Your Brain on Love – Nature’s Case Against Solitude, Zoom and Working from Home
We just passed Valentine’s Day weekend, so I thought I’d write a love story about you, the people you care about and, of course, your brain.
Having Friends Keeps You Sharp
Let’s start with a little research to pique your interest in why you need love to keep your brain happy. Many studies have pointed to the fact that socialization (of the non-virtual type) is wired into us for optimal health, physically and mentally. It helps prevent mental decline and lowers the risk of dementia. For example, a 2017 study published by researchers at the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease Center of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine found that people who were over 80 years old who had the mental agility of 50-year-olds shared one common factor: a close-knit group of friends.
In another study published by the American Journal of Public Health, researchers reported that older women who managed large social networks reduced their risk of dementia by 26%. Women who had daily contact with their network cut their risk of dementia by almost half.
Have I got your attention now?
New Research on the Love Hormone
Oxytocin is often called “the love hormone” because it’s involved in empathy, trust, building relationships, childbirth and breast-feeding. When you hug or kiss a loved one, your pituitary gland releases oxytocin. This hormone may also affect our memory according to a study conducted last summer.
In this study, researchers treated brains from mice with toxic beta amyloid. Beta amyloid is the protein that forms the unwanted plaques believed to disrupt brain cell function and destroy neurons, associated with the profound memory loss seen in dementia.
Beta amyloid protein also causes the brain’s “synaptic plasticity” to worsen, the capability of neurons to adapt and form new neural pathways in the brain. The researchers then treated the mice brain samples with beta-amyloid and oxytocin together. This seemed to stop the toxic beta-amyloid from negatively affecting synaptic plasticity. But, interestingly, when the samples were treated with oxytocin on its own, there was no effect on improving synaptic plasticity. Hmmm.
The researchers concluded that oxytocin might be a future treatment for memory loss from with cognitive disorders, such as Alzheimer’s Disease.
Why Zoom Doesn’t Cut It – Is Technology Really Better than Nothing?
Our brains thrive on socialization because it’s a biological imperative. It’s normal to crave interactions with others because we need that engagement to stay active as we age. Biology signals us that proximity to others means safety. Socialization – all that business of reading emotions, feeling empathy, and communicating with one another – feeds our brains more than we realize.
Since the onset of the pandemic, efforts to reduce the virus’ spread by limiting outside contact, working from home, and social distancing have exacerbated a loneliness problem already underlying modern society. For most, the pandemic has meant limiting physical proximity to those with whom one lives. For Americans who live alone (some 28 percent of the population), this has meant little to no human contact for months. All this comes at a heavy cost; surveys suggest that within the first month of COVID-19, loneliness increased by 20 to 30 percent, and emotional distress tripled!
Technology and social media that strive to “virtually connect us” are meager substitutes- in fact, they can make us feel worse. Anyone who has attended a virtual event – be it a conference, art class or happy hour, realizes that it may be “better than nothing” but it still feels appreciably inadequate. According to one survey, these virtual social gatherings failed to reduce loneliness among 48 percent, and actually increased loneliness among 10 percent of respondents.
Love in the Time of Cholera Coronavirus
Now is an especially hard time for sustaining connections and social needs. My happiest moments this past month have been when I’ve volunteered to vaccinate people at the mass clinic in San Antonio’s Alamodome arena. And it’s not because I’m crazy about giving shots. It’s because for the first time in so many months, I was together in real time with others sharing a common purpose as if we were PPE-costumed missionaries. We swapped stories, laughed and stuck needles in arms. I was struck by how much I’ve missed the energy of an experience when we’re physically present with friends and even with strangers – like a live concert or a wedding or lunch at a bustling restaurant. We will never take those experiences for granted again, ever.
Links to the studies included in this blog:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006291X20307725?via%3Dihub
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2007.115923
https://news.feinberg.northwestern.edu/2013/07/oxytocin_stress/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12598900/
https://socialpronow.com/loneliness-corona/