Loneliness?
The holidays are lonely times for a lot of folks, especially this year of the pandemic, what with lockdowns and distancing. A 2018 study from Cigna found 54 percent of Americans confessing loneliness. In a couple of years that had grown to 61 percent!
But there is good news: loneliness may actually be good for you!
So claim scientists from McGill University in “The Default Network of the Human Brain is Associated with Perceived Social Isolation,” published recently in Nature Communications.
Sure, loneliness has its problems: hypertension, risk for suicide, decline of cognitive performance and even life expectancy, susceptibility to Alzheimer’s, etc. But these scientists decided to go more directly and look at the brain itself for lasting changes left by loneliness:
We test for signatures of loneliness in gray matter morphology, intrinsic functional coupling, and fiber tract microstructure.”
I.e., they looked at a collection of brain regions closely associated with higher-order social abilities, the “social brain,” studying MRI brain scans of those who responded “Yes” to “Do you often feel lonely?” (13 percent of 40,000 subjects replied affirmatively, a third of these men, the rest women: totaling about 5,000 lonely individuals between 40 and 69 years of age!)
Brain regions associated with perceptual, attentional, and affective processing of social information were indeed altered by the experience of loneliness.”
But they also discovered that several default network regions in the brain were more highly developed in lonely people.
We speculate that in the absence of desired social experiences, lonely individuals may be biased towards internally directed cognitions mediated by default network brain regions. … These neurocognitive processes include reminiscing, future thinking, imagining or mentally simulating desired social exchanges. Consistent with this idea, persons who face social disconnection are known to more frequently engage in random imagination of social interaction, nostalgic reminiscence, hypothetical conversations, and treating pets as if they were human agents.”
In other words, brain areas dealing with imagination and memory, future planning and hypothesizing, were winners in the contest between lonely vs. non-lonely folks.
Adds Dr. Nathan Spreng, first author on the study:
So this heightened focus on self-reflection, and possibly imagined social experiences, would naturally engage the memory-based functions of the default network. In the absence of this experience of social connection, the brain appears to compensate.”
Growth and development of “default networks” is all well and good. But I’ve got something better: Jesus!
“Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”
Matthew 28:20
Everyone else may abandon us.
For my father and my mother have forsaken me,
But the LORD will take me up.
Psalm 27:10
God never will.
“The LORD your God is the one who goes with you.
He will not fail you or forsake you.”
Deuteronomy 31:6
Especially in times of crisis.
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I fear no evil, for You are with me;
Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.
Psalm 23:4
God’s promised us!
“I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you.”
Hebrews 13:5
What a God!
A father of the fatherless and a judge for the widows,
Is God in His holy habitation.
God makes a home for the lonely; …
Only the rebellious dwell in a parched land.
Psalm 68:5
No, we don’t want to be rebellious. Instead we want to fear him for …
The angel of the LORD encamps around those who fear Him.
Psalm 34:7
So …
Trust in Him at all times, O people; …
God is a refuge for us.
Psalm 62:8
SOURCES:
CNN.com; Nature Communications
Abe Kuruvilla is the Carl E. Bates Professor of Christian Preaching at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (Louisville, KY), and a dermatologist in private practice. His passion is to explore, explain, and exemplify preaching.