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[deleted] OP t1_j82x7uz wrote

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RollssRoyce t1_j843tz4 wrote

I just want to add that a reason stress causes health issues is that your body shifts it's attention and energy away from systems in the body that heal, provide maintenance (as well as your immune system as mentioned above) so that it can put that energy toward things that help with fight for flight. Moreover, some of those fight or flight modes, like high blood pressure, can be harmful on their own in the long run. Short bursts of stress aren't unhealthy. It is the chronic, long term stress that wears on your body.

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turbozed t1_j854er5 wrote

"Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers" by Robert Sapolsky is a great book that goes in depth about this topic.

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mschweini t1_j86h9oa wrote

I haven't read the book, but I thought the connection between ulcers and stress is now considered outdated, and that the current theory lays most of the blame for ulcers on helicobacter infection?

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RepleteDivide t1_j83t6j1 wrote

And just in case it isn't common knowledge, the ultimate cause of those physiological processes is the evolution of a social species. Pre-human apes became highly social as fruit-eating tree-dwelling creatures, and then as they came out of the trees and evolved over the generations as upright-standing apes, the social systems remained, and when H. sapiens evolved, the social system was still there. We need human connection because of that evolution that created our bodies, and that is where the cortisol and psychological distress vs joy comes into play.

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BizWax t1_j8416my wrote

It's inaccurate to say that the social systems "remained", as that suggests they're the same throughout our evolutionary history since first acquiring them. Our sociality has evolved along with us, and is different from that of our non-human ancestors and from the extinct species of our genus. The only thing that's the same is the bare fact of being a social species.

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Boring_Ad_3065 t1_j848s2e wrote

I mean…

Chimps get money, invent prostitution

Engaged in a 4 year tribal war

Like much of evolution, it repurposes and adds on, it doesn’t often reinvent. There’s debate around Dunbar’s number, but some agreement that a lot of us can manage about 50 active personal connections (albeit with high variability). The fact that we added in religion, culture, nations are more meta-evolutions of society (largely enabled by language and written language), not necessarily saying we’ve adapted our brains significantly from 10,000 years ago, but that social structures enabling mass cooperation were generally advantageous for production and competition.

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BizWax t1_j84qv9l wrote

You're conflating cultural evolution and biological evolution. They're qualitatively very different, and operate on entirely different time scales. 10k years ago? The first modern humans appeared 300k years ago, and we were talking about ancestors before that. Sure, you could posit that our biological evolution hasn't adapted to recent cultural evolution, but it has no bearing whatsoever on what I said.

As for your comparison to chimps: just because similarities exist, does not mean they are the same. All the similarities between chimpanzee and human sociality in the world don't erase facts like that a same/similar expression like smiling has very different meanings among chimps compared to humans. Human and chimp sociality are definitely not the same.

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RepleteDivide t1_j8729ii wrote

It's as accurate as saying that fingers remained. But the fingers are different. Yes, they are different; if anyone thought that I was saying otherwise, then... my goodness. Hopefully they speak up to voice that confusion!

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Westbrook_Level t1_j84gmzz wrote

And we seem to be trying to replace it with online socialization, to disastrous effect.

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MC_Queen t1_j847lqd wrote

At some point in history pro-social behaviors helped individuals survive and procreate. So it follows that the ones in the species who developed pro- social behaviors were the ones having babies who survived, and those behaviors passed down. Everyone alive today had ancestors who survived long enough to procreate.

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Terrorfrodo t1_j84ffmr wrote

I wonder where those people fit in who voluntarily choose total isolation and seem to be doing fine. Recently I saw a video about a guy who has been living in a hut in Siberia for 25 years, 30 km away from the closest settlement, because he "didn't like it in the village". He's probably a pretty weird guy but I doubt that his lifestyle is physically harming him.

So probably quite a few people are wired to live not as social animals, and isolation likely hurts only those who are isolated against their wishes.

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horyo t1_j859qd7 wrote

It's possible that he's isolated not just socially but also from dependence on civilization which creates physical demand for him to procure his own food and to handle the elements.

I think social isolation that's pathologic and leads to decreased activity is worsened by the convenience of civilization because then it becomes easier to avoid activity while also amassing caloric intake.

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ThrowAwayIguess2424 t1_j85b49j wrote

Love the response, and I’ll add another point that’s become more emphasized in emotional/social neuroscience over the past decade

That is that cognitive functions, like all forms of brain functions, requires use to keep the underlying neural architecture in tact and “up to par”. Neurons are energy sinks, and all across microscale (cellular), mesoscale (cortical columns, maybe think of as a type of local circuit) and macroscale (whole brain regions) levels, our neural systems consequentially rely on regular use of neural functions to decide when the energy investment is worthwhile. It is a use it or lose it principle

Cognitive functions can suffer from this fact. Cognition is highly complex, so it’s not as easy to study lack of use and cognitive ability changes as it is say lack of use of an arm and associated sensorimotor changes (there are some cool studies where they cast someone’s arm and get longitudinal brain scans), but the principle seems to persist

The final point to tie this to your question is that cognition is inherently a social and emotional function. For the longest time we acted as if these were separate brain phenomenon, but emotion is so integrated into cognitive circuits that they are no longer thought of as wholly independent (or “modular”) functions. I highly recommend Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions are Made for more on this in the context of emotion and cognition, or Luiz Pessoa’s The Entangled Brain for a whole-brain view on distributed functions

Anyway, social isolation leads to the obvious of not engaging in certain cognitive functions on the regular. But we also experience emotional disturbances in social isolation, which again, integrate directly to cognitive functions.

I’m super interested in this principle because my research in on Alzheimer’s, and a fascinating (albeit tragic) phenomenon is how quickly dementia and even mild cognitive impairment can accelerate once social isolation is entered. Often this happens as demented individuals are transferred into nursing homes. This transition is associated with all sorts of health decline, but many researchers think the social isolation and associated behavioral issues light the fire for accelerated physical and cognitive decline in such scenarios. This is of course why strong community engagement programs are important from anything like nursing, all the way up to independent living homes, is crucial

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haruame t1_j85j6h2 wrote

Do you know how remote communication (through phones etc.) differs from in person communication in this regard? Lots of people noticed a decrease in mental well being when switching into remote only communication due to covid.

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