After months of COVID-related isolation or even living on your own, you may begin to feel like your brain is becoming rewired. You may talk to yourself more often or find your dreams are more vivid.
It’s not just your imagination.
Dr. Nathan Spreng, director of the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition at the Montreal Neurological Institute, and a team of researchers have found that parts of your brain “default” to richer imagery and reminiscence after being cut off from typical day-to-day stimuli. This largest study of its type shines a spotlight on why seniors who are isolated tend to fall prey to higher rates of dementia.
For years, doctors have recorded the devastating effects of loneliness on physical health. People who live alone don’t eat as well and are far less active. They have fewer enriching social connections as well, leading the United Kingdom to declare in 2018 that loneliness would be the next traumatic health crisis and assigning a cabinet minister to deal with the issue.
Little did they know that an impending pandemic would escalate the isolation of millions of people and accelerate the problems associated with losing vital social and work connections.
Spreng and his team hope that their research will spur other government leaders to factor social life into public health initiatives more in the future. The study shows radical changes to the human brain when denied conversation and other social supports.
The Montreal study relied on the UK BioBank’s collection of patient information from hundreds of thousands of British volunteers, of whom close to 40,000 people consented to brain imaging. Previous studies on loneliness drew insights from samples of, at most, 700 adults.
Of the people in the UK database, 13 percent said they often feel lonely. The Spreng team discovered these individuals have a unique neurological fingerprint with more dense gray matter and tighter networks that mean more communication within the brain rather than with external sources. One of the signs was thicker bundles of fornix fibers, a C-shaped bundle of nerve fibers in the brain that play a key role in cognition and episodic memory recall.
Previous studies have suggested that lonely people are cut off because they are not exposed to conversations and feel negative emotions from their isolation. However, this latest research shows they are creating their own internal worlds built on memories and hypothetical conversations. Those patterns are rewiring their brains to create richer imagined worlds.
However, it could also be the reverse: that people with denser fornix fiber networks could be more likely to create these internal worlds, leaving little incentive to seek external stimulation. There is a link between the physical attribute and the behavior, regardless of which is causing which.
There are additional studies on loneliness that are gaining new attention during the pandemic’s mental-health fallout, including one about how astronauts cope in isolation while on space missions. The next steps would be studying groups that are cut off from usual social channels due to a health issue if they consent to do so.
The Spreng study has mapped out brain pathways that will benefit other teams of researchers with an interest in loneliness and its impact on dementia. Given the skyrocketing rates of this disease, it does give credence to investing in programs that target isolated seniors and provides mental and social stimulation to them. After all, Alzheimer’s disease also targets the default network in the brain, suggesting that treating one issue could prevent the other.
Watch for new research on this topic. And make sure you get out and get some social time. Your brain will thank you.
References:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/amp/canada/article-what-does-a-lonely-brain-look-like-study-offers-new-answers/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41526-020-00122-8
