Has lockdown rewired our brains?
Underwood has now spent a year living by himself, although that two-month stretch was the longest he went without seeing another soul (a handful of people now sporadically stop by to help him fix up the property). As a former hostel manager who was always surrounded by human beings, he says his social skills have undoubtedly changed. Over the months, my bandwidth for social interaction has decreased. Before, at the hostel, I could sit on the couch and talk to people for four hours without feeling exhausted. Now, it might be 30 minutes [before] I feel a little bit like I need to get back to my own space.  Though he experiences fatigue, Underwood is not suddenly awkward or socially unskilled. Robin Dunbar, emeritus professor of evolutionary psychology at the University Of Oxford, studies the neuroscience of social bonding and recently authored the book Friends: Understanding The Power Of Our Most Important Relationships. Dunbar says that our social skills require constant practice and can become rusty, but argues that, just like riding a bicycle, socialising is a very easy habit to pick back up. These skills come back very quickly, he says, noting that because we spend the first decades of our lives acquiring and entrenching our social skills, they are very difficult to unlearn. Dunbar explains that a big chunk of the brain called the default mode network is involved in socialising. While regions of our brain can develop and contract over time  Dunbar cites a 2000 UCL study that found the hippocampus, the area of the brain that deals with navigation, grew larger in London taxi drivers the longer they spent doing the job  most of us havent been isolated long enough to alter our brains.