Recent comments in /f/askscience

electric_ionland t1_j85pd41 wrote

Reply to comment by RareBeautyEtsy in What are some of the mechanisms behind why long term physical inactivity and social isolation leads to chronic health diseases? by [deleted]

Yes in that case we are talking about AI programs. The most well known at the moment is OpenAI Chat GPT. They produce very realistic sounding answers but those are often innacurate or straight up made up. Spotting them is not always easy but they often use the same writing style where they will restate the question in the first sentence. They use a lot of connecting adverbes like "however", "similarly", "therefore" or "overall". They will often use passive voice and very general sentences like "It is well established that...". The main thing is that after you see a few of them you can recognize the style.

7

ThrowAwayIguess2424 t1_j85b49j wrote

Reply to comment by [deleted] in What are some of the mechanisms behind why long term physical inactivity and social isolation leads to chronic health diseases? by [deleted]

Love the response, and I’ll add another point that’s become more emphasized in emotional/social neuroscience over the past decade

That is that cognitive functions, like all forms of brain functions, requires use to keep the underlying neural architecture in tact and “up to par”. Neurons are energy sinks, and all across microscale (cellular), mesoscale (cortical columns, maybe think of as a type of local circuit) and macroscale (whole brain regions) levels, our neural systems consequentially rely on regular use of neural functions to decide when the energy investment is worthwhile. It is a use it or lose it principle

Cognitive functions can suffer from this fact. Cognition is highly complex, so it’s not as easy to study lack of use and cognitive ability changes as it is say lack of use of an arm and associated sensorimotor changes (there are some cool studies where they cast someone’s arm and get longitudinal brain scans), but the principle seems to persist

The final point to tie this to your question is that cognition is inherently a social and emotional function. For the longest time we acted as if these were separate brain phenomenon, but emotion is so integrated into cognitive circuits that they are no longer thought of as wholly independent (or “modular”) functions. I highly recommend Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions are Made for more on this in the context of emotion and cognition, or Luiz Pessoa’s The Entangled Brain for a whole-brain view on distributed functions

Anyway, social isolation leads to the obvious of not engaging in certain cognitive functions on the regular. But we also experience emotional disturbances in social isolation, which again, integrate directly to cognitive functions.

I’m super interested in this principle because my research in on Alzheimer’s, and a fascinating (albeit tragic) phenomenon is how quickly dementia and even mild cognitive impairment can accelerate once social isolation is entered. Often this happens as demented individuals are transferred into nursing homes. This transition is associated with all sorts of health decline, but many researchers think the social isolation and associated behavioral issues light the fire for accelerated physical and cognitive decline in such scenarios. This is of course why strong community engagement programs are important from anything like nursing, all the way up to independent living homes, is crucial

8

horyo t1_j859qd7 wrote

Reply to comment by Terrorfrodo in What are some of the mechanisms behind why long term physical inactivity and social isolation leads to chronic health diseases? by [deleted]

It's possible that he's isolated not just socially but also from dependence on civilization which creates physical demand for him to procure his own food and to handle the elements.

I think social isolation that's pathologic and leads to decreased activity is worsened by the convenience of civilization because then it becomes easier to avoid activity while also amassing caloric intake.

13