What he saw there changed his life.
It was as though the subjects were under mortal assault by a disease the disease of loneliness.
“The impact at the societal level it really kind of shocked me, he says.
As an academic, he was used to publishing findings that interest scientists but not the general public.
So that led me to respect loneliness as a topic and a foe, Cole adds.
Many of the women and men studying loneliness express a similar sense of mission about their research.
There is a human need to be embedded, connected,integrated in a social internet, she notes.
The research into those impacts has produced a wave of headlines.
Every day it seems scientists discover more ways in which loneliness can attack our bodies and shorten our lives.
The Research is alarming, but for most of us, it is also confusing.
How can an abstract emotion shorten a life?
How do we even define a word that provokes so many meanings in so many different circumstances?
Most of us are intimately familiar with only one kind of loneliness: our own.
Some experts find its face in statistics; others, in brain scans.
Still others see it in the behavioral patterns of the people who suffer from it.
Together, those in the field deploy a complex battery of methods.
What does it mean to be lonely?
Is it loneliness specifically, or is it people becoming more socially disconnected in a variety of ways?
Until recently, she adds, data on loneliness in and of itself was scarce.
We know that lacking social connection puts us at greater health risk.
Objective factors, such as living arrangements, may be equally important.
Simply living alone or in an isolated place may bejust as harmful to your health as feeling lonely.
