Tea at Trianon: Loneliness and Our Brains

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, August 10, 2021

Loneliness and Our Brains

From Wired:

Extreme isolation does strange things to the human mind. In late 1964 Josie Laures and Antoine Senni disappeared into two caves in the French Alps as part of an experiment to find out what effect isolation would have on their bodies and minds. When Senni emerged after 126 days in isolation—a record at the time—he thought that only a couple of months had passed. In 1972 Michel Siffre, a French caver who oversaw the pair’s experiment went even further, spending six months in a cave near Del Rio, Texas. “Physically it was not tiring, but mentally it was hell,” he told Der Spiegel four decades later.
Attempts to manufacture isolation in the laboratory are even more disturbing. In the 1950s, Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb paid graduate students at McGill University $20 a day to stay alone in tiny rooms. The volunteers’ hands were placed in cardboard tubes, their ears covered by thick U-shaped pillows to muffle any sounds, and opaque goggles were placed over their eyes. Soon enough their mental cognition deteriorated and they experienced extreme restlessness and vivid hallucinations. One student reported feeling that his body was in two places at once, and he was unable to decide which one was really him.
Humans rarely experience such extreme social isolation, but studies have shown that even in normal life, increased loneliness has a negative impact on physical and mental health. One review of the science of loneliness found that people with stronger social relationships have a 50 per cent increased likelihood of survival over a set period of time compared with those with weaker social connections. Other studies have linked loneliness to cardiovascular disease, inflammation, and depression.
We’ve known since the 1980s that people who are more socially isolated tend to have worse health, but we still don’t know why loneliness is so closely linked to our health. Is it that isolated people tend to have other risk factors for certain diseases, or is there something about loneliness itself that rearranges the wiring of our brains, slowly wearing away at our health? For loneliness researchers the pandemic has provided an unprecedented natural experiment in the impact that social isolation might have on our brains. As millions of people across the world emerge from months of reduced social contact, a new neuroscience of loneliness is starting to figure out why social relationships are so crucial to our health.
Although the link between loneliness and poor health is well-established, scientists have only recently been able to take the first glimpses of what social isolation looks like in our brains. It’s a discovery that started with a failed experiment. As part of her PhD at Imperial College London, Gillian Matthews was trying to find out how drug addiction affected the connections between specific neurons in a part of the brain called the dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN). Matthews divided the mice she was studying into two groups—one she injected with cocaine, and the other with a saltwater solution—but no matter what she tried, she kept seeing that the DRN neuron connections were growing stronger in both groups of mice.
These new neural connections, Matthews realized, had little to do with drugs. Both groups of mice had been isolated for 24 hours before the start of the experiment. What Matthews was seeing was the effect that social isolation had on the brains she was studying. This accidental discovery opened up a new way of thinking about loneliness—if we could see the traces of social isolation in the brains of mice, it meant that loneliness didn’t just describe a state in the outside world, it could also point to something on the inside too. (Read more.)