The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

other animals, chiefly due to their superior ability to work together. Human brains are wired to connect—
magnetic resonance imaging shows that the same neural circuitry that causes us to feel physical pain is
activated when we face social pain, like being shunned from a group or picked last on the playground.
Harry Harlow, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin, ran a series of experiments
starting in the 1950s, showing that young rhesus monkeys, when isolated from other monkeys for as little as
three months, could be behaviorally damaged for life. Brain scans of war prisoners in the former Yugoslavia
demonstrated that without sustained social interaction, a brain can become as injured as one that has
incurred a traumatic blow. Upon being taken captive, John McCain had two broken arms and a broken leg,
and later developed chronic dysentery, but the pain of loneliness, he implied, was worse.
Our inherent and environmentally stimulated sociability may have made our brains grow so large in the
first place. “Reading and interpreting social cues,” noted social neuroscientist John Cacioppo, “is, for any of
us, at any time, a demanding and cognitively complex activity.” The need to recognize the constantly shifting
status of friends and foes, to act for the betterment of a group when it isn’t in your immediate self-interest,
to understand how to reason and cajole and deceive, likely gave rise to an expanded cerebral cortex, which,
in turn, resulted in the dominance of humans.
Further, evolution selected genes that reinforce pleasure and safety in company, and unease and fear when
alone. Unwanted loneliness makes you sick—social isolation is as damaging as high blood pressure, obesity,
or smoking as a risk factor for illness and early death. “Happiness for a member of the human species
demands connection,” wrote Cacioppo. “Our brains and bodies are designed to function in aggregates, not in
isolation.”
Connectivity and cooperation transcend humans; these traits extend to the most ancient forms of life.
Many animals display extreme devotion to group bonding and social good. There are hives, flocks, herds,
schools, gaggles, troops, packs, bands, bevies, coveys, and droves. (There are also lone wolves and solitary
apes and even hermitlike wasps, but these are exceptions to the general rule of the animal kingdom.)
Salmonella bacteria work together, secreting signaling molecules that help them determine the opportune
moment to collectively attack a host. By the time a human infant is eight months old, attachments to others
have already been formed. It’s only Knight, and his fellow solitaries throughout history, who are puzzling
anomalies.
After his arrest and incarceration, Knight craved solitary confinement. “I have a hope, wish, fantasy of a
cell of my own,” he wrote in one of his letters. “And to think this would be considered punishment. It is to
laugh.” But not aloud—Knight always made sure to laugh silently, internally. He worried that if he were seen
grinning in jail, amused by a thought in his head, it would be considered further proof of his
feeblemindedness.
For his first several months in jail, Knight had a cellmate, with whom he scarcely exchanged a word.
When he was finally transferred to a single cell, he was much relieved.
Isolation is the raw material of greatness; being alone is hazardous to our health. Few other conditions
produce such diametrically opposing reactions, though of course genius and craziness often share a fence
line. Sometimes even voluntary solitude can send a person over to the wrong side of the fence.
In 1988, a cave explorer named Véronique Le Guen volunteered for an extreme experiment: to live alone
in an underground cavern in southern France without a clock for one hundred and eleven days, monitored by
scientists who wished to study the human body’s natural rhythms in the absence of time cues. For a while,
she settled into a pattern of thirty hours awake and twenty hours asleep. She described herself as being