Singularity cake, is socialization a basic human need?

Society often shows a contradictory duality, which is both modern and traditional, bustling but extremely lonely. Restaurants and bars are crowded, but when you get closer, you will find that most of the diners in them are eating alone. The same is true in the street, no matter when, you can always find tired white-collar workers in the street. (Photographer Myka Allen, Hidden People: Those Who Evaporate from Society)

This is a sentence mentioned in an article I read on Singularity Cake not long ago describing Japanese "hermits", who have been shut up at home for months, years or even decades, without working or socializing.

Although I don't know if there are many such phenomena in China, this passage by photographer Myka Alan makes Singularity Cake very insightful. We always say that "people are gregarious animals" and socializing is a normal need for survival, but there are more and more young people around Singularity Cake who don't like socializing and prefer to be "isolated" from the crowd and society to the greatest extent. What's wrong with this?

In the latest research published in Cell [1], the team of Professor David J anderson of California Institute of Technology found that the lack of social interaction for a period of time will increase the level of an active substance in the brain, affecting many areas of the brain and neural pathways. In mice, the lack of social interaction for two weeks makes them more aggressive, more sensitive to environmental stimuli or threats, but also more "lazy". (Ah, this image, Singularity Cake can't help but make up an otaku ...) The secretion mechanism of this substance is evolutionarily conservative and exists in the human brain.

Professor david andersen.

Professor Anderson, 62, is a veteran in the field of neuroscience. In 2007, he was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is currently the director of the Institute of Neuroscience in Qian Qian, Chen Tianqiao, California Institute of Technology and a researcher at Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Do you know, Chen Tianqiao? At the end of 20 16, the founder of Shanda Network donated1.1.50 billion dollars to the California Institute of Technology to establish the Chen Tianqiao Lianqian Institute of Neuroscience. At that time, it also caused some war of words, but it is true that people in the industry think that the combination of "Neuroscience+California Institute of Technology +David J. Anderson" is still worth investing. If you are interested, you can search it.

Professor Anderson's research group has been devoted to understanding the structure and dynamic characteristics of neural pathways related to emotional behavior in the brain in recent years. A few years ago, when they studied the aggressive behavior of animals, they found that the aggression of isolated fruit flies would be enhanced, and the expression of hundreds of genes in the brains of these fruit flies was obviously different [2]. Later, they found that an active substance called tachykinin at least partially increased the aggression of Drosophila and had no effect on courtship behavior [3] (as expected, nothing can delay finding a partner).

However, the head of the fruit fly is very small, just a little big. Although it can produce tachykinin in the brain like human beings, it is an insect after all, which is far from human beings, so researchers focus on mice that are mammals like human beings.