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I call bullshit. I stopped reading at the setup: "the researchers had 40 socially-connected healthy human adults spend 10 hours (9am to 7pm) alone, with no soci

I call bullshit. I stopped reading at the setup: "the researchers had 40 socially-connected healthy human adults spend 10 hours (9am to 7pm) alone, with no social interaction and no other social stimulation (e.g., twitter, email, reading fiction)." All they did was deprive them of social media. I think it's well known by now that this is a source of dopamin.

ddeck 6y ago
Additionally, they also forced them to get up in the early morning on the social isolation day, locked them in an unfamiliar room, and gave them close to nothing to do: On the day of the isolation session, participants arrived at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT building 46, at 8.15am...Subsequently, participants gave their phones and laptops to the experimenter and were guided to a room containing an armchair, a desk and office chair, and a fridge with a selection of food, snacks and beverages. Participants remained in that room from 9am until 7pm. [1] It's not clear to me why reading material was withheld. It seems to make it harder to draw conclusions regarding the social isolation aspect. For the fasting session, they only had to report for the 7pm fMRI session. It strikes me that the type of people with time to participate in an experiment like this likely correlates with people that get up later than 6-7am each morning (as would have been required for the isolation session), but it seems there wasn't any accounting for possible sleep deprivation effects. [1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.25.006643v2.full.pdf https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.25.006643v2....