Susan Pinker

If intimate face-to-face contact is protective—girding our cardiovascular and immunological systems and even raising our lifetime IQ levels—loneliness has the opposite effect. Feeling lonely exaggerates the inflammation and reactivity to stress that are linked to heart disease while interfering with our ability to retain facts and solve problems, according to work by the British epidemiologist Andrew Step

THE SCIENCE
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the kind of social contact we need to thrive.