1

1. Mind the gap! The seduction of the synapse

Natasha Mitchell: Were a bit biased when it comes to brain cells; they get
most of our attention dont they. Its all about your grey matter. But what about
the space between your brain cells, the so-called synapses. Now they really
mean business.
Today on All in the Mind a grab-bag of molecular yarns each of which in some
way point to the past, the present and possible future for your brain and the
scientists who investigate it. Hey, Natasha Mitchell joining you on ABC Radio
National.
Can I get you, Seth Grant, to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation: how many
synapses do you think youve got?
Seth Grant: Well it has been said that the number of synapses in the human
brain is about a million billion. But something weve discovered about the
molecular composition of the synapses is that they have over 1,000 different
proteins within this and we have done a sort of a back-of-the-envelope
calculation about the computational power of the human brain based on what we
know about the molecular circuits and these neuronal circuits. And weve come
up with this very simple estimate and it is that one human brain is more powerful
than all computers on the internet put together times 100.
Natasha Mitchell: I was just thinking that as a scientist, contemplating the
prospect of trying to understand a million billion synapses must surely keep you
awake at night?
Seth Grant: Well its a fabulous puzzle. The thing that were very interested in
now is its not only that there is a million billion synapses but we think that its
possible that all of those million billion synapses are actually a little bit different
to one another, and we think this could be extremely important for how the brain
works and thats something were looking into now.
Natasha Mitchell: Well that will take you a million billion lifetimes. But well do
our best today in any case. Professor Seth Grant is a leading molecular
neuroscientist, he originally trained in Australia and now heads up the Genes to
Cognition research program at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge.
Theyre concerned with how genes affect and control how we behave.
Seth Grant: But theres a certain twist to the story. Its not just that were
interested in genes and behaviour, were interested in all the things in between
which means the brain, its cells, how they fire, their neural activity and their
biochemistry and all the chemical reactions that go on. Thats why they call it
'genes to cognition' because were trying to fill in the gaps. Lots of different
disciplines and skills brought together to focus in on a set of molecules in the
synapses of the nervous system.
Natasha Mitchell: Right, the synapse. People are well familiar with brain cells
but the brain is populated by cells called neuronsbut perhaps the connections,
the spaces between those cells and more mysterious and more abstract theyre
called synapses what are they?

2
Seth Grant: Synapses are quite simply the junctions or the connections
between nerve cells. These really are the most important feature of the nervous
system because every nerve cell has hundreds or perhaps even thousands of
these synapses allowing each cell to connect to hundreds and thousands of other
nerve cells. And its in synapses where information is transmitted between nerve
cells and its also where information is processed and in particular thats where
learning and memory seems to happen.
Natasha Mitchell: Its interesting isnt it though, if you think of the sort of
design concept of negative space, youd sort of think well its the cells that
matter. But what were saying, well actually the spaces between those cells
matter if not as much perhaps more?
Seth Grant: I would say definitely more. And the reason everybody thinks cells
are important is because they are just so easy to see. But even for 100 years
neuro anatomists have seen synapses between nerve cells but its only in very
recent years that molecular biologists and biochemists have actually been able
to find out what are the molecules inside synapses and when you do that you
discover all sorts of extraordinary things about the brain.
Natasha Mitchell: Youve heard of the human genome project well now theres
the Human Connectome Project too; this is an effort to map the vast network of
connections in the brain. Brain cells dont actually make physical contact with
each other instead they connect and communicate across a bridge of sorts and it
was the neuro physiologist and Nobel Laureate Sir Charles Scott Sherrington who
first coined the term for this bridge synapse.
Reading: It seems therefore likely that the nexus between neuron and neuron in
the reflex arc and this must be an important element in intercellular conduction.
In view therefore of the probable importance physiologically it is convenient to
have a term the term introduced has been synapse. Sir Charles Scott
Sherrington 1897.
Natasha Mitchell: Seth, if we sat on a sort of cliff-face of a neuron and we
peered across the synapse what would we see?
Seth Grant: If you were looking at a synapse and imagining yourself down
inside the synapse amongst all of the molecules you would see what you might
call molecular machines, large sets of proteins the sort of components which
assembled together make these large molecular machines. But what is the
extraordinary thing about these molecular machines which would look like large
sort of blobs of molecules is that theyre actually like computers, theyre
information processors, they handle all of the information that comes from the
animals environment, they convert it into chemical signals and they process that
information in very complex and specialised ways. Everything we hear, see,
taste, touch and smell is converted into these kinds of digital electrical codes and
the synapse will pass that information from one nerve cell to the next, which
then passes it to another nerve cell and the next and in that way the information
is transported around the nervous system. But the specialised thing about the
synapses is they dont just transmit the information, they listen to the
information sort of like the spy agency that listens to your phone calls, it listens
to that information as it goes past. And then responds and does things with it
and one of the most extraordinary and important things it does it allows that

3
information to be written down and stored in the form of memories. And this is
really a key function which synapses do.
Natasha Mitchell: So youre alluding to the key role that synapses play. Now
you say 'sinapses' and I say synapses.
Seth Grant: Both 'sinapses' and synapses. I say both of them myself.
Natasha Mitchell: Its a bit like tomato and tomato, potato and potato?
Seth Grant: Exactly.
Natasha Mitchell: People are obsessed actually with brain plasticity, this idea
that the brain is much more malleable than we originally thought and I guess
synapses are at the heart of our brains capacity to be plastic, arent they?
Seth Grant: Right. Synapses are absolutely vital in all aspects of plasticity in the
environment whether it be through sort of mental exercise and brain games, or
whether it be learning things in school, or even actually slightly more dangerous
things such as drug addiction and other sorts of abnormal behaviours. And what
the synapse does...
Natasha Mitchell: So abnormal theyre normal I suspect, but anyway...
Seth Grant: Well actually addiction and drug addiction unfortunately is a side
effect of our learning and memory mechanisms because the drugs and their
actions act.upon the very mechanisms of learning and memory, and thats why
people repeatedly use drugs. Which is another good reason to explain why its
important to understand the mechanisms of learning and memory because that
is one of very many different medically important aspects of it. So the synapses
is absolutely central in plasticity and how our brain changes and responds to the
environment and things that we do.
And thats because the information comes into the synapse and it then changes
the chemistry of the nerve cell, and as a result the nerve cells change in their
properties. They can become more excitable, they can even grow larger, they
can develop more contacts and thats the consequences of this plasticity.
Natasha Mitchell: You referred to electrical pulses bridging the gap between
nerve cells, so jumping across the synapse, but theres also a sort of chemical
soup there too, isnt there when we think of neuro transmitters, the brain
chemicals that allow for cellular communication in the brain?
Seth Grant: Well thats right, in fact the brain is all about the chemistry and it
is, as far as electrical transmission and chemical transmission of information is
concerned, its at synapses where the electrical information is turned into
chemical information, the chemicals are squirted across the synaptic cleft. These
are called neuro transmitters and those neuro transmitters then stimulate and
activate the electrical activity in the next nerve cell.
Natasha Mitchell: Taking stock then: this all gets to the heart of that popular
expression you might have heard oodles of times, neurons that fire together wire
together. So our brain converts all the information we sense about the world into
patterns of neural activity propelled across neurons and synapses by electrical
and chemical gradients. And the more a synapse is rehearsed or exercised in this

4
way the stronger and more efficient the connection thats made between
adjacent brain cells and the more likely they are to fire together. So a specific
memory might be a whole pattern of specific neurons firing together and primed.
They then wire together to make that memory. All this is a measure of whats
called synaptic strength, and its thought to be what allows you to learn and lay
down new memories and recall them later on. So take us back a billion years,
you entertain the possibility of a sort of proto synapsewhat organism would
that have been in, do you think, and why?
Seth Grant: Well over a billion years ago the proto synapse, which is a set of
molecules which we have in the synapses of modern humans today, and indeed
all other animals but this ancestral set of proteins would have been in unicellular,
simple cell animals that even today theres vast numbers of them in the
environment, and they can also be in fungi such as yeast and other simple
organisms of that kind. But theres also amoebas and other kinds of specialised
animals called choanoflagellates, these sorts of single cell organism swimming
around in ponds, they have this proto-synaptic machinery. And the extraordinary
thing about this machinery, it's used by these simple animals to respond and
adapt to their environment. It allows them to know whats going on in the outside
world and allows them to change their behaviour in response to changes in the
environment. Thats a tremendously exciting thing because that is precisely what
synapses in humans are doing. Before there was any multi-cellular organisms
such as the first ones that came along like sponges it was even before, and this
is really a striking thing, it was before there were any nerve cells or any brains.
We think of brains as being full of nerve cells with all of their electrical activity,
but what Ive just told you is that the core machinery in nerve cells actually
evolved before those cells were ever found in any organism.
Natasha Mitchell: Could it be that in fact the synapse becoming complex as
youve demonstrated was what allowed the brain to become complex?
Seth Grant: I think thats exactly whats happened. One of the most surprising
findings were made when we were studying the synapses of mammals, humans
and mice for example was that there was over 1,000 different proteins that you
could find in those synapses. But if you then look in insects and various types of
invertebrates there are far fewer proteins and then if you go back into the more
distant and ancient past into those uni cellular organisms, those single cells sort
of protozoa like organisms they even have fewer proteins again.
We found that the evolution of those proteins preceded the evolution of the large
brains that we have, those brains that have frontal cortex, hippocampus,
cerebellum, all of these bits and pieces of the human and mammalian brain, they
evolved after this large set of proteins. And we found a very interesting
connection between these two events. The evolution of these proteins allowed
these different parts of the brain to become specialised and by understanding
the molecular evolution of the synapse we can now understand what makes
those synapses in different parts of the brain different as well as their common
ancestry.
Natasha Mitchell: Youre thinking deeply about the deep history of the synapse,
have you Seth Grant contemplated the deep future of the synapse? What might
it look like one day henceforth?

5
Seth Grant: The synapse is continuing to evolve in humans and indeed in all
other animals and what will determine its shape and its form will not just be the
mutations but it will be the selective pressure that comes from our environment.
In the case of humans, the human population now is so vast that theres all sorts
of different new mutations arising in the synapse. This is going to be very
interesting from the point of view of a medical situation, we will discover people
with new mutations, with new intellectual capacities. Of course there will be
people with many medical disorders so who knows what sort of new people will
arise as a result of mutations in the synapse. Hopefully they will make a great
contribution to our society.
Natasha Mitchell: So with that we enter the twilight zone. But you also
entertain the possibility that the fact that we have such complex synapses with
so many proteins attached to them means that that complexity comes at a price
for us doesnt it?
Seth Grant: Yeah, a very interesting question because the molecular complexity
that mammals have in their molecules that make up their synapses on one hand
have been extremely beneficialand they have been beneficial by giving those
animals a diverse repertoire of behaviours. Different aspects of cognition,
different types of learning and memory, the ability to do wonderful and
extraordinary things but the price is that when there is a DNA mutation in those
genes those can result in mental illnesses or neurological conditions and we have
very carefully looked at this in the context of human synapse proteins and genes
and we have found that those genes are responsible for more than 100 different
brain disease which inflict both children and adults.
Natasha Mitchell: So what sorts of brain diseasesand obviously with most
brain diseases there are many genes, a sort of cascade of genes involved, its no
singular gene necessarily?
Seth Grant: Many and varied are those diseases. Firstly there is a very severe
early onset childhood epilepsies, forms of mental retardation, in older individuals
theyre responsible for various autism, schizophrenia and in older individuals
again some of the common diseases that are involved are Parkinsons and
Alzheimers. The proteins that form the parts of the synapse are responsible for
more brain diseases than any other set of brain proteins and the two principle
kinds of effects of mutations that affect the synapse are those that affect our
cognitive abilities, the ability to perceive, think, learn, remember and plan. And
the second area is motor functions, so there is a wide range of motor functions;
forms of spasticity, forms of mechanical speech impairments and many other
kinds like this.
Natasha Mitchell:Professor Seth Grant there doing some deep thinking on the
brain here on ABC Radio Nationals All in the Mind with me Natasha Mitchell. And
so from ancient history to the 21st century synapse and one thing its doing is its
going digital.
Geoff Goodhill: Well I originally started off in mathematics and physics and I got
interested in artificial intelligence building intelligent machines and from that I
got more and more fascinated by the beauty of biology and have many of the
problems which people have been struggling to solve from the computer science
perspective for many decades; like how you make a computer see the world,
how you make it understand language. And all those problems are solved so

6
effortlessly by the biological nervous system so I think we have an awful lot to
learn from studying that.
Natasha Mitchell: Biology as our inspiration.
Geoff Goodhill: Exactly.
Natasha Mitchell: Biology is great but its hard work trying to understand the
human brain by looking at its wetware so to speak. We need models of the mind
and the little brains of experimental mice dont quite cut it and monkey research
has its obvious difficulties. So scientists are turning to mathematical and
computer models as well. Our brains, like computers, are information processers
after all.
And if we could come up with the perfect working model of all the connections in
a real brain we could use it to test and tweak our understanding of human
behaviour, of brain impairment, of ageing, of learning. Limitless possibilities.
Well Professor Geoff Goodhill is at the Queensland Brain Institute and the School
of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Queensland. Neural computing is
his gig.
Geoff Goodhill: Well neural computing is a very diverse area which spans many,
many different things. The aspect we are particularly interested in is building
theoretical models of the way the brain works and our particular interest is our
models of how the brain develops, how wiring forms during early life and how
wiring then changes in response to experience later in life.
Natasha Mitchell: There are billions of brain cells and not just brain cells,
everything else that goes with that. So were talking about an incredibly complex
feast to try and model.
Geoff Goodhill: One of the problems is nobody knows quite how to go about
that. So there is a wide diversity of approaches in the field about how we should
tackle that. So for instance at one extreme theres the Blue Brain Project based
in Switzerland. There the idea is that if you put a lot of artificial neurons together,
millions of artificial neurons together, and simulate all the details we know about
real neurons, which is a lot of detail, put them together and then the hope is that
they will by simulating that youll learn something about how the whole system
works.
Natasha Mitchell: And in some sense if you simulate it I guess their hope might
be that you end up with behaviours of the model that you could never have
anticipated just by modelling all those neurons and everything else that it might
produce a behaviour that is as complex and almost quantum like as the real
brain.
Geoff Goodhill: Thats exactly what the motivations are for that kind of
approach. On the other hand other people in the field are more sceptical about
that approach and one problem is that potentially you end up with systems
which you understand as little as you understand the real system and so you
havent really got anywhere. And so at the other extreme is approaches which
try to address much more of what the computations being performed are and
take their inspiration from what we understand about the nature of computation
in general. And so for instance one area with a big interface to understand neural

7
computation is called machine learning which is the science of understanding
how you make machines learn statistical structure about the world. And theres
been a very fruitful interaction between algorithms which have been developed
in an abstract sense as being good ways to learn about structure in the world
and what we know about real neurons and the way they make learning about
structure in the world.
Natasha Mitchell: So I imagine you can model the brain as a sort of networked
organ, a network of billions of brain cells but you can also bury right in to the
connection between just two brain cells in those billions. So at the level of what
we call the synapse, that connection, that space between two nerve cells.
Geoff Goodhill: Yes, so thats one of the huge challenges of neuroscience in
general so there are very, very detailed mathematical models about how single
cells work and there are models at the level of you know millions of neurons and
theres models of many levels in between as well. But at the moment it is very
hard to make the connections between those levels.
Natasha Mitchell: In some sense this is the 21 century synapse thats found its
way into the world of silicone, of binary computation.
Geoff Goodhill: Well thats right and one thing thats really exciting now is the
computing power available which allows us to test some of these computational
ideas in much more detail. I mean the history of understanding neurons in cells
actually goes back to the 1940s to one of the founders in the field of artificial
neural networks and of course they really didnt have the capability to run much
in terms of simulations back then. But since then you know with the doubling of
computing power every 18 months we are really in a whole new world now in
terms of the level of phenomena we can investigate.
Natasha Mitchell:Professor Geoff Goodhill. Big computing power to study the
very, very small molecular mechanics of the brain and the connections between
brain cells of so much interest because they produce the most marvellous talent
of all; that of thought. But even if we manage to gather all this beautiful data
about the brain, to model it using maths, turn it into a silicone brain even what
then? Datas great but making meaning from it all is hard work.
Huda Akil: Im Huda Akil I am a professor at the University of Michigan and I codirect a neuroscience institute called the Molecular and Behavioural
Neuroscience Institute and Im also a bench scientist interested in the
neurobiology of emotions from animal models to human including mood
disorders.
Natasha Mitchell: Huda and colleagues recently published a paper in the
journal Science really asking scientists to look at the bigger picture. The great
challenge they reckon is understanding the brains neural choreography that it is
the dance, not just the individual dancers or cells and synapses.
Huda Akil: I like the music analogy because it has a time and space. I like the
choreography analogy because it has a time and space component, because I
think the brain is about a combination of time and space, form and function and
that it can be destructed not only because something hurts it in a physical,
visible way like a lesion but also it messes up its timing. And many of the more
subtle kinds of brain disorders for example that affect mood or fine thought may
have to do with this integration, this choreography, this more subtle level of

8
analysis where the brain is having to keep track of multiple function in time, shift
years, reintegrate, retune itself. And I dont feel that we have captured that yet
very well and that its not easy to capture by studying one gene at a time or
even one cell at a time. We really need to start integrating information both in
terms of depth and breadth but also space and time.
Natasha Mitchell: Well thats beautiful. Thats as much a conceptual challenge,
isnt it, because in some sense science likes to probe the intricate and intimate
because thats a good place to start. When youve got 100 billion neurons to
investigate youve got to start somewhere.
Huda Akil: And the question is when have you reduced the problem so much
that you have lost its essence. So if you think that youre not understanding
emotion can a cell really ever represent an emotion? If the answer is no then
studying one cell at a time youre never going to understand emotion and in the
brain we have all the complexity thats all cell biology, all the genetics to deal
with and then we have this idea of emergent properties that emerge from the
interactions of actions. And we really dont even know how to begin to think
about that. I dont know that we have it in our brains to figure out how things go
from one type of existence to another type of existence. How we go from a
bunch of molecules and cells firing to a feeling, a thought, a vision, a perception.
I dont know that we can conceptualise that.
Natasha Mitchell: Theres an argument that in fact we dont have the sort of
consciousness that will help us actually understand the nature of consciousness
which some would argue is an emergent property of the brain too.
Huda Akil: Yes, I would argue that it is an emergent property of the brain and
that we are almost wired not to worry about the underlying mechanics of how we
see a beautiful flower. The job of the brain is to perceive the flower in its entirety
and perceive certain facets of it but not worry about the steps that led you there.
So we have blind spots and everything we do in neuroscience, all the
technologies that we use are ways to kind are almost prosthetic devices for our
brains and minds to try and get around these blind spots. But how far we push
that and what do we need to do at the interfaces of the gaps, you know to bring
things together so we achieve a depth of understanding even if we dont fully
comprehend that consciously we can still make it happen through for example
mathematical or modelling approaches.
Natasha Mitchell: Another thought experiment for you what could the brain of
the future, what might the brain of the future look like?
Huda Akil: I think it would take a long time to evolve the brain into something
different. You know I think a lot but some of it might be fine tuning, being able to
perceive process differently for example so I can imagine that some features that
we see now as almost aberrations like what certain autistic people do if it could
be put in a different context where its not so emotionally and cognitively costly
to the people, but some of these skills and talents could actually be integrated
with kind of easier function in the world.
Natasha Mitchell: They become an enhancement rather than a burden?
Huda Akil: Exactly, so you can think of it as almost an experiment that nature is
conducting that tries to change the way some aspects of the brain function. You
can see some value to it but its at a very high cost. So if you could keep the

9
value and remove the cost you might get smarter, more talented, more
imaginative, more integrated people.
Natasha Mitchell: What if we could pop a pill that did that? You know this is a
very provocative conversation thats happening around neuro enhancement now,
medical, I guess pharmaceutical enhancement.
Huda Akil: I dont know, theres something about me is conservative about that.
I feel like its very hard to change the brain without paying a price and I think
because part of my work is on drug abuse you can see that the first time an
animal takes cocaine its great fun for some animals at least but there is a price.
Im totally for people taking pills and drugs to fix something thats very painful
and causes them a lot of suffering to do it to just sort of...
Natasha Mitchell: Add value.
Huda Akil: Add value when its not necessarily needed when youre functioning
perfectly fine, I think the price is high.

Loneliness: breaking the taboo

Transcript
Natasha Mitchell: All in the Mind here on ABC Radio National, radio being one
of the great companions of course - Natasha Mitchell joining you. Today, lifting
the lid on loneliness.
Reading: It's because you're lonely she said very gently. The words hit me like a
slap. Although I should have seen her response coming and probably should
have been able to spot the source of the problem myself I was entirely shocked
and profoundly embarrassed. Everything about her statement was new and
unwelcome. I wasn't used to having anyone comment on my loneliness. I wasn't
used to hearing anyone name it as a problem in my life.
I'd seen Dr R for at least two years and although problems with loneliness had
surfaced during those years he'd never alluded to it. With Dr R I had been an
over-achieving lawyer who had a problem with depression. I liked the depression
scenario. I liked the way it left my personality out of the picture, the way it
seemed to keep attributes such as smart and successful intact.
Genevieve was saying something much more damaging and much more
threatening. Her comment made it clear that she saw the gaps in my personal
life and these were gaps I didn't want anyone seeing. Nobody knows I told myself
when I came home on a Friday evening to an empty apartment, or when I went
to bed on a Sunday night after having spent the weekend alone. It was
comforting to me that even if loneliness was emerging as a significant problem it
was at least a problem I was able to hide and hiding it felt crucial. Loneliness at

10
the start of the wired up 21st century was so totally nowhere, so crushingly
uncool.
Emily White: If you quit your job, I was a lawyer at the time, then I quit my job
in order to write and that inevitably leads to the very reasonable question of
what are you writing and for the first two years I just lied, I couldn't bring myself,
I'd been an environmental lawyer so I told people I was writing about
environmental issues and everyone believed that because it seemed kind of like
a logical progression.
When I finally did summon up enough courage to say I am writing a book about
loneliness you know people didn't know how to respond.
Natasha Mitchell: Emily White is a former environmental lawyer now Toronto
based writer and policy adviser. She's written a rather incredible and exposing
book called Lonely: Learning to Live with Solitude. Although I do think that
solitude and loneliness are somewhat different experiences aren't they - more on
that in a moment and I'll be interested in your thoughts too.
Accomplished, well-loved and yet Emily describes herself as a third-generation
lonely person. She's my guest today on All in the Mind.
Emily White: Originally when I first started saying I am writing about loneliness I
would always follow up very quickly with there's all this loneliness research going
on in the States and in Canada and Australia and it took me probably another
year to finally start saying and it's a memoir you know. There's such a taboo
attaching to loneliness, you can compare loneliness to depression, Depression
has largely been de-stigmatised and we learn not to judge a depressed person
and not to see depression as the person's fault.
If you're struggling with loneliness it's supposedly still your fault, you know
there's all sorts of scientific research that's really fascinating saying that you can
be born with a predisposition towards loneliness that it can be largely
circumstantial, that there's large scale social changes going on that will trigger
loneliness in vulnerable people but we don't recognise any of that. If you say I'm
lonely or I'm having trouble with loneliness or heaven forbid if you say you're
having trouble with chronic loneliness you're really setting yourself up as an
object of dismissal and scorn and shame.
Reading: And so I began practising my tone. I mean I practised out loud, I'm
writing about loneliness I said, sounding upbeat and cheerful as though my
subjects were puppies or baby seals - too cute, a boat of loneliness I said, my
voice becoming more deeper and academic as though I was delivering a paper
on the Hapsburg Empire - too dull. Loneliness I said looking at myself in a mirror
and I knew I had it just right, think cook books I told myself aiming for neutrality,
think embroidery.
Natasha Mitchell: What's the stereotype, because there is a very powerful and
persistent stereotype about loneliness even though we never talk about
loneliness much publicly?
Emily White: Yeah, well there is a stereotype and what's interesting is this has
been tested in universities you now they provide people and these are generally

11
university students with a portrait of someone who's lonely and then ask those
students to describe the lonely person. They come up with traits such as
unsuccessful, unintelligent, passive, uncoordinated which is sort of a strange
one, unattractive. Basically everything negative that you can think of about a
person and the lonely person is also someone with agency they are the one
causing their loneliness so they have all these negative traits.
Natasha Mitchell: This just didn't fit with you did it?
Emily White: No, it didn't fit. I thought of myself as reasonably bright, I always
had friends, I had good social skills and so there was this huge gap and this is
what I heard. I interviewed a lot of lonely people for the book and I always asked
about the stereotype and I was always told there is no way the stereotype
matches me but the stereotype was so strong and so powerful and so all
encompassing so people hide it. Loneliness rates are high, you know you can
measure loneliness in one of two ways. You can say it's short term or you can say
it's long term and no matter which measure you go with you don't hit a rate
below 10 per cent or 11 per cent. So that's, you know, at a minimum, 1 in 10
people. But if you think about 100 people who ... I'd bet a lot of money that 10 of
those people haven't told you that they're lonely.
Natasha Mitchell: Emily, you suggest though that loneliness was something
you were born with that claimed you as your own as you describe it and it felt
like a ghost in your life.
Emily White: It did, you know in the book I write about worrying about being
lonely at 19. I went away to university, I had a lot of friends and I was at a very
busy, vibrant university and I still worried about loneliness. It was as though I
could see it off to the side of my life just sort of waiting to descend and, you
know, even at a time in my life when I was 19 and was surrounded by people I
thought this is going to be a problem in my life. And I have been having problems
with loneliness off and on since childhood. My parents were divorced, I was a
latch-key kid you know I'd let myself into the house after school and I'd be alone.
Natasha Mitchell: And your sisters were much older?
Emily White: Yes, much older than me and my mother had to work and there
was an awful lot of isolation in my early life and I think that's why my experience
with loneliness, I use the word charged in the book, the relationship with
loneliness felt really alive to me in a sort of scary way.
Natasha Mitchell: In fact you describe yourself as a third-generation lonely
person. So it was a lifelong habit that you seemed to have formed from a very
early age but it was a lifelong habit that many close to you had formed as well.
So in some sense there's an interesting story going on here about nature and
nurture isn't there.
Emily White: There is, there's this test called the UCLA Loneliness Scale and it
kind of gauges how lonely you are at a given point in time and if you give that
test to people over a period of years you can get a sense of loneliness persisting
in their lives. This test came into being in the 1970s in California and so what you
had was a whole generation of people who had taken this test after about 25/30
years. And what they noticed was that the UCLA scale scores for mothers and

12
daughters tended to repeat themselves. And originally that was thought to be an
issue of nurture that mothers who were lonely were raising their daughters to be
lonely. But increasingly what scientists believe is that it's genetic that you can be
born with this trait towards loneliness and I saw that in my mother's life when I
was growing up that she was very much alone and that she felt alone and even
though she had friends the feeling of loneliness persisted. And that's what I was
sensing taking shape in my own life and I was going to follow in my mother's
footsteps in that way and ultimately I did.
Natasha Mitchell: Let's climb inside the heart of the feeling of loneliness. It's
different from being alone - what when you're sitting at the centre of the white
noise of loneliness how would you describe the state of mind. In one powerful
reflection you seem to suggest that you begin to disappear but you also describe
it as a metaphorical hunger. So let's tease that out a bit.
Emily White: Yes, there's definitely a difference. I would say there's a lack of
being grounded in loneliness, you know we define ourselves in reference to other
people and if you start to feel as though your life is uninhabited it can start to
feel as though you yourself are disappearing. You know less about yourself, you
feel less about yourself, you're not getting feedback from other people about
who you are, what you want or what you need. And it can start to feel as though
there's just not enough of you, you know there's not enough to you. At the same
time I interviewed a lot of loneliness researchers for the book and the word that
kept coming up with independently of each other was hunger, that loneliness
was like hunger that you've got this need for something, that you're empty and
you need nourishing, you need sustenance and it's just not there. And the worst
thing about loneliness is you know what you need and this is how I always
distinguish it from depression or at least this is the distinction that felt true for
me.
You know I had troubles with depression in my early adulthood and I never really
got it, I never really understood what was wrong; I didn't know what to do to fix
it. Whereas when I was lonely, when my loneliness lasted I knew exactly what I
needed and I needed more connection and I understood that if that increased
connection came into my life my loneliness would go away. So there wasn't that
sort of mysteriousness to it, I knew what I needed and it just wasn't there. And I
think that's what is so frustrating about loneliness, is that you can picture and
intuit and you are very acutely aware of what it is that you need but you just
can't get it.
Natasha Mitchell: What's particularly striking in your telling of your own story
and some very powerful research has started to reveal this too is that loneliness
begets loneliness. How did your behaviour change, the lonelier you got in a way
that reinforced your loneliness - this is a really powerful loop that people get into.
Emily White: It is powerful and it is a really important loop to be aware of. I've
noticed this when I went back and looked at my diaries and I was struck during
my lonely years at how often I retreated from social interaction. People would ask
me out for dinner and I would say no, people would ask me out for drinks after
work and I would say no. Social interactions began to make me anxious and that
was the case even though I desperately needed more sociability in my life and I
couldn't make sense of this paradox and I started blaming myself for it. And
when you're lonely you can start to feel as though you don't have what you need
to bring to social situations, you don't feel safe in those situations. So you start

13
to retreat and the more you do that the lonelier you become and it becomes this
vicious circle that you can't get out of.
Natasha Mitchell: This has been played out in research as well hasn't it, a
Finnish research.
Emily White: Finish research and there's more recent research that's been
undertaken at the University of Chicago and it's found this as well that people
will not only withdraw from social situations they'll start to describe their own
social skills as unsatisfactory. So they'll start to believe that they are not as
socially competent as they in fact are. And the researchers at the University of
Chicago have tried to explain this with an evolutionary framework. I always feel
funny talking about evolution because you end up with strange scenarios of
people on the savannah .......
Natasha Mitchell: With just little just so stories but this evolutionary account is
quite potent because it gets to the heart of us as essentially social beings.
Emily White: Yes and what they're saying within an evolution context is that if
you're alone say on a savannah other people.....
Natasha Mitchell: Or in your Toronto apartment let's say.
Emily White: Or in your Toronto apartment, other people aren't comforting, they
are a source of menace and it actually makes sense to retreat from them
because you don't know what that social situation or what that situation in
general is going to hold. You know I can say this as someone who has done this it
feels really reassuring to turn down a social event when you're lonely. You kind of
think OK, that risk is over but then you walk into your apartment and think what
have I just done? You want to be aware of what's happening to you and even if
you can't fight it don't start blaming yourself for it.
Natasha Mitchell: And in the same sense the evolutionary account is saying
that we should feel anxious when we are alone because when we're alone we are
vulnerable.
Emily White: You are vulnerable when you're alone and that's why I think I'd
always have these moments of feeling safer. I mean the word, two words come
up a lot in loneliness research and those words are safety and security. And what
researchers think is that loneliness sort of skews our sense of security and our
sense of safety so that we start to see aloneness as safer than togetherness but
that can become seriously self defeating.
Natasha Mitchell: Yes, Emily White is my guest on All in the Mind here on ABC
Radio National and Radio Australia, she's written a compelling book called
Lonely: Learning to Live with Solitude. Emily one key figure who's really
spearheaded the research on loneliness and really in a sense outed it in the
scientific community and in psychology research is a chap in Chicago called John
Cacioppo and you've spoken to him at length. One of the key things he has found
is that loneliness, independent of stress and depression and a whole range of
other afflictions, powerfully affects our health and you started feeling unwell
didn't you?

14
Emily White: I started developing these strange symptoms that no one could
diagnose, I was having problems with anxiety and my weight shot up, my doctor
suggested I might be entering perimenopause even though I was only 34. I just
did not feel well but I was actually scheduled and went through a MRI at 4.30 in
the morning in Toronto because they thought I might have multiple sclerosis. You
know this was a kind of scary time when no one really knew what was going on
with me and I was having all these tests and I was a drain on the health care
system and there's all sorts of kind of very advanced studies that have been
carried out by John Cacioppo and his colleagues at the University of Chicago and
they have found that it increases blood pressure and that it compromises your
immune system, this is the one that I find most alarming is that it increases your
likelihood of developing Alzheimer's disease, it increases your likelihood of an
early death. I mean it affects us at the level of the body.
Natasha Mitchell: It can increase your risk of breast cancer one study in
Indiana found.
Emily White: Yes, all sorts of things and this is the point that loneliness
researchers really start to hammer home which is this really isn't just a feeling,
we are profoundly social animals and when you take away the sociability that we
need, we start to fall apart physically.
Natasha Mitchell: I mean what biologically do they think is going on? Is it the
same set of biological parameters as stress so you know targeting the stress
system and cortisol levels and our immune function; that kind of whole cluster of
biological linkages?
Emily White: Very much that's what they think it is. One of the big things that
John Cacioppo has discovered and this would explain a lot of my symptoms is
lack of sleep. It's been shown that people who are struggling with loneliness and
chronic loneliness don't sleep as well as the non-lonely people and that gradually
that lack of sleep starts to undermine everything else. And I have talked to so
many lonely people who contact me or who I have interviewed and they say you
know my sleep has just fallen apart, I wake up, or I can't fall asleep, you know
I've developed insomnia and that was my case, I'd get up at three or four in the
morning and normally I was a sound sleeper but that can be a sort of slippery
slope once you start to not sleep. Physiologically a lot of things start to go wrong.
Natasha Mitchell: And John Cacioppo's described loneliness not just as a sad
circumstance then but as a dangerous circumstance. The finding around
dementia is very interesting and very sobering isn't it?
Emily White: It's terrifying and again they don't know what the trigger is, they
don't know what's causing the increased rates of Alzheimer's among lonely
people. They just know that it's there and of course the converse has been
shown as well. If you take people who are very socially active the classic study is
senior citizens involved in bridge groups those people who have rich social ties
are less likely to show signs of dementia. So there's something very profound.....
Natasha Mitchell: That's independent of other risk factors?
Emily White: That's right, exactly. There is something very profound going on
between our sense of connectedness and our bodies. That's a new idea and for a

15
lot of people we still see loneliness as something to dismiss or something that's
unsubstantial or something that's trivial or temporary, we don't need to become
scared of the state but we have to start understanding that loneliness has a
significant impact on our whole life.
Natasha Mitchell: One thing that you did investigate was thinking about this
lifelong plight that chronic loneliness can become right from childhood for many
of the people who contacted you through your blog. Is this notion that it can
perhaps it can become a habit brought about by a kind of disrupted sense of
attachment that we come to rely on ourselves and that feels like a safer thing to
do than to rely on others. Tell us a little bit about this relationship between
loneliness and attachment?
Emily White: One of the key ideas in loneliness research is trust and what they
have found is that the more trusting you are as an individual the less likely you
are to have problems with loneliness and the opposite is also true. The more
distrustful you are, one researcher used the word automatic, you will
automatically start having more problems with loneliness. And you can take that
back to childhood where you can learn a trusting way of being with your care
giver or you can learn perhaps that care giver isn't someone you can fully trust.
And if the latter scenario was true for you you're going to be less and less
trusting, not just of your care giver but of the other people you come across in
life. That's usually referred to as anxious attachment and if that is the situation
you're facing, if you've grown up rightly or wrongly thinking that the only person
you can truly rely on is yourself, you will definitely be a good candidate for
loneliness. Because what loneliness responds to best is a deep and secure sense
of trust and faith in another person, a very, very deep sense of emotional
intimacy. I use the word attunement in the book and I think that's a lovely word
referring to the sense in which we can feel psychically and emotionally
connected to another person in a sort of wordless way.
That's what loneliness responds to but if you have grown up feeling that trying to
achieve that sort of relationship with another person is risky, or if you've sort of
been batted away as you've tried to achieve that sort of relationship, loneliness
is going to emerge as a problem.
Natasha Mitchell: Is that something that plays out in your own life and your
own childhood do you think?
Emily White: I can't give you an easy answer; I've given this a lot of thought. I
was very attuned to my father and my father left when I was four and I do
wonder how that departure affected me as I grew older. There is also a
generational issue there I'm 41 now and my parents got divorced when I was
four and I was unusual, I was in a Catholic school at the time so I was the only
divorced kid that I knew in my entire school really. And kids today would have a
very different experience of divorce but for me at the time it scarred me but it
also left me with a feeling that I was the only kid that was going through that. So
there was this sense of being exceptional in a way that I was uncomfortable with.
You've asked about attachment and I've ended up talking about divorce but I'm
very interested. This is again an early study but what they found this was
research that was done in New York City, they found the people whose parents
had gotten divorced before they were six were much likely to report feelings of

16
chronic loneliness as adults. There's definitely something there about childhood
loss and adult loneliness.
Natasha Mitchell: Chronic loneliness is on the rise, this is a very potent
analysis that you offer us in the book. Internationally it's on the rise, this is slowly
being documented now as partly now being seen as not just a health issue but a
public policy issue. Part of it you suggest is the diminishing depth of people's
emotional lives and I guess we could point to urbanisation, we could point to
single person households, the rise of those and all sorts of things and yet you
come back to this idea that there's a diminishing depth of our emotional life that
might be part of this too.
Emily White: I think we're being encouraged to see relationships that are in
some ways superficial and you can think of that in terms of Facebook friends with
Twitter followers you know your social media here as real relationships and what
a lot of people within the loneliness research community are trying to impress
upon us is that that doesn't give you what you need to fend off loneliness. It's
not just to say that Facebook is a bad thing it's to say that what we need to fend
of loneliness, and I'm speaking from personal experience here, you don't need a
lot of relationships but you need a few relationships that run really deep, that
make you feel fully known, that help you understand yourself. And increasingly
we're not finding that, people are spending more and more time alone and
researchers don't know why that is and it's not a cohort, they're not finding it in a
specific age group, they are finding it across the board, people are spending
more time alone, people are living alone.
And what struck me was an interview I did with a researcher in Toronto named
Glen Stocker and we were talking about this increase in time spent alone and he
said you know when people are with other people there's been this shift in how
we're spending our time. In the past there was more of what he called passive
socialising and he described that in a way that I really liked. He said that's time
spent with someone else when you don't have to say anything, you're cooking
and somebody is reading the newspaper at the kitchen table, there is someone
there with you in a sort of deep and quiet way. So what we have increasingly
today is active socialising, meaning you're out for dinner, or you're out to a
baseball game.
Natasha Mitchell: It's all on.
Emily White: It's all on.
Natasha Mitchell: Or it's all totally off.
Emily White: That's exactly what he was saying and you know lonely people
write to me and they say I'm so tired of that, it's exhausting.
Natasha Mitchell: And yet while chronic loneliness is being documented as
being on the rise you also suggest that solitude has become rather cool, it's quite
trendy to dabble in isolation. It's become something of a status symbol, people
go on silent retreats at ashrams and there's this whole sort of movement called
quirky alones. So there's a kind of revival of solitude as well. Solitude is
something quite different from loneliness, what's sort of implicit in that is that
there's a certain satisfaction that comes from solitude.

17
Emily White: You know it's a very simple difference between loneliness and
solitude I think and the difference lies in the role of choice. If you are choosing to
spend three weeks in an ashram not talking to anyone else you are not going to
feel lonely for the most part because you've chosen that.
Natasha Mitchell: And you're surrounded by people in silence oddly enough.
Emily White: Which is very comforting, it's the sort of passive socialising that
people need and I think part of the reason there's this sort of cache attachment
to solitude now is that is shows you are in control of the decisions that you are
making about isolation. Isolation isn't something that scares you, you know you
have a social life, you have friends and family.
Natasha Mitchell: Loneliness is about lack of control in some sense.
Emily White: Loneliness is very much about lack of control, overwhelmingly so
you can feel when you're lonely this need to control facts of your life in a way
that you can't pull more people, and you can't pull more connection into it and
you're not in control of some of the key factors of your life.
Natasha Mitchell: And yet you sought to have control, your book tells you went
on bike rides with groups of people, you volunteered at a soup kitchen, you did
any number of things, you went to bookshops and surrounded yourself with
people, you did any number of things to counter your loneliness. What, and there
is a bit of a book end to this story, you did form a relationship but more recently
that's actually broken up so you're kind of confronting the story again aren't you?
But what brought a difference to you?
Emily White: I think there is something to be said for getting out there and
trying new things and forcing yourself out of the apartment in the evenings. At
the same time I don't want to say that persistence of loneliness is in any way the
lonely person's fault, we see ourselves today as having all of this control over our
own lives and I think we discount the role that luck plays, or that chance plays.
You know I met my partner because she was assigned to the same team as me in
a basketball league and there's an enormous amount of chance there, yes I had
to be there at the league in my shorts and T-shirt and what not and this will vary
from person to person, What I needed to overcome my loneliness was a deep,
lasting and quiet connection and with that connection in place I was able to
reach out and make other social connections.
The paradox of my loneliness kind of collapsed in upon itself, you know I started
to feel safer with other people than I did away from them. I could do an awful lot
on my own but I was not going to overwhelm loneliness on my own, I needed
someone's help with that. You know my situation has changed but that is what
the book ends with. And some people have written to me and said I found that
really frustrating, you know you end with this romantic relationship and I don't
have one. And that's not the message I want to leave people with, I want to
leave people with the message if anything that loneliness isn't entirely under
your control and the end of loneliness isn't under your control. What we need
above all is a sense of connection and you can't achieve that yourself, you can
go to as many basketball games or feed-the-hungry suppers or anything like that
but ultimately someone else needs to come along and provide you with what you
are missing.

18
Natasha Mitchell: Well Emily White thank you for the insight, it's a very
powerful insight into the experience of loneliness - thank you.
Emily White: Thank you.
Natasha Mitchell: Easier said than done though isn't it? In fact there are now a
range of creative loneliness reduction initiatives happening around the world, a
hot topic for social policy right now.