Social isolation can generally be defined as “the absence of social interactions, contacts, and relationships with family and friends, with neighbors on an individual level, and with ‘society at large’ on a broader level,” as Robert L Berg stated in The Second Fifty Years. This isn’t just some amped up offshoot of cabin fever, mind you, the psychological stress that social isolation causes can have extreme detrimental effects on a person’s mental, emotional and even physical health.

Dr. Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University, has co-authored a meta-analysis of recent studies and found that a lack of robust social connections can raise one’s health risks as much as smoking 15 cigarettes a day or misusing/abusing alcohol — that’s twice as much as obesity’s impact would be.

“There is robust evidence that social isolation and loneliness significantly increase risk for premature mortality, and the magnitude of the risk exceeds that of many leading health indicators,” Holt-­Lunstad told the American Psychological Association in 2019.

“Regardless of whether loneliness is increasing or remaining stable, we have lots of evidence that a significant portion of the population is affected by it,” she continued. “Being connected to others socially is widely considered a fundamental human need — crucial to both well-being and survival.”

In 2012, the Swiss Health Survey conducted a survey of more than 21,000 participants ages 15 and up. The study found that nearly a quarter of respondents could be considered either only “partially integrated” or “poorly integrated” into Swiss society. Regardless of their age, these people were more likely to suffer from poor health, musculoskeletal disorder, depression and engage in drug use. In short, the study found that “social isolation may be less prevalent at younger ages, but is then even more strongly associated with poor health conditions and behaviors than at older ages.”

Even more worrisome, a 2019 study by the American Cancer Society, working with data from more than 580,000 Americans, discovered that social isolation increases the risk of mortality from every cause across every race. “Our research really shows that the magnitude of risk presented by social isolation is very similar in magnitude to that of obesity, smoking, lack of access to care and physical inactivity,” Kassandra Alcaraz, a public health researcher with the ACA, told the APA last May.

This problem is nothing if not prevalent. A 2018 Pew Research Study of 6,000 American adults found that a whopping 28 percent of them felt dissatisfied with their lives and relationships with family and community, compared to just 7 percent of respondents who were. In fact, people don’t even need to be physically isolated to feel a sense of loneliness, Dr. Lawrence Palinkas, a Professor of Social Policy and Health at the University of Southern California, explained to Engadget.

“For example, people who are living in assisted living or nursing homes with several other residents” are acutely susceptible to bouts of loneliness, he said. “They may interact with those residents daily yet still feel socially isolated because the nature of the interactions, and the contact it creates, may still be associated with a perception of isolation or separation from other people — especially if the people who are physically close to them are not people who are psychologically close to them.”

He also points out that people can be socially engaged while still being physically isolated, thanks to modern remote communication technologies like Zoom, Instagram Live or even telephones. “It boils down to whether people perceive themselves to be socially isolated or not,” Palinkas said. “And that physical isolation may be a factor that weighs in on that decision but it’s not the only factor, and sometimes it’s not even a factor at all.”

But tell that to the approximately 80,000 prisoners placed in solitary confinement every year. Used as either a punitive device (ie for breaking rules) or as a protective measure for vulnerable inmates (ie Harvey Weinstein), solitary confinement leaves people isolated in a nearly empty cell the size of a pickup truck bed for as many as 23 hours a day with minimal sensory stimulation and virtually zero physical contact. The impact on the psyche is devastating.

Take Robert King for example, who spent 29 years in solitary confinement. King spoke at a 2018 neuroscience conference about his experience and how it impacted his cognitive function. He described that, upon his release from prison, he had severe difficulty recognizing faces and had to retrain himself to understand what faces even were and how they worked. He also had difficulty navigating even simple routes through a city without assistance. Turns out that when your universe is a 6-foot by 9-foot room for nearly three decades, there’s not much need to keep your navigation skills sharp — or even much impetus to keep a firm grasp of reality.

“For some prisoners … solitary confinement precipitates a descent into madness,” Dr. Craig Haney, professor of psychology at University of California, Santa Cruz, told the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights in 2012. Prisoners may experience crushing bouts of anxiety, paranoia, hallucinations, and panic attacks. “The conditions of confinement are far too severe to serve any kind of penological purpose,” he concluded.

The reason this happens is because prolonged social isolation physically changes the shape and function of your brain. The hippocampus, the region responsible for learning and memory not only shrinks in size in response to long-term isolation, it loses its plasticity and may eventually shut down altogether. At the same time the amygdala, which regulates your fear and anxiety response, goes into overdrive. And the longer the confinement lasts, the more pronounced these changes become — even after the inmate’s eventual release.

“I would watch guys come to prison totally sane, and in three years they don’t live in the real world anymore,” Anthony Graves, an exonerated former-inmate who spent a decade of his 18 years on death row under solitary conditions, told the APA in 2012. “I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since my release. I have mood swings that cause emotional breakdowns.”

And while a recent study out of Europe suggests that projecting outdoor scenes onto cell walls as a means of providing the confined inmates a visual stimulus, “the biggest thing you can do is just limit time spent alone,” Dr. Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Social Medicine, told Engadget. “They should limit it to 14 days or less” which is what the UN Council on Human Rights has called for.

Of course some people will both physically and socially isolate themselves on purpose. They’re called astronauts. Whether they’re prepping for a trip to the moon or just orbiting in the ISS, isolation is par for the course when it comes to space science. It’s also something that NASA and other national space agencies have spent years studying.

“Even the astronauts will say this,” Dr. Phyllis Johnson, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, told Engadget. “They just would like to hug their wife or their child, just be able to touch and hold. It’s just like they also want to smell the smells of Earth, [feel] what it’s like to be on Earth because they don’t have that up there.”

But whether you’re stuck 254 miles above the Earth or quarantined in your apartment, you’ve got plenty of options for fighting off the effects of social isolation. Johnson points to communities (figuratively) coming together in Spain and Italy during the lockdown to sing from their balconies as a positive sign. “You can feel a part of some of these kinds of rituals,” she explained.”And they don’t require that you be next to each other.”

Johnson also warns against becoming complacent during your time in isolation. “It’s important not to think you’re on holiday with no routines and no goals,” Johnson noted. “That’s what they do in the space station, they have routines and established time for things.”

“Don’t just sit and watch TV, maybe watch different kinds of shows from what you normally would,” she continued. “Prepare different kinds of meals from what you normally would, learn a new skill!”

What’s more, concerns that shutting people in their homes with their social media echo chambers could lead to an even more polarized society, Palinkas has actually seen the opposite since the pandemic started.

“Every day, my wife and I take our dog for a walk around the neighborhood. We see a lot of neighbors that we don’t normally see or haven’t seen much of prior to the pandemic, who now seem to be much more socially engaged — in part because they perceive a need to interact, in part because they have been spending a lot of time by themselves” he said. “I think the realization that this is an experience that we are all having collectively, you know, we’re all in it together.”

It started off innocently enough: “What Disney princess are you?” “What Pokémon are you?” Then things got a bit more cerebral. “What’s your best quality?” “What should your New Year resolution be?” Then it got dark: “What’s your crippling anxiety?” And then it just got weird: “What type of hole are you?”

The premise is simple. Load up the filter, stare dead-eyed into the camera lens and hold down the trigger button and wait with bated breath to discover what kind of whatever you are. Your reaction is recorded, and you can choose to share your result with your followers if you want to (and everybody wants to). You’ve also got the option to try or save an effect, but most people seem content using them just the once. It’s basically a more instantaneous, shinier take on the ol’ random Buzzfeed quiz, created at a grassroots level by Instagram-using artists and programmers.

And “random” is the keyword here, because despite the filter giving the illusion of complex number-crunching — a light beam scanning your face, for example — the results are generally completely arbitrary. As @DarkArtsPhoto — maker of the “What’s your crippling anxiety?” filter — tells me, the majority of creators use a randomize function on their AR software (the Facebook-made Spark is a popular choice). “In simple terms, this software instructs the camera to look at your face, gleans info about the shape and position of your face and then simply slaps the effect on your face with one of the predetermined outcome options,” @DarkArtsPhoto says. “I haven’t seen anything describing a formula to utilize camera or environment to influence a number.”

That’s not to say a smarter kind of filter isn’t feasible, but it would likely require a heap more work than their random counterparts. According to the creators I spoke to, these filters can take only a couple of hours (if that) to put together, and the pay-off is pretty remarkable. Filippo Soccini — the maker behind the popular “In 2020 I will be…” filter — says his creation has been seen two billion times since it launched and has been used 330 million times.

Meanwhile, Christopher Gu‘s portfolio of filters — which range from “Never Have I Ever” to “Which dog breed r u?” — has picked up well over 100 million impressions, including 60 million in their first seven days on the platform. During that period, then, Gu’s filters were being used 100 times per second around the world.

Some brands have found a way to use these filters to their advertising advantage. UK chicken chain Nando’s, for example, attempted a “What Nando’s spice level are you?” filter, which seems rather uninspired in the face of indie offerings like “What mythical cryptid are you?” For grassroots creators, though, the pay-off comes in the form of massive exposure, more followers and a warm glow that they’re helping folk around the world waste time in a very efficient manner — and that’s largely down to the curious way Instagram made these filters usable.

There’s no central database from which to pick and choose these specific filters — you either find them via someone else’s story or on the profile of its creator if you follow them. Their popularity depends entirely on them spreading through Story feeds, so you need to actively engage with the platform to use them. The chances are, once you’ve used a specific one, you’ll soon see your friends following suit, and that particular filter will then spread into different social circles. Creators that have a bigger social circle have a better chance of their filter spreading far and wide, resulting in users coming back to their profile out of curiosity. For Gu, this gives potential post-college recruiters an idea of his entrepreneurial, creative chutzpah. For others, such as @TheDarkArtsPhoto, it’s a fun tie-in with the account’s existing content and services.

This is also why many of these filters have managed to shirk any issues of copyright. While there are a number of clauses attached to the use of copyrighted material on both Spark and Instagram, filters asking “What McDonald’s dollar menu item are you?” is nothing but free advertising for the company, so creators muddying the waters here have thus far flown under the radar. Although as @DarkArtsPhoto says, “If people start making money off filters, I bet some lawyers will prick their ears up soon enough.”

But to the matter at hand. These filters would not have seen such meteoric popularity nor appeared in their droves, were it not for their immense appeal. Something about their entire MO sparked interest in even the most apathetic Instagram filter user. Even I — a ham-fisted elder Millennial who feels a bit queasy about selfies and has only really just gotten to grips with Story GIFs — was extremely here for them. Ask me what type of anything I am. Go on. I bet I can tell you.

There are, of course, no end of studies illustrating the feel-good fix that social media provides. Posting a picture of your shining visage online can bring about lots of dopamine-dosing feels. But the appeal of these specific types of filters goes a little deeper still, according to neuroscientist and author of The Idiot Brain, Dr Dean Burnett. (Disclaimer: He and I run a neuroscience-based podcast together called Brain Yapping). According to him, a large part of it comes down to the randomization of it all.

“Humans are an extremely social species by default, so the opportunity to share something with your group is tempting already,” he says. “But there’s also a consistent human drive to quantify ourselves — we do it all the time, with everything.” Burnett points to things like our weight, our height, age, salary and follower count as examples of things we use to define ourselves. “This kind of quantifiable data gives us certainty and feeds into our self-image.”

But does knowing what dog-wearing-sunglasses you are really count as quantifiable data? Especially when the outcome is entirely random? “The fact that it’s all random nonsense is irrelevant,” he says. “It’s still satisfying to know what type of thing you are. And it’s actually advantageous to the ‘sharing with the group’ dynamic — there’s no risk involved. If you get a complimentary result, great. If you get an insulting one, you can act surprised and appalled in an amusing and engaging way, and nobody can judge you because it’s all meaningless.”

Risk — or rather, the lack of it — is actually a much bigger draw to these filters than we might realise, says Burnett, especially in comparison to the regular selfie, for which Instagram is so well known. Selfie shame, sadly, is a very real phenomenon. People — often women — are afraid to share photos of themselves for fear of appearing vain or arrogant, and there’s the risk that they put themselves out there in what they think is a nice photo, only to receive deafening silence in return — or worse, criticism.

These Instagram filters bypass all of that, says Burnett. “You’re not saying, ‘Hey look how nice my face looks.’ You’re saying, ‘Look what this software thinks my face means,’ and it’s hard to take exception to that. A filter that took a reading of your knee or elbow probably wouldn’t be as successful, so it’s a visual humblebrag, of sorts, and there’s no risk of rejection.”

But these are not motivating factors for the filters’ creators. When asked what they believe the appeal of them is, answers typically included things like, “they’re funny,” or “they’re relatable.” Or the most common response among those I spoke with: “They’re a good way to waste time.”

This quiz filter frenzy does appear to be dying down now — replaced instead with parodies and memes of the whole episode. But I can’t guarantee I won’t tap on another one if it orbits into my social sphere, putting it in front of other filter fans and causing the whole cycle to kick off again. What kind of insufferable Instagram trend am I? I already know the answer to that one.

Fletcher and Taneem Antoniades, co-founder and Creative Director at Ninja Theory, plan to study how game design, technology and neuroscience can come together to benefit those with mental illness.

Their work will take place over the course of years. At the moment, the team is testing how you can use biometric data to control gaming simulations with the mind and body. The Insight Project plans to conduct formal experiments and share the results with the scientific community. Ultimately, the goal is to help gamers recognize, respond to and control their own fear, anxiety and emotional suffering.

This isn’t the first time a gaming studio has attempted to tackle mental health, and as we’ve seen first hand, there have been mixed results. But it’s critical that we address mental health in the gaming community (and beyond). While gaming is sometimes blamed for problems like addiction, we’ve also seen that it can help users who are depressed or isolated connect and socialize. Given their track record, Antoniades and Fletcher could make a significant impact.

As such, NASA has spent decades working to ensure that, when it sends crews beyond the atmosphere, they’ll possess the talent and training required to do their duties and return safely. As we look towards Mars — and its two-plus year round trip — NASA faces an unprecedented challenge in doing so.

Even on relatively short stints aboard the ISS, astronauts face a number of challenges and contributing factors that can wear on them physically and emotionally. Those include potential personality and cultural conflicts or communication issues with foreign crewmates, the monotony and boredom of performing daily maintenance on the station, physiological changes due to microgravity and isolation, worries of radiation exposure and disruptions to their circadian rhythms. Astronauts on the ISS are essentially stuck in a little bubble of habitable atmosphere with only five other people for six months at a time or more. That’s enough to make all but the most psychologically sturdy go a bit stir crazy.

Per NASA’s research, US astronauts suffered 1,800 in-flight medical events over the course of 89 shuttle missions between 1981 and 1998. Fewer than 2 percent of those were due to behavioral health issues and among those, the most common complaint was “anxiety and annoyance.” Conversely, Space Adaptation Syndrome — wherein astronauts suffer from motion sickness, headaches, and facial stiffness until they grow accustomed to life in microgravity — accounted for 40 percent of medical issues over the same span.

That’s not to say astronauts don’t go a little crazy from time to time. The Soyuz 21 mission in 1976 had to be abandoned when the cosmonaut crew all noticed a strong odor in the capsule. The source of the smell was never found and the entire incident was chalked up to a shared, stress-induced delusion among the crew. In 1989, shuttle commander David Walker, recently returned from his first mission and in the midst of a bitter divorce, piloted a T-38 jet within 100 feet of a Pan American commercial flight. While NASA never officially cited post-mission stress as a contributing factor to the near disaster, the agency did remove Walker from command and grounded him from missions until 1992.

More recently, in 2007 astronaut Lisa Nowak drove non-stop 900 miles across the country, armed with an adult diaper, bb gun, mallet and knife to confront a romantic rival at the Orlando airport. After failing to pepper spray her rival, Nowak was arrested and charged with attempted murder. Her legal team pursued an insanity defense following a diagnosis that Nowak suffered from a brief psychotic disorder and major depression after returning from her recent Discovery mission.

“Anecdotal and empirical evidence indicate that the likelihood of an adverse cognitive or behavioral condition or psychiatric disorder occurring greatly increases with the length of a mission,” NASA’s Human Research Program found during a subsequent study on astronaut psychological health. “Further, while cognitive, behavioral, or psychiatric conditions might not immediately and directly threaten mission success, such conditions can, and do, adversely impact individual and crew health, welfare, and performance.”

NASA’s first line of defense against this happening is its brutal astronaut selection process. Many candidates come from high-pressure fields such as fighter pilots and physicians, inherently dangerous, high-stakes professions where a wrong move can prove fatal. The ability to quash fear and anxiety to overcome a challenge is of paramount importance. Astronauts “already know [they] can meet stressful challenges,” NASA senior operational psychologist Dr. Jim Picano told Astronaut in January, “and [they] believe [they] can overcome these things.”

A rigorous training regimen helps iron out any remaining doubts the candidates may have. “The training that astronauts receive shapes their confidence in the procedures and equipment they have, to deal with spaceflight commands as well as emergencies,” he continued. “Rehearsing these over and over again…brings a sense of preparation that allows them to believe they can influence and change their circumstances for the better.”

Of course, confidence can only get one so far in the selection process. Out of the 18,000-odd applicants, only a pool of 60 or so will eventually be eligible to go to space. NASA rates each of these applicants on nine separate “suitability proficiencies“

• The ability to perform under stressful conditions

• Group living skills

• Teamwork skills

• Self-regulation of emotions and mood

• Motivation

• Judgement and decision making

• Conscientiousness

• Communication skills

• Leadership skills

And that’s just the start. Candidates are subjected to hours of psychiatric screening during the selection process to ensure that they have “the right stuff” for a given mission. Once selected, astronauts must then go through multiple additional batteries of psychological evaluation and support during the run up to launch, while on mission, and after they return. While aboard the ISS, crews participate in psychological conferences with ground-based medical staff, for example.

Additionally, NASA takes great pains to keep astronauts aboard the ISS in contact with their friends, families, and the public to help counter the enormous psychological stresses they experience. NASA provides its ISS astronauts access to social media accounts, satellite phones and video conferences for communicating with family, media downloads for keeping up with the latest TV seasons, and regular care packages from Earth. Astronauts are also encouraged to take up hobbies while aboard the space station; be it photography, reading or in Commander Chris Hadfield’s case, recording a guitar album in microgravity.

NASA is also looking into less invasive ways of monitoring its astronauts’ mental health while in space. “Researchers funded by NASA have been experimenting with visual recognition technology,” Dr. Lawrence Palinkas, professor of Social Policy and Health at the University of Southern California, told Engadget. The same sort of technology that law enforcement agencies are using to track and identify people could eventually be used to subtly keep tabs on a crewmate’s psychological state. “If aberrations or abnormalities are detected, a psychologist is armed with more detailed information on how to respond adequately,” he said.

Still, Mars is 35 million miles from the Earth, even at their closest orbital points. Getting there and back will take a minimum of two and a half years. “Mars is a long way away, and the extreme distance has psychological ramifications,” Dr. Nick Kanas, emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, told the American Psychological Association in 2018. “It will be hard to have the kind of social novelty we crave.” Given the scope of the mission, multiple nations’ respective space agencies will be involved and likely sending astronauts of their own.

Dr. Phyllis Johnson, associate professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, has recently performed research into the effects that these sorts of dangerous and remote jobs have on family members left behind. “We’re looking at how [astronauts] create, or do they create, a shared space culture,” she told Engadget. “Or are they going to be separate entities of ‘I’m my national culture. So I’m an American there first, and I’m a Canadian, and I’m a German, or I’m from a particular space agency.'”

“Are they developing something that encompasses all of it,” she continued, “and do they see it as recreating some traditions — customs that we’re doing as a team — that are carried forward by other groups.”

That community will be vital given that the further they travel from Earth, the longer the communications lag grows. By the time the time they make it to Mars, signals from Earth will need a full 20 minutes to get there. Combined with an equally long trip back and the time needed to compose a reply, astronauts will be looking at a 40 minute lag at the very least. That will make telephone-style conversations impossible.

“Undoubtedly protocols that will have to be established for how that form of communication takes place,” Palinkas said, “and how questions and answers are bundled together to minimize disruption to the normal flow of conversation.”

NASA isn’t planning on sending a crew to the Red Planet for nearly another decade, not when there’s so much Moon to explore and potentially exploit. This should give the space agency sufficient time to further mature the technologies and flight systems needed to keep its astronauts alive, and more importantly, thriving, during their perilous journey.