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Forced social isolation causes neural craving similar to hunger

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Re: Forced social isolation causes neural craving similar to hunger

#101

Post by m463 »

ericol wrote: post #13

More or less for my entire life I've had the idea that my social needs were not on par with the rest of the people, and this quarantine seems to have proven just that. Bear in mind I do enjoy social life; when I was living in Spain in my 30s (and single) I had a very active social life, and had a moderate (~30) amount of friends split in 2 groups with which I continuously interacted. When I left Spain for my place of…

Sounds like a normal introvert.

extroverts get recharged by being with more people.

introverts get recharged by being with fewer people.

Re: Forced social isolation causes neural craving similar to hunger

#102

Post by jjjensen90 »

ummonk wrote: post #81
0xFFC wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Those restrictions were from the time we were thinking the virus is more deadly than this (1-2% IFR). Now with more publications, data suggests an IFR of 0.1-0.6%. Which is pretty low and does not worth crashing the economy. This does not mean vulnerable people has to pay the price no. It is trade off. We have to reopen and go back to normal, while helping vulnerable people. Even some paper suggest far more infe…

The IFR is proving to be ~1%. For 0.1-0.6% to be true, 50-100% of NYC would have to have gotten infected with COVID-19...

IFR is not a fixed value and is affected by many things. For example, intial viral load may be higher in NYC than many other places, vitamin D levels, air pollution, etc. There is no single IFR for any disease.

Re: Forced social isolation causes neural craving similar to hunger

#103

Post by vmception »

burnout41 wrote: post #94
daveFNbuck wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are also mental health consequences to large-scale death and hospitals being over capacity. Would you choose a year of watching your friends and family randomly die over a year of staying home most of the time?

You could always get both. I haven't seen another human other than through zoom since march 15th. Meanwhile, my extended family, people I love, are ignoring isolation mandates and out and about, hosting gatherings, like normal. Many of them are seniors with chronic conditions that put them at high risk for covid complications / mortality. I'm depressed as fuck staying home all the time and waiting for the inevitable…

yeah I did maybe a little after march 15th till late may. around early may I found myself pacing around my apartment saying "this is bullshit" more than once per day. referring to the scenario itself, not the utility of the lockdown mandates - yet.

but I can definitely go two months without physical human interaction! video conferences, video dates, video for sake of video? CALL OF DUTY: WARZONE? all of those are chores to me.

Re: Forced social isolation causes neural craving similar to hunger

#104

Post by jjjensen90 »

nprz wrote: post #35
chrisseaton wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Honestly its scary the talk of another year like this. I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting you will not be able to leave your house for another year. I think everywhere has concrete plans to re-open everything short of mass gatherings pretty soon. That's the cautious countries and the less cautious countries alike.

Currently around ~5% of the US has contracted COVID. 60-70% of the population needs to become infected in order to gain herd immunity. Meaning we're about 7% of the way to herd immunity. We still have a long way to go.

We have no idea what the required percentage of infection is for herd immunity, given that we don't know what percentage of people are naturally immune or resistant, what percentage of people clear the virus without any antibody response, etc.

There is a decent amount of research beginning to indicate we won't need nearly that level of infection to reach herd immunity. It's not guaranteed but I'd keep an open mind.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.03085 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32209383 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.27.20081893v...

Re: Forced social isolation causes neural craving similar to hunger

#105

Post by daveFNbuck »

esotericn wrote: post #88
daveFNbuck wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are also mental health consequences to large-scale death and hospitals being over capacity. Would you choose a year of watching your friends and family randomly die over a year of staying home most of the time?

I believe my comment about halving mortality addresses this. They're already likely to arbitrarily die - if in 2017 I could reduce that probability by half (coronavirus roughly doubles mortality across all age groups) by having everyone stay inside or perform the various rituals like standing far apart, wearing masks etc I wouldn't do it. If instead of decreasing life expectancy by less than a year it were something…

Coronavirus may only double overall mortality, but having no hospital capacity would cause a further increase in deaths. We'd probably just end up in a real lockdown (shelter in place orders are not a lockdown) and have a bunch of extra dead people.

Re: Forced social isolation causes neural craving similar to hunger

#106

Post by fyfy18 »

esotericn wrote: post #70

Er, yeah, I've been saying this for months. We are social animals. Literally just existing is stressful at the moment for most of us, because there's a constant urge that is not being satisfied. Not only for socialisation but simply the low-level stress of constantly having to 'check yourself' when you realise literally everything you'd normally be doing is either disabled or handicapped in some way. To me, lockdowns…

I've found this period has had an overall positive effect on my mental health. At first I was rather depressed, religiously following the news and subreddits about what was happening, but after a couple of weeks of that I realised I couldn't continue living like that forever. I started introspecting and tried to figure out what was causing the stress and low level anxiety I've been experiencing for a few years.

During this period I feel like I have figured a lot of things out, and overall feel more relaxed now than I did before quarantine. I realised that I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to achieve things, and I don't need to - at first I used the pandemic situation as an excuse to myself to not have to do these things, but now I just feel naturally relaxed.

Also as a newish (1 year old) father I found talks by Gabor Maté resonated a lot with me.

(And I've somehow lost 6kg - even though I've been cooking whatever tasty deserts I've found on YouTube - probably from not eating out)

Re: Forced social isolation causes neural craving similar to hunger

#107

Post by somerandomqaguy »

richardbrevig wrote: post #77
Nav_Panel wrote: post #3

This was Maslow's point from back in the 40s, that there's no real distinction between physiological and social hunger, besides the fact of an importance hierarchy (one needs to be decently fed in order to start caring a lot about sociality, although even a person in starvation may care somewhat). Glad to see it's being neurologically researched as well.

Yes, all needs in the hierarchy are basic and necessary!

I wouldn't classify social interaction as a need. There's plenty of examples of people without any human contact surviving, to the point that we have a well established word for these people; hermit.

Imperial Japanese holdouts after the end of WW2 are the classical example, and to a lesser degree you have hikikomori in modern day. The most extreme example is Christopher Thomas Knight (the North Pond Hermit) with only one claim instance of human interaction in that period; he said, "Hi" to a hiker.

A need has a specific meaning; more or less, you will die if you don't have water for more then a week. It doesn't matter how strong willed you are, lack of water will kill you. Lack of social interaction will not universally kill everyone.

Re: Forced social isolation causes neural craving similar to hunger

#108

Post by ummonk »

jjjensen90 wrote: post #102
ummonk wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The IFR is proving to be ~1%. For 0.1-0.6% to be true, 50-100% of NYC would have to have gotten infected with COVID-19...

IFR is not a fixed value and is affected by many things. For example, intial viral load may be higher in NYC than many other places, vitamin D levels, air pollution, etc. There is no single IFR for any disease.

Yes, IFR is not a fixed value. But a range (0.1-0.6%) was provided by the person I was responding to. Even assuming NYC hit the top of the range of IFRs (which seems questionable given that NYC isn't a particularly old city), one would need an infection rate of 50%, which contradicts serology studies that turned out to be half that.

IFR in other locations (e.g. small towns in Europe where blood tests show widespread exposure) has also consistently come in at roughly 1%.

Re: Forced social isolation causes neural craving similar to hunger

#109

Post by fdsgnr0g90n0fw »

colechristensen wrote: post #66
Trasmatta wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, this me. I haven't been able to see friends or family since March 15th. So I haven't even touched another human in that long. It's been really bad for my mental health. I have a hard time empathising with people who say they've been super lonely but still live with family.

I feel you, me too. I also had a relationship fall apart late last year and did quite a lot of my own social isolating at the time combined with my natural inclination to hibernate around the winter solstice because of lack of light. My closest friends also moved away in part motivated by the situation. I really don't remember the last time I interacted with another human who wasn't selling me food or through a compu…

>There are probably a lot of us out there. If it weren't for a couple of cat monsters I probably would have lost all of my marbles by now.

I think you might be underestimating yourself as a human being. I spend about 8 months with little human contact. I spoke twice with my parents for about 10 minutes each, once for 2 minutes to ask some questions, and maybe 10 seconds each time to the cashier when buying food (however it never deviated from this script; "Would you like bags?" "Yes." "How are you paying?" "Cash." "Have a nice day."). That was it. Nothing else.

I won't say that it was an easy or enjoyable thing to do, but I think given enough time and focus, almost anyone can probably acclimate to a complete lack of human contact without loosing all their marbles.

Re: Forced social isolation causes neural craving similar to hunger

#110

Post by JoshuaDavid »

djsumdog wrote: post #65
rb808 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a lot more sympathy for animals in the zoo as well.

I have never liked zoos! The animals look so sad. The San Diego and Cincinnati zoos are very large and that helps, but I still don't enjoy going to them. The reptiles are usually fine, but many of the mammals really shouldn't be locked up like that. A polar bear swims up to 600km a day in the wild. I like aquariums. Most fish are fine in a big enough tank; turtles too. I avoid aquariums with Dolphins or Whales. Consi…

> A polar bear swims up to 600km a day in the wild.

Off topic, but there's no way that can be true. 600km in a day is 25 km / hour for 24 hours straight. Looking online, it looks like the top swimming speed of a polar bear is closer to 10 km / hour.

That said, I agree about the sadness of zoos.

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