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All through my childhood, until my early teens, I had a daydream.I would have this daydream every day.But our street consisted only of other people, equally shut away, equally alone.I once heard the comedian Sarah Silverman talk on a radio interview about when her depression first descended on her.She was in her early teens.When her mother and stepfather asked her what was wrong, she couldn’t find the vocabulary to explain it.But then, finally, she said she felt homesick, like when she was at summer camp.She had felt homesick.But she was at home.I think I understand what was happening to her.But that’s never been what home has meant to any humans before us.But that is largely gone.Our sense of home has shriveled so far and so fast it no longer meets our need for a sense of belonging.So we are homesick even when we are at home.As John was proving how this effect plays out in humans, other scientists were investigating it in other animals.For example, Professor Martha McClintock21 separated out lab rats.Some were raised in a cage, alone.Others were raised in groups.Many years into his experiments and research, John discovered a cruel twist in this story.They would spot potential threats within 150 milliseconds, while it took socially connected people twice as long, 300 milliseconds, to notice the same threat.Protracted loneliness causes you to shut down socially, and to be more suspicious of any social contact, he found.You become hypervigilant.You start to be more likely to take offense where none was intended, and to be afraid of strangers.You start to be afraid of the very thing you need most.John calls this a snowball effect, as disconnection spirals into more disconnection.Lonely people are scanning for threats because they unconsciously know that nobody is looking out for them, so no one will help them if they are hurt.The tragedy, John realized, is that many depressed and anxious people receive less love, as they become harder to be around.Indeed, they receive judgment, and criticism, and this accelerates their retreat from the world.They snowball into an ever colder place.This turned out to be unexpectedly difficult to answer.When he asked people Are you lonely? they wouldn’t find it hard to see what he was talking about, but it’s hard to pin down.I pictured an elderly woman who’s too frail to leave the house and who nobody comes to see.But John was discovering this wasn’t true.In his studies, it turned out that feeling lonely was different from simply being alone.Surprisingly, the sensation of loneliness didn’t have much to do with how many people you spoke to every day, or every week.Some of the people in his study who felt most lonely actually talked to lots of people every day.There’s a relatively low correlation between the objective connections and perceived connections, he says.I was puzzled when John first told me this.But then he told me to picture being alone in a big city, where you hardly know anyone.Or picture being in a hospital bed in a busy ward.You’re surrounded by patients.You can push a button and have a nurse with you in a few moments.Yet almost everyone feels lonely in that situation.As he researched this, John discovered that there was a missing ingredient to loneliness, and to recovering from it.You also need, he explained to me, to feel you are sharing something with the other person, or the group, that is meaningful to both of you.When you’re in Times Square on your first afternoon in New York, you’re not alone, but you feel lonely because nobody there cares about you, and you don’t care about them.You aren’t sharing your joy or your distress.You’re nothing to the people around you, and they’re nothing to you.To end loneliness, you need to have a sense of mutual aid and protection, John figured out, with at least one other person, and ideally many more.I thought a lot about this.We have started to believe that doing things alone22 is the natural state of human beings, and the only way to advance.I will look after myself, and everybody else should look after themselves, as individuals.Nobody can help you but you.Nobody can help me but me.But John has proven that this is a denial of human history, and a denial of human nature.It leads us to misunderstand our most basic instincts.And this approach to life makes us feel terrible.This notion that the brain is static and fixed is not accurate.Your brain never was an island.And yet there is an obvious rebuttal to all this evidence that we are becoming disconnected, one that kept running through my mind.Seventy of my friends, I see, are online now, across several continents.I could talk to them straight away.But as I began to dig into this, I realized that we have been missing the most important point.The Internet arrived promising us connection at the very moment when all the wider forces of disconnection were reaching a crescendo.I only really began to understand what this means when I went to the first rehab center for Internet addicts in the United States.Hilarie Cash’s office, near the main Microsoft offices in Washington state.She was a psychotherapist and he was a handsome, smartly dressed young man.After some polite chitchat, he began to tell her about a problem.James was from a small town,24 and he had always been the star at his school.He aced his tests and became the captain of one of the sports [teams.He](https://gitee.com/uk_b6a6/sync/wikis/Nursery Management Systems) cakewalked into the Ivy League and left his community thrumming with pride.For the first time in his life, he wasn’t the smartest guy in the room.He looked at how people spoke, the rituals he was meant to take part in, the weird social groups that were forming, and he felt profoundly alone.So when other people were mingling, he went to his room, started up his computer, and launched a game called EverQuest.It was one of the earliest games that you could play simultaneously with many anonymous strangers somewhere out there in cyberspace.