If you are alone, you are wrong. Find a friend- Part II

“If you are alone, you are wrong”. These sage words have stuck with me as I have grown both in my experience on the track and elsewhere in life, like in lab. This might be a surprising revelation given the standard stereotype of the socially awkward scientist toiling away at the lab bench with only their pipette for company. But like derby, science is a team sport. In fact, you will almost never see a published experiment with a single author who worked alone on the project. Beyond the obvious safety concerns of working alone in a lab with dangerous chemicals (and safety is our number one priority), science is a team sport because from design to dissemination, experiments are complicated processes. For example, publications that represent a single study often have several components such as observations made in vivo (living organisms such as rodents) combined with assessments made from tissues post-mortem (after death) and teams of people are often involved in the execution of distinct parts. Further, the highest impact articles, the ones that describe an integrated series of studies that utilize multiple models and scientific techniques, can often have more than ten authors each of whom used their unique skill set to contribute to the advancement of the research line. And the teamwork does not end with the submission of the paper for publication. Even the evaluation of that work’s quality is done by a team of experts in the field. In my own research, I am mentored by a panel of eminent scientists who guide me in the pursuit of my scientific questions and I am supported by a small team of trainees who help me execute studies to answer those questions. The more minds are on a problem the more effectively it gets solved. So if you are alone, you are not only wrong, you are ineffective and for a scientist that is absolutely awful.

The members of one of the first neuroscience labs I worked in, the Bimonte-Nelson Memory and Aging Lab at Arizona State University (circa 2006-7).

Our mental health is stronger when we are together too. A lot can be said of the suffering caused by mental health disorders like major depression. Over time, the stresses that instigate them foster a constant sense of sadness, fear, guilt and hopelessness that affects all sorts of domains in a person’s life from their work productivity to the quality of their relationships to the enjoyment of life’s basic pleasures. I can always tell when I am under stress because chocolate chip cookies, my absolute favorite, just don’t taste as good. But, one thing about these disorders that I find especially insidious is that their symptoms not only debilitate those who suffer from them, they also rob their victims of the power to attenuate the negative effects through isolation.

Social isolation among depressed patients is incredibly common and also incredibly hard to treat with medicine since social behavior is an extremely complicated process (Kupferberg et al., 2016, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews; Porcelli et al., 2019, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews). These complex interactions get confusing enough to make heads spin so I break it down to the basics, please also remember that I am grossly oversimplifying. There are some excellent scientists doing excellent work to comprehensively quantify these processes and I will direct you here, here, and here for more detailed information.

Social behavior is governed by several neural networks or groupings of neurons that encompass no fewer than 5 brain regions and engage multiple neurotransmitter systems (chemicals that change the responses between neurons). The aversion network is especially important in depression. Researchers have noted that depressed patients have reduced brain activity in the nucleus accumbens, a region near the front of the brain that is important for encoding whether something is rewarding. This means that for depressed people, interactions with friends are less enjoyable than they are for a non-afflicted person. At the same time, depressed people have a higher sensitivity to the emotional pain caused by social rejection. We think this is caused (at least in part) by an overactive amygdala, a pivot point for several neural networks involved in social behavior and the brain region chiefly attributed with processing fearful response. And that is to say nothing of the numerous brain regions (the insula, the prefrontal cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex, etc) that process related yet distinct information about social interaction and whose activity can control activity in both the nucleus accumbens and the amygdala. Disruption in even one of these areas can impact the functioning of the whole system. And what does this disruption do? It causes a deep fear of rejection, anger, and social withdrawal (to name a few). No pill currently available can fix all that. So what is a depressed person to do?

Selected publications (Kupferberg et al., 2016, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews; Porcelli et al., 2019, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews) that review how depression, the brain, and social withdrawal interact. Note that each of these articles is authored by several people who each intellectually contributed to its publication in important ways.

We know that social connectedness is a key feature of resilience. At the level of the brain, the signaling molecule at the center of social interactions is oxytocin and its role in pair bonding is undisputed. It is released in excessive quantities in both mother and child at the time of birth. Prarie voles, who mate for life, have a high density of receptors for it. And it is a key molecule in the social affiliation neural network, capable of controlling the activity of many of the brain regions disruption by depression that I mentioned above. In fact, oxytocin inhibits the amygdala to reduce arousal (neural alertness for threats), decrease stress, and produce a calmed state.

And if you are feeling depressed, you can calm your overactive aversion network by taking action and putting in some face-time with loved ones. For me, social support is an integral component of my own self-care regimen. Whenever I sense building anxiety inside myself, I take action to get those oxytocin juices flowing. I send a few texts to far-away family, take a walk to a colleague’s office for a quick chat, or schedule a dinner date with a close friend. Even social connectedness in the metaphysical sense can help and I often will make small donations to charities in moments of stress. Even though you might not want to, even though it will feel effortful, being socially connected is one of the best ways to build your resilience to the socially isolating consequences of depression. So if you find yourself alone, you are wrong; find your friends.