Friends feed brains

It’s easy to take friends for granted. By their nature they are your friend because you go well together and don’t have to work too hard at the relationship. Like any living thing though, a friendship reflects the effort that you put into nurturing it. The really wonderful thing about friendship is that what you get back from it far exceeds what you put into it. That goes even to the biological level. New research, for instance, has shown that isolation does some pretty damaging things to your nervous system and brain.

This study was done on mice and previous research has shown that isolation causes changes in behaviour as well as changes in the structure of neurons. In this study, however, isolation was found to have a further effect not previously known.

The researchers found that isolated mice had lower levels of myelin forming cells called oligodendrocytes in the prefrontal cortex of the brain. Without myelin, nerve signals cannot travel and diseases like multiple sclerosis (MS) result. The prefrontal cortex is involved in complex emotional and cognitive behaviour, so loss of myelin production in this area of the brain could result in reduced “plasticity” in the brain. This means that the capability to grow and change could be significantly reduced.

Importantly, when the mice were reintroduced to the social group after four weeks the changes reversed.

What this shows is that environmental factors can affect how your brain operates at a cellular level. In this case the environment is people (or “others” be they mice or men) and it reinforces how important being part of something and connected to others is for your own health and wellbeing.

Pay attention to your friends and community; you don’t do that for what it is does for you, but what it does for you is real and powerful.