person cares about themselves
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at the expense of others.
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Across our biological heritage,
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our brain and biology have been sculpted to incline us
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to certain ways of feeling, thinking and behaving.
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For instance,
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we have a number of biological machineries
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that capitalise on aversive signals to motivate us to act
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in ways that are essential for our survival.
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Hunger, for instance, is triggered by low blood sugar
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and motivates you to eat,
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an important early warning system for an organism
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that'd require much more time and effort to find food
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than going to the refrigerator door, kitchen cabinet
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or fast food restaurants.
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Thirst is an aversive signal,
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that motivates us to search for drinkable water
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prior to falling victim to dehydration.
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And pain is an aversive system that notifies us of potential tissue damage
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and motivates us to take care of our physical body.
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You might think that the biological warning machinery stops there
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but there's more.
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Although not common sense, although not intuitive,
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the pain and aversiveness of loneliness,
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of feeling isolated from those around you,
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is also a part of biological early warning machinery
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to alert you to threats and damage to your social body,
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which you also need to survive and prosper.
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Just about all of us have felt physical pain
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and nearly all of us have felt
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the heartbreak of home sickness,
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the agony of bereavement,
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the torment of unrequited love
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and the pain of being shunt.
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All of these are variations on the experience of loneliness.
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When I started to study the effects of loneliness
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and brain and biology a couple of decades ago,
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loneliness has been characterized as a non-chronic disease
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without redeeming features.
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It was even equated with shyness and depression
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with being a loner, a person with marginal social skills.
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Scientific measurements and sophisticated calculations,
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to our surprise, revealed that these were myths.
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Science and common sense had again produced
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two very different depictions of a phenomenon.
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And yet if you look at the way we are increasingly living our lives,
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it shows the extent to which we still buy into
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those myths of loneliness and values of autonomy and independence.
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For instance, if you look at
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the percentage of one-person households in 1940 across the United States
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it was largely less than 15% of the households by state.
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Fast-forward to 1970,
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and it's grown to be between 15 and 20%.
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Fastforward to 2000
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and it now exceeds 25% in most states in America.
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And that light blue state, Utah
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in 2010 census has gone darker blue.
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The prevalence of loneliness is also on the rise.
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In the 1980s, scholars have estimated that about 20% of Americans
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felt lonelier than at any given point of time.
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Two recent nationally representative surveys indicate
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that this number has doubled,
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but you don't hear people talking about feeling lonely,
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and that's because loneliness is stigmatised.
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The psychological equivalent to being a loser in life or a weak person.
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And this is truly unfortunate,
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because it means we are more likely to deny feeling lonely,
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which makes no more sense than denying we feel hunger, thirst or pain.
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For living with loneliness we now know is the major risk factor
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for broad-based morbidity and mortality.
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Consider a couple of the conditions we know about premature death.
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Living with air pollution increases your odds of an early death by 5%,
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Living with obesity, we know, a national health problem,
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increases your odds of an early death by 20%.
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Excessive alcohol consumption: 30%.
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A recent med analysis of around a hundred thousand participants
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shows that living with loneliness increases your odds
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of an early death by 45%.
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We're not the only social species and the experimental investigation
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of non-human social animals who were isolated shows
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they too suffer deleterious physiological consequences
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and an abbreviated lifespan.
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Across our history, as a species, we have survived and prospered
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by banding together,
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couples, families and tribes, for mutual protection and assistance.
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We think of loneliness as a sad condition,
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but for social species, being on the social perimeters,
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not only sad, it is dangerous.
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The brains of social species including our own have evolved
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to respond to being on the social perimeter
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by going into a self-preservation mode.
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If you isolate a rodent and then put it in an open field
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such as these dots in the bottom of the image,
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it engages into what's called predator revision,
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it walks around the outside and doesn't venture into the middle
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where escape from a flying predator would be more more difficult.
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When humans feel isolated,
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they're too, and not only in an unhappy circumstance,
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but in a dangerous circumstance.
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Their brains too snap into a self-preservation mode.
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In a brain-imaging study that we conducted,
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we showed people negative images
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that had nothing to do with other people
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or negative social images,
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while they were sitting in a scanner and we were scanning.
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What we found was
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the lonelier the brain,
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when a negative social image was presented,
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that is in a person's environment,
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when something negative socially happened,
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the brain allocated more attention,
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greater visual cortical activity depicted in yellow here, to that image.
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Now, as you follow that image forward,
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you come to those two blue areas:
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that's a temporoparietal junction.
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This is a piece of brain tissue that's involved in theory of mind,
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in mind reading and mentalizing,
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in taking another person's perspective and empathy.
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It's responsible for the attentional control required to step out of your head
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and put yourself, at least figuratively, inside the head of someone else
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so you can take their point of view.
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The lonelier the brain,
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when something negative in the social context was depicted,
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the less the activation in this region.
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It's dangerous on the social perimeter.
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When something happens negative in the social environment,
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that brain is focused on self-preservation,
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not a concern of the other person.
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The similarity in neural and behavioral effects across phylogeny
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is a testimony to the importance of the social environment for social species.
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And these deep evolutionary roots tilting our brain and biology
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towards our self-preservation
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also suggest that much of what's triggered by social isolation is non-conscious.
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For instance, when you feel isolated
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you feel this motive, this desire, this intention
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to connect with other people again.
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What you don't feel,
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is that your brain has gone into a hypervigilance for social threats
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and this hypervigilance means you introduce
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intentional, confirmatory and even memory biases in terms of those social interactions.
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And if you're looking for dangers,
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you more like to see dangers
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whether they exist or not,
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meaning that you more likely
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to have negative interactions.
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And that threat surveillance of always looking for the next foe
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activates neuro-biological mechanisms
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that can degrade your health and lead to early mortality.
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Loneliness increases defensiveness
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because you're focused on your own welfare
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rather than taking the position or perspective of people with whom you interact.
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Loneliness increases depressive symptoms
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which has the odd effect of decreasing your likelihood
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of having social conflict
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and through the acoustic and postural
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and facial expressions of sadness,
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such as this child in this picture serves as a signal
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to others in the vicinity to reconnect with you,