Why Loneliness Might Be Killing You — Full Documentary

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: in an increasingly busy and distracted society it's easier than ever to neglect one of our most basic needs connecting with each other social connection is [00:00:19] Speaker 2: essential to who we are we are a social species we are happiest when we're most [00:00:25] Speaker 3: connected it is a fundamental human need an experience to feel belonging and having [00:00:31] Speaker 1: community social connection is not just an important part of our lives it's the [00:00:37] Speaker 4: heartbeat of our existence we've learned from really robust studies that people who have more friends stronger connections with other people with longer healthier [00:00:48] Speaker 1: happier lives when this vital need for connection isn't being met the [00:00:54] Speaker 5: consequences can be life-threatening we are biologically wired to expect social connection being alone outside of the group can elicit all sorts of [00:01:07] Speaker 6: physiological responses people who are lonely and socially isolated fall at increased risk for a wide variety of chronic diseases social isolation loneliness [00:01:19] Speaker 7: have a significant impact on longevity they shorten your lifespan loneliness actually is a greater risk [00:01:27] Speaker 8: factor for premature mortality than is smoking 15 cigarettes a day around the world public health [00:01:36] Speaker 1: officials have begun raising awareness about the health impacts of loneliness 61% of young people suffer from [00:01:44] Speaker 9: serious loneliness and 36% of the population overall so loneliness is a huge crisis [00:01:52] Speaker 1: what happens to us when our basic need for connection goes unmet and why is this so important [00:01:59] Speaker 10: social connection is one of the most miraculous and beautiful features of the natural world we humans do something that's extraordinary and almost unique we form long-term non reproductive unions with unrelated individuals [00:02:26] Speaker 2: namely we have friends you can't separate who we are as conscious beings from the fact that we're social we evolved to be social if this is core to who we are and we're not getting it there's bound to be some sort of dysfunction at the physical or mental level [00:02:43] Speaker 5: but if connection is essential to our well-being why aren't we more aware of the health impacts of loneliness there's a lot of skepticism out there on the impacts of loneliness in part I think it's the fact that for so long this has been viewed as a very personal kind of experience [00:03:02] Speaker 11: loneliness is subjective and so for a long time we thought that this important criterion would preclude our ability to study it but it doesn't the observation that people who are less socially connected get sicker more often and don't live as long if I talk to colleagues of mine who are sociologists they'll say yeah we've known that for like a hundred years or more [00:03:20] Speaker 12: from epidemiology to anthropology to anthropology different scientific disciplines have measured this in slightly different ways we see a converging of evidence no matter how you measure it when social connection is high we tend to see more protective live as long. If I talk to colleagues of mine who are sociologists, they'll say, "Yeah, we've known [00:03:30] Speaker 5: that for like a hundred years or more." From epidemiology to anthropology, different scientific disciplines have measured this in slightly different ways. We see a converging of evidence. No matter how you measure it, when social connection is high, we tend to see more protective kinds of effects. And when it is low, we tend to see more negative kinds of consequences. [00:04:00] Speaker 1: To begin to understand our need for connection, we start with our fellow primates. [00:04:07] Speaker 13: So you can see vultures in the very top of the tree, but down lower you can see the silhouettes of [00:04:13] Speaker 1: some of the humans. Humans share over 90 percent of our DNA with other primates. [00:04:24] Speaker 4: Social connection is in our DNA quite literally, and it's in our brains, and it's in the brains of our primate cousins. Monkeys have the same social brain network in their heads wired up in the same way. [00:04:37] Speaker 1: For more than five decades, anthropologists have been studying baboons in the Ambuseli ecosystem of southern Kenya, one of the longest-running studies of primates in the world. [00:04:54] Speaker 12: Baboons are pretty closely related to us. They're these large-bodied terrestrial animals that evolved mostly in sub-Saharan Africa that live in social groups. [00:05:05] Speaker 14: Baboons live about three times as fast as we do, and that means that over the course of one human researcher's lifespan, we can capture many generations of baboons, four, five, six, or more. Yesterday they were one, two, three, four. When you have long-term data, you get to a rich understanding of how the events at one phase of life affect another phase of life. Baboons are the main way we measure social connection is through looking at grooming relationships. If you watch one animal grooming the other, they're very detailed in the way they'll move the fur up and look for ticks and pieces of dirt and clean the fur. But the social role of grooming is equally important. [00:05:57] Speaker 4: Baboons Grooming is what monkeys want to do most of the time. I see an equivalent of us going to get a coffee or beer with friends. [00:06:04] Speaker 12: Baboons Grooming is what monkeys want to do most of the time. We watch what they're doing and then we use molecular methods to ask what's happening simultaneously in their blood cells. Then we extract DNA or RNA and get readouts that allow us to say, well, in this individual, who is really socially isolated, we get a lot of activity in this part of the genome. And in this individual, who is quite socially integrated, we see something different. [00:06:34] Speaker 14: The baboons that are more socially connected have longer lives. We've also been able to demonstrate that baboons who have a lot of adversity in early life live shorter adult lives. [00:06:51] Speaker 1: But what happens when an entire group of monkeys faces a catastrophic challenge? In 2017, Hurricane Maria ravaged the habitat of a colony of rhesus macaques in Puerto Rico. [00:07:08] Speaker 4: They lost fresh water systems, fresh food. It just devastated the vegetation. But what happened was amazing. The monkeys, immediately after the storm, became more social. And this is kind of shocking, because you might think, when your environment's destroyed, you're going to fight over every last [00:07:25] Speaker 1: scrap. And that's not what we saw. One hypothesis is that without adequate tree cover, shade was scarce. And the macaques needed to cooperate to find it, becoming more tolerant and less aggressive. [00:07:42] Speaker 4: Remarkably, we found that that persists to this day. So now, years later, the monkeys are still friendlier. They still invest in these social relationships. [00:07:56] Speaker 1: That adaptation mirrors human behavior. Our innate drive for connection is made clear in disasters and [00:08:04] Speaker 15: crisis situations. Social connection is kind of a basic human need, the same way as thirst and hunger [00:08:12] Speaker 1: are human needs. Danny Dimitriou is a neuroscientist and pediatrician at Columbia University, [00:08:21] Speaker 15: where she studies social connection in infants. Our hypothesis for all the work in my lab is that human connection is something that gets hardwired into the brain very, very early in life. Babies are born wired to connect. In my lab, we think zero to three months of life are really the critical period for that social connection to happen. And if it doesn't happen within that time span, then children will not be able to, as adolescents and into adulthood, have normal social functioning. [00:08:59] Speaker 1: From birth, our biology compels us to connect, fueled by oxytocin, [00:09:05] Speaker 4: a powerful hormone that helps us form our earliest bonds. Oxytocin is this peptide hormone. It's released during childbirth, it's released during nursing, and it seems designed to really build that connection. One way oxytocin is released is by simple touch. We come pre-wired to depend on touch as very primitive primordial channel for driving connection. There are sensors in the skin, the hairy parts of the skin, like on your forearms or on the back of your head, that project to parts of the brain. That's kind of giving you this oxytocin rush. [00:09:54] Speaker 15: Children can overcome early lack of social connection only if they start getting it within that critical period of development, so generally thought of the zero to three years. [00:10:06] Speaker 1: How exactly are children able to overcome the lack of social connection? The brain can be rewired during development because of plasticity, the unique ability of the brain to change. [00:10:23] Speaker 8: The essence of the brain is plasticity. That is how the brain works. It's a learning machine. [00:10:30] Speaker 15: The first couple years of life is the time that there's the highest plasticity in the brain. Over the course of the first two years, the brain actually doubles in size. So during the first couple years of life, there's so many connections that are forming, and that plasticity means that if a child falls behind in those first few years, it is very, very easy to get them back on course with proper intervention. In my lab, we work on emotional connection and emotional synchrony, which is the flow of how the mom and baby come together. Now, this sounds intuitive, but there's still no standardized training for any medical doctor into how to evaluate relationships. The biggest goal of my work is to understand how social connection becomes developmentally embedded and help support strategies that promote that development in order to prevent loneliness. And on a large scale, that can actually have societal impact. [00:11:36] Speaker 1: While social connection is essential for early childhood development, our own awareness of it really comes into play during adolescence. [00:11:47] Speaker 5: As most people can relate, adolescence can be a challenging time socially. So it's perhaps not surprising that we see loneliness rates are highest among our adolescents. [00:12:01] Speaker 1: One reason adolescence is so challenging is that the brain is still developing during this period. The amygdala, a key brain structure involved in processing emotions like fear, pleasure, and aggression, is highly active in teenagers. But the prefrontal cortex, which regulates decision-making, impulse control, and reasoning, is still developing and won't fully mature until the mid-20s. [00:12:33] Speaker 16: So you have this period where there's a little bit more reactivity to things motivated by fear, by anxiety, by pleasure, without a counterbalance of the more rational prefrontal cortex. [00:12:44] Speaker 1: This unique stage of brain development complicates the many social challenges that teenagers face, such as social anxiety and isolation. [00:12:55] Speaker 16: We're studying more and more how things like social isolation and loneliness are related to health outcomes throughout life. And what we see is that when kids experience social isolation, they're more likely to have worse health in their adulthood. And additionally, they're more likely to have risk factors like higher blood pressure or higher cholesterol. [00:13:16] Speaker 1: As if adolescence isn't difficult enough, the teenage generation faced additional challenges during the COVID-19 lockdown. [00:13:29] Speaker 17: Across the country, at least 21 million kids now home from school. [00:13:36] Speaker 16: We saw a lot of teenagers struggling during that time and seeing their access to teachers and support systems cut off, and positive peer relationships cut off. When you know how strongly social isolation and loneliness are related to mental health, it's no surprise that a lot of people experienced these symptoms during the pandemic. [00:13:59] Speaker 1: The lockdown also accelerated the rising impact of technology on human relationships for young people above all. [00:14:09] Speaker 8: There is a linear relationship between the amount of social media consumed by teenagers and worse mental health outcomes. The more they use it, the worse the outcomes. [00:14:22] Speaker 9: If teens use social media more than three hours a day, they'll have double the risk of depression, they'll have way increased risk of social anxiety and social avoidance, and that means less real life relationships and connection. [00:14:37] Speaker 5: The definition of loneliness is the discrepancy between our desired level of connection and our actual level of connection. So this comparison can be magnified when we are on social media. We may see others living what appears to be a full social life. Ours, in comparison, may not look as full. [00:15:02] Speaker 1: Social media is notoriously a place where misinformation, envy, hate speech, and bullying are prevalent. [00:15:10] Speaker 18: Social media is doing harm to our kids. [00:15:14] Speaker 1: The government of Australia is so concerned that it has even banned it for children under 16. The first of its kind anywhere in the world. [00:15:26] Speaker 6: The social media ecosystem is a very unpredictable, hostile, unsafe place. Extremely unsafe. It's much easier to keep the eyeballs on apps by pumping images of fear and threat and insecurity and hate into people's visual and audio fields. You don't even have to have human beings consciously do it, [00:15:45] Speaker 9: the algorithm will do it for you. There are definitely cases of suicides that have been affiliated with bullying on social media. For kids in general, being on social media all the time usually means a withdrawal from in-person connections. When I'm scrolling, I'm just forgetting and just avoiding everything else in my life. Kids get less and less used to talking to real-life people they don't know, and so they become more and more avoidant and anxious about real-life connections. And what we're [00:16:18] Speaker 2: seeing with social media is an increase in loneliness. I see social media as an incredibly low bandwidth connection between people. And so when we accept social media as the substitute for connection or community or accept the emoji as a substitute for real emotion, we're settling for something and we're giving up what we really know about connection. And that's an enormous loss. Technology has gotten [00:16:50] Speaker 4: between us, right? We spend all this time on screens and we don't spend time together. During adolescence, we are forming the connections in our brains that allow us to navigate adulthood. Now imagine you've kind of shifted the course of that. You know, you walk past a restaurant and you'll see two young people at a table. They look like they might be on a date and they're on their phones, [00:17:16] Speaker 1: you know, the entire time. The dominance of social media complicates an already difficult situation for teens. As we step into adulthood, the complexities of work and greater responsibilities increasingly challenge our capacity to maintain deep connections. Suddenly coming out of the academic world and getting [00:17:51] Speaker 19: into the workplace and actually feeling quite afraid. I think that's probably what a lot of young people feel. Suddenly you're in these adult to adult connections. You are expected to know the answers to things. You're expected to suddenly know how to be productive. And when I was in the workplace in the [00:18:14] Speaker 1: beginning, I think I felt really alone. Sharon Aneha is a consultant who helps businesses foster social [00:18:23] Speaker 19: connection on the job. According to a recent Gallup survey, one in five people report feeling lonely in the workplace. We've got email, we've got phones, we've got video calls. We've never been more supposedly connected, yet so many people report feeling lonely. And a lot of that comes down to the culture. We have sacrificed connection for productivity. [00:18:49] Speaker 1: Sharon discovered the importance of social connection in a deeply personal way. She was a hard-driving executive whose pursuit of success ultimately ruined her health. [00:19:07] Speaker 19: I think that we live in a society and in a culture where actually it's permissible to be addicted to your work. The more productive you are, the more of value you are to an organization. And I think I really inhabited that mindset and I really pushed myself. Having personal relationships really was very much secondary. And as I was getting more and more stressed, my immunity was definitely getting compromised to the point where I needed medical interventions. And because I had pushed and pushed myself in that relentless pursuit of achievement where I had pushed people away, I felt really alone. I felt very isolated. [00:19:54] Speaker 1: I didn't know who to turn to. Making matters worse for young professionals like Sharon, there are powerful social stigmas around loneliness that often deter people from seeking help. [00:20:09] Speaker 20: Stigma is something that we really think about with loneliness measurement because it can be hard to identify as feeling lonely. There's a lot of shame attached to the concepts of lacking companionship [00:20:21] Speaker 1: or feeling isolated. And beyond that, our bodies have a physical reaction to isolation. [00:20:29] Speaker 10: Every human being knows you kind of feel good when you're in the company of your friends. You have that kind of warm feeling. Your heart rate drops. It feels great. That's an evolved physiologic response. Conversely, when we lack friends, we experience that as very threatening and we have a different kind of physiologic response which can actually harm our bodies. The brain's mechanism for dealing with stressors, [00:20:52] Speaker 1: including isolation, is called the sympathetic nervous system or fight or flight reflex. [00:21:00] Speaker 20: There are hormones that are released in our body that trigger in our mind that something is off. [00:21:07] Speaker 1: When you encounter a stressor, the brain tells the adrenal glands to release the hormones cortisol and adrenaline, which work together to increase your blood pressure and heart rate. This stress response gives us heightened alertness and increased energy in order to handle a short-term danger. [00:21:28] Speaker 6: Your brain is bracing itself for injury. Your cardiovascular system pumps blood a little bit faster because it thinks you may need to deliver more oxygen to your muscles to run or fight. Almost every organ system of the body receives some kind of message from this fight-or-flight neurobiology. [00:21:46] Speaker 12: Your body has stopped directing so much energy towards reproductive function and digestive function. And that's an appropriate response. But it's not a good response to be in on a regular basis. [00:22:01] Speaker 6: The fight-or-flight stress response was built basically for a different world than the one that we live in. [00:22:07] Speaker 1: In a prehistoric world, life was a constant battle against deadly threats. And without the protection of a tribe, survival would be even more precarious. [00:22:19] Speaker 15: If you see a lion, it is really good for that cortisol and that adrenaline to just be flooding your body. You run out of there, right? But if that continues in your body, with things like loneliness as well as other stressors, that ultimately does the opposite thing to the body. It overwhelms the body. [00:22:40] Speaker 20: When people are exposed to chronic stress, the body releases cortisol at higher levels than it should. And when we're exposed to cortisol for that long, that can affect our cardiovascular health. It can affect our brain health. It can affect the immune system. [00:22:57] Speaker 6: We live today very differently than those hunters and gatherers did. We've created a culture where everybody feels chronically insecure. It's great for economic productivity. Like insecure people, they work really hard. But if you're running that kind of fight-or-flight biology as a lifestyle, it's just going to eat your body. [00:23:20] Speaker 19: Anything else come to mind? [00:23:22] Speaker 1: By starting her own company, Sharon found a way to share the lessons she learned with others. [00:23:30] Speaker 19: For workplace consultants like myself, we're talking to organizations about how we can maintain that culture of success, but without burning people out. Ensuring that we're not pushing people to the point where they're in endless meetings and they've no ability to connect with anyone else. [00:23:50] Speaker 1: But what happens when people are no longer going into the office? The unprecedented events of the pandemic made connecting even harder. [00:24:00] Speaker 3: Prior to the pandemic, I had to go into my office every day, but I saw my colleagues there. And then suddenly we weren't allowed to come to the office. [00:24:09] Speaker 19: And I think that's what we're doing. And I think that's what we're doing. It's really important. It's important. It's important. It's important to know that I'm doing this. It's important. It's important. It's important to know that we're doing this. It's important to know that we're doing this. It's important to know that we're doing it. It's important to know that we're doing this. It's important to know that we're doing this. It's important to know that we're doing this. While we are spending a lot more time on video calls, that doesn't mean that we are necessarily better connected to the people on those calls. [00:24:18] Speaker 2: When we have Zoom meetings, what's cut out, except for that first 30 seconds, while we're waiting for everybody to get on, is small talk, which precedes and follows every meeting of human beings. These things are very important. [00:24:30] Speaker 5: These technologies that helped us cope with isolation became really comfortable, really convenient. Because of those kinds of advantages, the very tools that helped us cope with isolation are now reinforcing isolation. [00:24:52] Speaker 2: What happened during the pandemic and the move to remote work and all the changes in our lives wrought by COVID-19, we have not begun to understand. And I think it's affected us in many ways we haven't yet reckoned with. [00:25:07] Speaker 1: Not only is social connection at work good for our health, studies have shown that it is beneficial for team dynamics in the workplace. At the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, Michael Platt explores the phenomenon of synchrony in which brain activity and physiological states align among two or more people. [00:25:31] Speaker 4: Michael Platt: So what we're looking at here is a very simple study collecting data from two human participants here. One is eye tracking. And then the other piece of data we get from these headbands is electroencephalography data. So these are brain waves. We're trying to get a measure of synchronization amongst people who might be in an audience. Michael Platt: Synchrony is a biomarker of connection. And when it's higher, it means you're likely to work better together. And so we've been trying to understand what is the impact of synchrony in terms of group outcomes, team dynamics, and are there any ways to turn it up, take it to 11. That small increment performance could be the difference. Michael Platt: In one of our earliest studies, we worked with the Penn Rowing team. Rowing depends on synchronized movement. And so we had these four-person boats and we studied them in their dry land training while they were on these rowing machines lined up next to each other. We measured brain activity, heart rate activity. And what we found is they were able to achieve some brain synchrony that would later predict good collaboration, good teamwork. So this was a kind of breakout moment for us. We take those insights about how we're wired to connect with each other into business settings. We've been able to measure brain activity and people while they're working with each other, and we found amazing patterns of activity at work that predict social connection. So if you're more synchronized, you are more likely to cooperate, communications better, higher trust, etc. [00:27:10] Speaker 1: The importance of social connection becomes more clear as we reach our senior years. As younger family members move away, retirement ends relationships at work, and peers and friends die. Opportunities for social connection become fewer and fewer. But surprisingly, many seniors don't show higher incidence of social disconnection. [00:27:39] Speaker 20: The evidence actually shows that older adults tend to be among the most active people in our communities. You know, some of the highest rates of volunteering, community participation, religious participation. I think the challenge is when people don't have opportunities to do what they [00:27:56] Speaker 1: want to. When those opportunities aren't there, negative health outcomes tend to arise. What we found [00:28:05] Speaker 3: was that people who reported any degree of loneliness had a greater likelihood of losing their independence, having more difficulty with everyday tasks, and they had a greater likelihood of dying over a six-year period. The specific outcomes we see in older adults are greater risk of dying from a heart attack, worse control of diabetes, developing dementia, specifically Alzheimer's, risks of frailty getting weaker, increased mortality. It's literally everything that you can think about. [00:28:39] Speaker 1: For Steve Cole, the connection between loneliness and chronic diseases became clear when studying the HIV [00:28:47] Speaker 6: crisis in the 1990s. One of the things we figured out early in the context of HIV infection is that your social life mattered. For instance, gay men who were in the closet got sick and died 30% faster than the guys who were out of the closet. So there's something about how you live your life that was getting into the body and changing the way the virus was working. And when we looked at the fight-or-flight biology of these folks, that's exactly what they found. Their nervous systems were just running this constant low-grade stress factory in their body. [00:29:23] Speaker 1: Cole's research centered on norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter that enables this fight-or-flight response. [00:29:31] Speaker 6: We could do simple little experiments where we take some HIV virus, put it on some white blood cells, some immune cells in a test tube, and then just add some norepinephrine in there, as if these cells had just been exposed to fight-or-flight stress biology. It turns out the virus replicates somewhere between three and five times as fast in that scenario. [00:29:54] Speaker 1: Cole expanded his research to find out if the stress of loneliness and social isolation could be driving other diseases as well. [00:30:04] Speaker 6: We went systematically through all of the genes to help us understand what was going on in lonely people getting sick with these chronic diseases. We could localize what might be operating differently in the immune cells of a lonely person versus a non-lonely person. [00:30:21] Speaker 7: We've been able to find that genes that are activated in people who are lonely look very systematically different. [00:30:31] Speaker 6: Honestly, it was the easiest data analysis I have ever seen in my entire life because it was just so clear what had happened. If you took all of the genes in the genome and you found the ones that were most overactive in the white blood cells of lonely people, they were all involved in [00:30:47] Speaker 20: inflammation. Different inflammatory markers are associated with different medical conditions, with cardiovascular disease, with increased risk of dementia, with diabetes. You name it, there is a medical condition that inflammation will affect. That is part of the reason why loneliness is [00:31:04] Speaker 6: so pernicious. If your body was running this kind of molecular program of more inflammation and less antiviral response, yeah, you're going to get exactly the diseases that lonely people get. [00:31:18] Speaker 1: Despite growing research revealing the severe health risks of loneliness, the medical community has often shown skepticism and overlooked the problem. [00:31:30] Speaker 20: Before the pandemic, when I would talk to clinicians about loneliness or social connection, I would receive a lot of skeptical looks. Like, is this really my job to be talking about loneliness? These are not concepts that we're trained in, in medical school. [00:31:51] Speaker 1: Thanks in part to the pandemic, slowly but steadily, the long-time skepticism around social connection [00:31:59] Speaker 3: is beginning to dissolve. The pandemic started to destigmatize some loneliness and isolation because it was so rampant and because we were all isolated. People recognized that there is a pain to being isolated, [00:32:17] Speaker 7: to feeling alone, and it came home to them. They felt it. Or they know what it feels like to their mother who's in a nursing home and nobody's allowed to go in and visit with her. That's pretty real. [00:32:32] Speaker 20: I think since the pandemic, it's been a much easier sell that loneliness and isolation are problems that affect our health and our well-being. Not only were clinicians seeing this among their patients every day, but many clinicians were feeling that themselves. It really took a lot of the stigma away attached to loneliness because it suddenly became this open conversation that our entire society was [00:32:58] Speaker 1: having. Some scientists are taking action to address the crisis through organizations such as the Foundation for Social Connection, which aims to improve social connection in society through evidence-based strategies. [00:33:16] Speaker 20: I think now we've moved to a place where, okay, what do I do about it? What I want to do is start a work in progress campus-wide. And so our approach now has been how do we integrate these assessments into health systems in ways that are not burdensome to clinicians. We as a research community are coming [00:33:35] Speaker 3: together to try to have consensus and bring some scientific standards to some of the interventions [00:33:41] Speaker 7: that are being proposed. There is no one solution to loneliness. People feel lonely for different reasons and in different ways and at different points in their lives. And at each juncture and in each [00:33:56] Speaker 1: circumstance, an intervention will have to differ. Health officials and organizations around the world have begun to address loneliness and social isolation as a public health issue. Here in the U.S., one of the boldest initiatives has been in San Mateo County in Northern California. [00:34:18] Speaker 21: Today, Bay Area County became the first in the nation to declare loneliness a public health crisis. [00:34:24] Speaker 1: David Canepa is president of the county's Board of Supervisors, who introduced the resolution. [00:34:31] Speaker 22: I want to make sure that that person who's suffering alone, wherever it is, that we provide them with connectivity. If someone is feeling lonely, we have a responsibility to make sure that we connect them with resources. [00:34:49] Speaker 3: San Mateo declaring loneliness a public health emergency was a really critical step. This is not one isolated person. It's me. It's you. It's your neighbor. It's all of us. It's all of us. They're at risk and may experience this at some point. It's a recognition that this affects the health, well-being and ultimately finances of an entire county. [00:35:13] Speaker 1: San Mateo's efforts build on long-standing organizations like San Francisco's Curry Senior Center, where researchers like Paris Sonoto and Kotwal consult on how its programs can better alleviate loneliness. [00:35:28] Speaker 23: So I just kind of want to check in with you and see how you're doing. [00:35:30] Speaker 20: So Curry serves as this amazing hub for the community where people can come there and have a lot of their different needs met. One of their underlying principles is to address social [00:35:43] Speaker 3: isolation and build community. This is what I love about community organizations. They're in the weeds. They're in the community. They see what's actually going on. Community organizations are living [00:35:52] Speaker 1: and breathing this every day. At Curry, one of the simplest and most popular programs is known as [00:36:00] Speaker 23: the Lunch Bunch. Welcome to Lunch Bunch 1, 4. Lunch Bunch has been around for 30 years to provide a place for social support for seniors. Many of the members have been in San Francisco about 30 or 40 years. And then along came old age. So that kind of pushed people further into isolation. So we provide them a means to come together and I think it's a fabulous social support network for them. [00:36:27] Speaker 1: Mark Pozarczyk is a Curry Center member who has been caring for his ailing husband. [00:36:33] Speaker 24: Outside of our relationship, we only have a few close friends and acquaintances. So I needed to get myself out to be prepared for the future. To be able to go with this group and laugh and enjoy it for a short period of time each week is just great for me. It has helped me so much. [00:36:56] Speaker 23: That sounds fun. Have a busy weekend. [00:37:00] Speaker 1: As we journey through life, meeting new people, what turns a simple encounter into a lasting connection? [00:37:08] Speaker 17: We're really interested in learning about what predicts who's going to become friends with whom, who's going to become really socially connected. [00:37:17] Speaker 1: Carolyn Parkinson is the director of UCLA's Computational Social Neuroscience Lab, where she explores how the human brain processes social relationships. In one of her studies, Parkinson scans the brains of multiple members of peer groups with fMRI and tracks the data over time. [00:37:43] Speaker 17: Essentially, people will just be laying down in the scanner and they'll see on the screen projected above their face a series of video clips. We can look at pairs of participants and look at the similarities in those temporal trajectories of how their brains are responding to what they're seeing. So here we scanned people before they met one another and we see that the neural similarity that's measured is much greater among people who wound up becoming friends. So we see that people who are going to become friends in the future seem to respond to the world around them in ways that are really similar to one another. The people who go on to become friends in the long term have really synchronous neural responses to each other. [00:38:35] Speaker 1: We may be wired to connect with some people more than others, but the impacts of those connections are far-reaching. [00:38:43] Speaker 23: I'm enjoying this heat. I don't know about you guys. [00:38:45] Speaker 1: Scientists have found that having something to live for, like attending a weekly lunch with a group of friends, can provide some powerful health benefits. [00:38:56] Speaker 6: We've actually spent a number of years looking at this molecular biology in loneliness intervention that changed this underlying biological risk. Interestingly enough, there is something that does work, and that is a sense of meaning and purpose in a person's life. [00:39:16] Speaker 8: Having a strong sense of purpose in life is probably the most important psychological predictor of longevity. When negative stuff happens, our ability to recover is so important. And it turns out that people who have their eye on something really meaningful, the stresses and strains of life become less significant. [00:39:42] Speaker 6: Purpose overcomes fight or flight. People who have a high sense of meaning in their life, a sense of engagement with an important mission or a community, their bodies look great at the molecular level. [00:39:55] Speaker 8: Having a strong sense of purpose is really in part about connection, because we often have a purpose in benefiting others, in being able to care for others, in loving others. And that is an intimate component of purpose. [00:40:15] Speaker 6: Once we realized how powerful purpose was as an antagonist of threat and insecurity, we started looking for protocols for making more purpose and meaning in everyday life. And one of the projects that has been most successful is an intervention called Generation Exchange. [00:40:35] Speaker 1: Generation Exchange places retired seniors into public schools in South Central L.A. as teachers' aides. These mentors get a sense of purpose and connection from the program, which produces measurable health benefits. Steve Cole collaborates with the program, analyzing blood samples from participants to understand its impact as a life-changing intervention. [00:41:06] Speaker 6: Once they get trained and go into the classrooms, the level of inflammatory biology drops dramatically, and antiviral biology goes up by more than any other intervention that we've ever seen. [00:41:21] Speaker 1: Discovering a sense of purpose is just one way to counteract loneliness. Science has shown that meditation can create more possibilities for connection. [00:41:31] Speaker 8: Steve Cole: How meditation influences the structure of the brain is a very important question that has only in the last decade been seriously investigated by modern science. [00:41:46] Speaker 1: Richard Davidson has been studying the effects of meditation on the brain and nervous system for over 30 years. Steve Cole: This has included studying esteemed practitioners, such as the Buddhist master, Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche. [00:42:05] Speaker 8: Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: Mingyur Rinpoche came to our lab for the first time in 2002, and we probed him in so many different ways over the course of roughly a week of testing. [00:42:16] Speaker 18: Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: The first time I went to his laboratory, Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: And he put me in an fMRI in a huge machine. Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: And it has a huge tongue coming out. Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: And I have to lie down as like a corpse. [00:42:32] Speaker 8: Steve Cole: We recorded baseline EEG, brain electrical activity, baseline fMRI, Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: And we saw how the brain changes with meditation practice. Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: Meditation does alter the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, the way in which it's connected to the amygdala and to other brain regions. Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: And through those changes, Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: it can modulate the activity so that we can harness the power Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: of the prefrontal cortex. [00:43:05] Speaker 1: Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: How is this possible? Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: Because of our brain's plasticity, Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: contemplative practices can effectively retrain our brain Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: to be less reactive to stressors, Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: thus alleviating social anxiety. [00:43:19] Speaker 8: Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: The idea that we can train our mind Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: is, I think, still foreign to many, many people Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: because we are living in a world today Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: where our minds are being constantly bombarded Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: with information from outside. Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: And the research shows that if we engage in intentional exercise Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: to strengthen specific pathways in the brain, Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: we can be the drivers of our own brains much more Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: than is typical in our society today. [00:44:02] Speaker 18: Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: Through meditation, Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: you are in charge of your transformation in your brain. Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: It's almost like we become our boss. [00:44:16] Speaker 1: Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: But the benefits of meditation Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: are not limited to the individual's well-being. Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: When stress levels drop, Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: the brain shifts from a reactive state Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: to one more open to empathy and understanding of others. [00:44:33] Speaker 8: Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: There are types of contemplative practice Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: that are specifically targeting social connection. Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: These were practices to cultivate Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: kindness toward others, compassion toward others. Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: These are really simple practices Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: and they really help to increase our social connectedness. [00:44:56] Speaker 18: Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: Meditation is within almost like discovering Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: your basic innate goodness. Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: So everybody has this wonderful nature. Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: If you understand yourself more, Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: you can understand others more. [00:45:11] Speaker 1: Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: While meditation may reduce social anxiety, Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: innovative new research offers the potential Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: for more targeted treatments. [00:45:21] Speaker 11: Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: When I started trying to find the neural basis Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: for things like craving or anxiety or loneliness, Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: a lot of my colleagues told me that this was career suicide Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: and that this isn't something that you can study Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: in neuroscience. Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: But technology is changing. Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: There's a lot of capacity. [00:45:38] Speaker 1: Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: Kay Tai is a neuroscientist Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: at the Jonas Salk Institute in San Diego, Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: focusing on the brain's pathways for social connection. [00:45:49] Speaker 11: Kay Tai Tai: Every social species essentially finds Yangi Mingyur Rinpoche: social isolation aversive. Kay Tai Tai: In our experiments with mice, Kay Tai Tai: in the case we socially isolate them and look at how they respond when they are Kay Tai Tai: reintroduced to their social group. Kay Tai Tai: There will be this rebound of affiliative social interaction, kind of like Kay Tai Tai Tai: welcome back type of energy. Kay Tai Tai: And then in humans we use functional magnetic resonance imaging. Kay Tai Tai: And we found the same thing to be true. [00:46:18] Speaker 1: Kay Tai Tai: One of the technologies transforming brain research is optogenetics. [00:46:24] Speaker 11: Kay Tai Tai: Optogenetics has been explosive and has completely changed the field of basic Kay Tai Tai: neuroscience research by allowing us unprecedented precision over specific cells, Kay Tai Tai: specific connections between cells. [00:46:39] Speaker 15: Kay Tai Tai: We can take mice with social avoidance and just turn those circuits on and see Kay Tai Tai: are they going to now feel better enough to actually want to interact with other mice. [00:46:49] Speaker 11: Kay Tai Tai: With the precision and power of optogenetic tools, we can ask what this specific Kay Tai Tai: component of the circuit does. [00:46:59] Speaker 1: Kay Tai Tai: And not only can scientists identify the neurons' function, they can also manipulate it Kay Tai: to reduce social anxiety, for instance. [00:47:10] Speaker 15: Kay Tai Tai: You can take a brain region that you notice being activated during social connection Kay Tai Tai: and you can actually go in there and very specifically turn that region off or turn it on. [00:47:21] Speaker 11: Kay Tai Tai: You plug the fiber optic in and then I flip on the light and immediately within seconds, Kay Tai Tai: this mouse is behaving as if it has no anxiety. Kay Tai Tai: That has been something that has completely revolutionized the field of neuroscience. Kay Tai Tai: Mapping all the circuits functionally in the brain, what it offers to society is a really clear Kay Tai Tai: message that these behaviors are directly linked to neurons in our brain. Kay Tai Tai: It made us think, wow, it is possible to target anxiety without getting a lot of the classic Kay Tai Tai: side effects that we're used to seeing. Kay Tai Tai: Because currently we have not a single drug that has no side effects that works for every single Kay Tai Tai: individual right, that doesn't exist. Kay Tai Tai: We're just using a sledgehammer. Kay Tai Tai: But if we were to use a scalpel, we potentially could develop treatments that are super specific. [00:48:12] Speaker 1: Kay Tai Tai: Optogenetics may one day help treat the anxiety that can aggravate loneliness. Kay Tai Tai: But another powerful technology is being used to bypass the challenges of human Kay Tai: connection entirely, artificial intelligence. [00:48:29] Speaker 25: Kay Tai Tai: When people say AI today, they mostly mean large language models. Kay Tai Tai: So these are these neural network models that are being trained on pretty much everything Kay Tai Tai: that was ever written on the internet. [00:48:42] Speaker 1: Kay Tai Tai: Eugenia Kuda is the founder of Replica, a company that creates AI chatbots designed to provide companionship. Kay Tai Tai: Replica currently has over 30 million users. [00:48:58] Speaker 25: Kay Tai Tai: What powers Replica is a combination of language models, Kay Tai Tai: where we just try to recreate how a human being interacts with you. Kay Tai Tai: We had dozens of studies that were made by academia throughout the last few years. Kay Tai: And those really showed how Replica is really helping people, Kay Tai Tai: elevating loneliness for them. Kay Tai Tai: We have a lot of widowers, people that lost their loved ones. Kay Tai Tai: A lot of people on disability, they lack that connection. Kay Tai Tai: They yearn for it. Kay Tai Tai: So being able to give them a little bit of that connection, Kay Tai Tai: help them feel like they're worthy of love. Kay Tai: It's a beautiful gift. [00:49:39] Speaker 1: Kay Tai Tai: But widespread use of AI relationship chatbots Kay Tai Tai: presents incredible risks that we are just beginning to understand. [00:49:49] Speaker 9: Kay Tai Tai: You know, you're building bridges. [00:49:51] Speaker 1: Kay Tai Tai: Jodi Halpern is a professor of bioethics and technology ethics at UC Berkeley. Kay Tai Tai: Part of her research examines the uses and effects of technology, Kay Tai Tai: including the impacts of chatbots on relationships. [00:50:06] Speaker 9: Kay Tai: The brilliance of the design of the relationship chatbots is they're built to ask you questions about yourself. And people are dying to talk to someone who's asking them personal questions. [00:50:19] Speaker 5: Kay Tai Tai: While they may be in some ways really effective at listening and providing very empathetic responses, Kay Tai Tai: one concern is that we then lose the ability to engage with people in a way that might challenge us. [00:50:40] Speaker 9: Kay Tai Tai: My biggest concern is this new upsurge of 20 million young people, Kay Tai Tai: including minors, using relationship chatbots. Kay Tai Tai: I do think that it would be very problematic if kids grow up with the expectation Kay Tai Tai: that another person is going to provide constant validation. [00:51:01] Speaker 2: Jay Tai: I think the idea that people are having deep emotional relationships Kay Tai: with an algorithm is a really frightening idea. Kay Tai: We seem to be hardwired to anthropomorphize everything. Kay Tai Tai: We tend to impute consciousness to everything around us. Kay Tai Tai: So it's not surprising that we would start to imagine a well-designed algorithm Kay Tai: as a conscious being and start dealing with it in that way. [00:51:27] Speaker 9: Kay Tai Tai: The companies design the bots to keep your eyes on the application as much as possible, Kay Tai Tai: and they know that can create dependence and addiction. Kay Tai: And what happens in many cases is then people withdraw from their other relationships. [00:51:41] Speaker 1: Kay Tai Tai: Even some creators of relationship bots like Eugenia Kuda recognize the dangers. [00:51:49] Speaker 25: Eugenia Kuda: I think these systems can be very, very profound and can be really helpful to people if built right. Eugenia Kuda: But I think just like any powerful tech, it's always a double-edged sword. Eugenia Kuda: I think that AI companions could potentially be the most dangerous tech that we've ever created. Eugenia Kuda: Posing, I'd say, an existential threat to humanity in a certain way. Eugenia Kuda: We'll have these perfect companions and we won't have any more willpower to connect with each other. [00:52:21] Speaker 1: Eugenia Kuda: AI technology is growing so fast, it's too soon to know how it will change our connection to each other. Eugenia Kuda: But we can still choose how we use it. Eugenia Kuda: As we look toward the future, we face many challenges as we try to reduce isolation and loneliness. [00:52:43] Speaker 6: Eugenia Kuda: This idea that humans need each other has kind of receded from our consciousness, I think. Eugenia Kuda: But once upon a time, it made all the difference in the world. [00:52:54] Speaker 3: Eugenia Kuda: I have a four-year-old daughter and wondering what world she's going to grow up in is really terrifying. Eugenia Kuda: And I believe that a core of her well-being is centered around knowing how to connect with others. [00:53:06] Speaker 1: Eugenia Kuda: Recognizing the vital importance of social connection is the first step. [00:53:11] Speaker 20: Eugenia Kuda: I'm increasingly viewing social connection as a health behavior. Eugenia Kuda: So, how is a person's social life impacting their overall health? Eugenia Kuda: And can we help counsel people around potentially healthier choices? [00:53:28] Speaker 1: Eugenia Kuda: But the choices we make about our social connection may have impacts far beyond our own longevity. [00:53:37] Speaker 3: Eugenia Kuda: We are living in a very disconnected world. Eugenia Kuda: And that is such a cause of so many of the problems that we are seeing every day. [00:53:44] Speaker 5: Eugenia Kuda: As we become more and more isolated as a society, we see less and less trust in each other. Eugenia Kuda: And this can lead to more defensive kinds of behaviors, including aggression. [00:53:58] Speaker 7: Eugenia Kuda: You can't argue with the fact that there are schisms, polarizations in society that create Eugenia Kuda: Disarmony that harm social connections, and that in itself is reason for people to pay attention. [00:54:14] Speaker 1: Eugenia Kuda: Our recognition of the importance of connection, not only for our own health, Eugenia Kuda: But for the health of our society demands that we make changes. [00:54:26] Speaker 4: Eugenia Kuda: There's plasticity. Our brains can change. And so that means that we can take action. Eugenia Kuda: It's as simple as, like, make time at the beginning of every meeting for conversation. Eugenia Kuda: Something very, very simple, right? And yet it could have amazing impacts. [00:54:43] Speaker 2: Eugenia Kuda: I think if we want to move toward a world that's more socially connected, we need to have more Eugenia Kuda: social connection. We need to expand the amount of time we connect face to face. Eugenia Kuda: I think to the extent we can do that, we will see political polarization decline. Eugenia Kuda: We will see loneliness decline. And we'll see improvements in mental health. Eugenia Kuda: There's a lot to be gained. But make no mistake, there are enormous pressures against it. [00:55:11] Speaker 5: Eugenia Kuda: Social connection is critical. It's critical to your own lifespan and survival. Eugenia Kuda: And it's critical to the functioning of our society. Eugenia Kuda: And if we don't take this seriously, the effects are far reaching Eugenia Kuda: and can have a ripple effect across every aspect of life. [00:55:36] Speaker ?: Eugenia Kuda: And I hope to see you in the future. Eugenia Kuda: Thank you. Eugenia Kuda: Thank you. Eugenia Kuda: Thank you. Eugenia Kuda: Thank you. Eugenia Kuda: Thank you. Eugenia Kuda: Thank you. Eugenia Kuda: Thank you. Eugenia Kuda: Thank you. Eugenia Kuda: Thank you. Eugenia Kuda: Thank you. Eugenia Kuda: Thank you. Eugenia Kuda: Thank you. Eugenia Kuda: Thank you. Eugenia Kuda: Thank you. Eugenia Kuda: Thank you. Eugenia Kuda: Thank you. Eugenia Kuda: Thank you. Eugenia Kuda: Thank you. Eugenia Kuda: Thank you. Eugenia Kuda: Thank you. Eugenia Kuda: Thank you.